BETHLEHEM’S STAR that led the wise men to young Jesus was no star. That’s according to the most popular theory. It was a sky full of stars.
I upgraded my art that illustrates the theory, and released it a few days ago with my paraphrase of Matthew for the Casual English Bible.
I know it’s odd to talk about the Star of Bethlehem in the heat of summer (for Northern Hemisphere readers). But Jesus could have been born in the summer; the Bible doesn’t say when.
Whether he was born in the summer or the winter, the wise men probably traveled at least part of the time in summer. They came from a land east of what is now Israel, and it seemed to take them two years to get there.
That’s why when King Herod ordered his men to kill baby boys age two and under in Bethlehem, in an attempt to kill young Jesus. “Herod based this age on the timeline he got from the sages” (Matthew 2:16).
Footnote about the star
Here’s a little Casual English Bible footnote about the Star. It’s linked to Matthew 2:2,
“They started asking around, ‘Where’s the boy who’s going to become king of the Jews?” We saw the sign of his birth: a rising star.1 We came to honor him.'”
“It’s unclear exactly what they saw. One theory is that they saw a conjunction of planets that appeared like stars. In 7-6 BC the planets of Jupiter and Saturn came close together and appeared beside the constellation of Pisces. If the magi were stargazers, as many theorize, they interpreted the meaning of what they saw in the sky. Jupiter, the largest of the planets, represented kings, which suggested a king had been born. Saturn represented the Jews because they worshiped on the day that honored the god Saturn: Saturday. “Pisces” means “fish,” and it represented the lands around the Mediterranean Sea, where Israel is located. So the sages did the math: king plus Jews plus Jewish homeland. They figured a king of the Jews had been born. They went to the Jewish capital of Jerusalem to introduce themselves and pay their respects.