Category Archives: Culture>History

How Legends Develop in Our Own Time

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Health foods were popular in the Victorian period—foods such as Kellogg’s corn flakes, Grape-Nuts cereal, and graham crackers all came from food fads of this time—but the most interesting story might be that of Horace Fletcher, “The Great Masticator.” He advocated a low-protein diet, said that more efficient digestion could halve the amount of food a person needed, and claimed that capacity for work would increase and need for sleep decrease with his methods.

Chewing was the key. He famously warned, “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate” and advised, “Chew all solid food until it is liquid and practically swallows itself.” Success could be measured when bowel movements (“digestive ash,” as he called it) were negligible and had “no more odor than a hot biscuit.”

At age 54, he easily performed the exercises given to the Yale varsity crew though he “had for several months past taken practically no exercise other than that involved in daily walks about town.” At 58, he beat Yale athletes on tests of strength and endurance. He said that “perfect alimentary education” would deliver to society “no slums, no degeneracy, no criminals, no policemen, [and] no criminal courts.”

Should we all become Fletcherites?

Some of these are just handwaving promises (calories halved or no criminals, for example). But some are tests with places, dates, and quotes from named professors, such as the claims of physical strength and endurance. What do we make of this?

I’m skeptical. Maybe Fletcher embellished his claims. Maybe other authors reporting on the benefits of Fletcherism were caught up in the excitement and passed on stories without fact checking. Fletcherism might have been popular, but we must distinguish popularity from the truth of health claims (astrology is popular, but that doesn’t mean that the planets influence our lives).

The biggest issue is that we’ve had a century of scientific progress since Fletcher, and no science predicts that his simple regime could deliver what he claimed. Society today gives plenty of encouragement for new eating regimes, valid or bogus, and yet nothing has come of Fletcher’s philosophy.

Fletcherism vs. Christianity

This is an over-the-top story about a guy a century ago that we can see through, but we’re to believe the far more fantastic Jesus story?

For starters, Fletcher makes bold claims, but they’re all natural claims. They can be tested. By contrast, the Jesus story is nothing without its supernatural parts. The “like what?” test applies here. You say Jesus is supernatural? Like what? There is no accepted precedent for the remarkable supernatural claims made about Jesus.

We have originals of Fletcher’s story, written in our own language and coming from our own Western culture. There are no copyist errors and no puzzling idioms to decipher. Contrast that with the difficulty of reading the Bible. Native speakers from millennia past didn’t provide us with Ancient Greek-English or Ancient Hebrew-English dictionaries, so modern scholars must create their own imperfect ones. Not all words are easy to interpret. For example, the Hebrew reem was a puzzle, as in this sentence: “Rescue me from the mouth of the lions; save me from the horns of the reem.” It’s now translated as “wild ox,” but the King James Version translated it nine times as “unicorn.” Scholarly theological papers are written analyzing single Bible verses or phrases.

Fletcher’s story can be explained by some combination of wishful thinking, error, deliberate lie, and legendary growth. Why wouldn’t that very unsurprising explanation apply to the gospel story as well? We don’t have the originals of the New Testament books, and an average of 200 years separates the individual chapters of Matthew from the originals, to take one example (more on this time gap here).

I’ve made a similar comparison between the claims of Mormonism and Christianity (guess which one wins), and I argue that the Jesus story is a legend here.

The Argument from History

A popular Christian argument from history goes like this: you say the historical record for Jesus is poor? We show the gospel story is true in the same way that you show that the story of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar is true, through the historical record. You want to discard the gospel story? Then be consistent and discard the story of every great figure in ancient history.

In the first place, the evidence for Alexander and Julius Caesar is far better than that for Jesus (more here and here). And second, historians scrub out supernatural claims for historical accounts. Remove the supernatural from the stories of Alexander and Caesar (yes, there was plenty), and you have the accounts of those great men from history. But remove the supernatural from the Jesus story, and you’re left with nothing—just an ordinary, uninteresting man.

Let’s zoom out from this critique of Jesus vs. Alexander to bring in a more contemporary giant of history, Horace Fletcher. Point by point, the Fletcher story beats the Jesus story on its own criteria—shorter cultural gap, shorter period of oral history, more reliable copies, and so on. Until Christian apologists embrace the great truths of The Great Masticator, I will conclude that they are applying their standards inconsistently.

More modern legends

Let me pile on with more modern legends. With each one, ask yourself: if this can happen today, with our modern understanding of science, geography, anthropology, and what’s plausible, how reliable a foundation can Christianity have been built on?

  • According to a story begun in the early 1980s, astronaut Neil Armstrong heard the Muslim call to prayer on the moon and converted to Islam. Who would give such a ridiculous story credence? Enough people, apparently, that it was worth Armstrong denying the story in 2005.
  • Did you hear the one about how Pope Francis would sneak out of the Vatican disguised as a priest and minister to the homeless? This was popular early in his papacy, but it is false. How can a false story about the whereabouts of one of the world’s most famous people get going? And if that’s possible, what might you expect 2000 years ago after forty years of oral history in a prescientific melting pot of different religious beliefs?
  • Atheist Hector Avalos, in a 2004 debate with William Lane Craig, said that as a Pentecostal preacher, he had people raised from the dead in his own church.
  • The story of John Frum and cargo cults is a fascinating modern example of legend developing among pre-scientific people.
  • Is Barak Obama a Muslim? A 2015 CNN poll showed that 29 percent of Americans think so (and more than half of Republicans, depending on the poll).
  • How many people thought that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11? It took more than two years for the fraction of Americans who thought that he was behind it to drop below fifty percent (source).
  • The Gilligan’s Island sitcom began airing on television in 1964, and the U.S. Coast Guard received telegrams urging them to rescue the stranded people. (And this was a show with a laugh track.)
  • Did you know that North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il was the world’s best golfer, despite only playing the game once? He shot eleven holes in one in a single 18-round game. He was also a fashion trendsetter, he had a supernatural birth, and he didn’t poop.
  • Remember the violence in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina? The Associated Press reported, “Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy today” (“today” being September 1, 2005). The reports were wildly exaggerated. There was looting, though most of it seemed to have been people looking for food and water. There were hundreds of dead, but these were caused by the hurricane, not from violence. There were several shooting deaths, but these were from police.
  • You can’t buy an electric fan in South Korea with a simple on/off switch. They all come with timers. This is because of the widespread fear of “fan death,” the idea that being in a closed room with a fan running is potentially deadly.
  • The idea that blood types determine personality had been popular in Japan, and the idea that children born in the year of the dragon are more successful is popular in China. Science supports neither idea.

Christian apologists might demand, “How could the story about Jesus get traction if it weren’t true??” But this is similar to, “How could the modern legend about <pick your favorite> get traction if it weren’t true?” The same answer would be reasonable for both.

God is a comedian
playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
— Voltaire

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Test Drive a Foolproof Method for Separating History From Legend

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Let me share with you an article that I enjoyed. And when I say “enjoyed,” I mean, “was baffled by.”

The article is “The Bible and Miracles: Fact or Fantasy?” and it proposes rules for separating history from myth and legend. It concludes that the Bible’s miracles are history.

Four simple rules

The author proposes four rules for identifying historical accounts.

1. Unlike myths, biblical miracles are presented in a historical context, that is, in conjunction with actual historical events, many of which can be verified by archaeology.

Yes, myths are often unconnected with human history, but that’s a quibble for this conversation (more on the distinctions between myths and legends here). Let’s consider legends instead, which typically are presented in a historical context. For example, the legend of King Arthur and Merlin the shape-shifting wizard was set in England around 600. The legend of William Tell was set in Switzerland around 1300. The legend of Jesus the miracle worker could be set in Palestine around 30.

Archeology supports biblical miracles no more than it does the supernatural stories in the Iliad. Yes, there was a Jericho and yes, there was a Troy, but archeology gives no support to the supernatural.

2. Miracles are presented in a simple, matter-of-fact style. No fanfare, sometimes not even a comment.

I don’t think that Jesus’s miracles are treated any more matter-of-factly than Merlin’s magic, the gods’ supernatural actions in the Iliad, or Paul Bunyan’s overlarge feats.

Fiction can also be presented in a matter-of-fact style. Witches and wizards can do magic (Harry Potter), and vampires and werewolves fight (Twilight).

3. Miracles occur in a framework of reason and logic. There are no miracles just for the sake of miracles. They are not performed for show; they are not “magic tricks” designed to entertain the reader.

The Bible’s miracles are not entertainment, but they are done as demonstrations. Jesus performed his miracles “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Matthew 9:6).

4. Miracles are performed in the presence of hundreds, sometimes thousands of witnesses; and many of the witnesses are still alive at the time the events are written down.

No, the stories claim that miracles were performed in the presence of many eyewitnesses. There is no independent historical documentation of a single miracle. I discuss the weakness of Paul’s claim of 500 eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus here.

Let’s test drive these rules

To illustrate a false claim, the author gives this example:

Even now, over 200 years after the fact, would anyone believe someone today who wrote that George Washington calmed the Delaware River and walked across it while his soldiers rowed?

We have the author’s own foolproof 4-part method to separate miracle from legend. Let’s try it out on this example.

1. “Washington walked across the Delaware River” is in a historical context. No one doubts that the Continental Army crossed that river the night of December 25, 1776 to attack enemy forces in Trenton.

2. Matter of fact style? Check. It’s easy to imagine the story told in this style.

3. Not performed as a trick or entertainment? Check. Washington had to get across somehow, and he could’ve walked across the water as a morale booster for the troops.

4. Performed in the presence of hundreds of witnesses? Check. History records 2400 soldiers in the group that crossed with Washington.

You might argue that Washington walking on water is nonsense, and those soldiers would rebut the claim. But if that’s the case, show me the letters from these men saying, “There’s a crazy rumor going around that General Washington walked on water. Let me make clear: I was there, I saw Washington, and it didn’t happen like that.” You can’t provide those letters? Then you begin to understand the weakness in the Naysayer Hypothesis, the idea that a claim that lasted until today must not have been defeated by any contemporary naysayers and so must be true (more here).

According to the author’s own checklist, he would be obliged to accept this account of Washington walking on water as an actual miracle. Since this account about Washington would be written in Modern English, it would be more reliable and accessible than gospel stories written in 2000-year-old Greek from an ancient culture (more here).

Parallel the gospel story with a modern analogy

The author bristles at the concern that the gospel story is unreliable history because it was initially passed on as oral history and written long after the events. He proposes a parallel. Compare Jesus known only through gospels written decades after his death with Mahatma Gandhi known only through the film Gandhi (1982), which was produced decades after his death.

To understand the early readers of the gospels, consider ourselves learning about Gandhi only through the film. But the author wants us to imagine a very different Gandhi. This Gandhi does the things that Jesus did: he proclaims himself divine, heals the sick, and multiplies loaves and fishes. Would you believe it?

Now go further. Would you believe that this Gandhi died and resurrected? That He died for your sins? Would you drop everything to accept this Gandhi’s call to follow Him?

Of course not. That’s a helpful parallel, and this Christian author has nicely demonstrated that the gospel claim is ridiculous. If you wouldn’t believe an account of Gandhi doing miracles, produced decades after his death, why believe the same thing for Jesus?

[SFX: record scratch]

Nope, that’s not the conclusion of this author. He tries to salvage his situation, not by running from, but actually embracing his ridiculous situation:

No one could have fabricated a story as that told in the gospels with the expectation that people would believe it. Yet believe it they did. Why? Because it happened, that’s why! And the apostles that preached the gospel must have demonstrated its truth by performing the same miracles. It’s the only answer that makes sense. No one in their right mind would have concocted those stories,* because no one in their right mind would believe them without reason.

* I argue that the gospel story is legend, not that it was deliberately invented.

Wow—you can’t make this stuff up! This author admits that the gospel story is crazy but tries to salvage his position by spinning this as a good thing. It’s so crazy it has to be true. It’s like early church father Tertullian who is quoted as writing, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Yeah, seek out the absurdity. That’s a good way to find truth. Or maybe not.

This reminds me of Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian spiritual leader who died in 2011 with millions of followers. He is claimed to have performed almost all of Jesus’ miracles, including raising from the dead. That the absurd stories are true is the only answer that makes sense, right?

The Son of God died:
it is wholly believable because it is absurd;
he was buried and rose again,
which is certain because it is impossible.
— Tertullian, early church father

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/25/14.)

Image via See-ming Lee, CC license

 

Critique of “The Star of Bethlehem” Video (3 of 3)

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I summarized the video The Star of Bethlehem by Rick Larson here. We’ll finish up our critique by examining the last claim, that the “star” stopped over Bethlehem (part 1 of the critique here).

As a final example to illustrate that compelling stories don’t always have substance, let’s remember Harold Camping. He was an engineer, and while fiddling with some biblical calculations, he stumbled across the fact that there were 722,500 days between the death of Jesus and May 21, 2011, a date (at that time) in the near future. Things become more interesting when you realize that 722,500 factors into 5² × 10² × 17². Biblical numerology assigns traits to those numbers: 5 = atonement, 10 = completion, and 17 = heaven. So that date was the day of (Atonement × Completeness × Heaven) squared. Armageddon, here we come!

I’ve written more about Brother Camping’s ridiculous project here.

And there are other intriguing stories that can’t support their weight. Procter and Gamble’s moon-and-stars logo had a Satanic meaning. Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision (1950) presented an imaginative natural cause for the ten plagues. The Beatles dropped hints that Paul was dead. Popular rock music contained hidden satanic messages, revealed when played backwards. John Hagee invented the idea of four blood moons.

Let’s return to Larson’s star-of-Bethlehem theory.

4. The star stops over Bethlehem

The magi visited Herod, who was surprised to hear of the astrological signs and worried about a potential rival for his throne. The magi expected to find the new Jewish king in Jerusalem, but Herod’s priests showed the Bible reference with Bethlehem as the prophesied birthplace. The magi were directed to Bethlehem, five miles south, and the star “went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.”

Micah prophecy

Micah chapter 5 has the Bethlehem reference: “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel.” As usual with claims that see Jesus behind every rock in the Old Testament, when you look at the context, the prophesied ruler doesn’t sound at all like Jesus.

Micah was written after Assyria had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and little Judah might be next. During these troubled times, Micah predicts that there will be a king from Bethlehem (since King David was born here, this may simply mean “a king in the line of David” rather than a literal birth in Bethlehem). God will abandon Israel, but then countrymen (presumably scattered Israelites from the aftermath of the conquest) will return to support the new king. With God’s renewed support, the king will bring peace to Judah, defeat any invasion by Assyria, and be celebrated worldwide.

This doesn’t sound like the career of Jesus.

What actually happened was that the Babylonians conquered Judah in the sixth century, so Micah’s prophecy was wrong.

(The composition of the book of Micah is complicated. Part appears to have been written just after the Assyrian conquest of Israel, but it was likely put into final form after the return of exiles from the Babylonian conquest of Judah. The king narrative in Micah 5 may date to an earlier time because it refers to Assyria, which hadn’t existed for a century when the exiles returned from Babylon.)

The perspectives of the magi and Herod

Let’s think about the magi. Who were they, and what was their motivation? They knew enough about Judaism to make the lion = Judah connection and cared enough to make an expensive, dangerous, and time-consuming trip. Nothing says that they were ambassadors from a royal court, so they funded this trip themselves. However, if magi from the east didn’t visit Herod or any other Judean ruler on their ascension to the throne, why (besides literary reasons) is it plausible that they would visit this time?

If they were knowledgeable about Judaism, why did they have to be told about Bethlehem? Perhaps they only knew of a Jewish canon with no Micah, but the book of Micah would’ve been over 500 years old at this point. They might have been isolated from mainstream Judaism, and then we’re back to the question of why they would make the difficult trip to connect with a Judaism they were isolated from.

Since God spoke to the magi directly when he warned them in a dream to avoid Herod on their return, why couldn’t he just have told them, “Go to Bethlehem by date X to visit the new king of the Jews”? Why would ambiguous motion of Jupiter be preferable? Avoiding a visit to Herod would’ve also avoided tipping him off to the rival king, which caused the Massacre of the Innocents (not that avoiding bloodshed is much of a priority in the Bible).

Of course, if we’re questioning God’s motivation, we could ask why he celebrated the most important event on earth since Creation with a vague light show that would be understood by a few strangers rather than something grand that would alert the world. God could’ve told everyone or he could’ve told no one, but instead he gave just a hint to a few men hundreds of miles away from the birthplace of Jesus. I guess God moves in mysterious ways.

Now consider Herod’s motivation. He was so concerned about being replaced by this new “king” that, after the magi returned home secretly to avoid telling Herod where Jesus was, an enraged Herod ordered all boys two years old and under in Bethlehem area to be killed to make sure he eliminated his rival. A guy that ruthless would’ve simply had guards escort the magi to Bethlehem and then kill the boy once they found him. Sure, you could imagine a miracle that kept Herod in check, but then you could imagine a miracle behind the star, and Larson wants a natural argument.

How could Jupiter stop?

Finally, let’s consider how Jupiter “went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.” Since Jupiter moved across the sky east to west each night, it was over Bethlehem for just a moment. When was that moment? And how far must you go in that direction? “[The star] stopped over the place where the child was” is not something Jupiter could ever do.

Larson’s attempt to salvage his theory uses one of Jupiter’s switches between forward and retrograde motion (it switches directions twice a year) as a “stopping” point. Yes, Jupiter’s motion relative to the fixed background of stars would apparently stop for several days, but this does nothing to get us to “it stopped over the place where the child was.”

Remember the Bible’s cosmology. Stars weren’t light years away but were close enough to fall to the ground after the tribulation. Perhaps it was easy for the author of Matthew to imagine those little twinkly things moving like Tinker Bell to direct the magi to the house (no, not a stable—that was Luke) where Jesus lived. Don’t forget that they already knew that “stars” could move since they were familiar with planets.

Fun with interpretations

So where does this leave us? We have the king planet crowning the king star in the constellation of Judah and then a remarkable conjunction between the king planet and the Mother Planet.

Alternatively, we could use similar logic but pick different data. Remember that Satan is personified as a lion in 1 Peter 5:8 (this may be an allusion to “roaring lions that tear their prey” in Psalm 22). Now we have the king star crowned in the constellation of Satan followed by a conjunction between the king planet and the morning star Lucifer.

One interpretation might give you “a new king is born in Judah,” but the other gives you “Satan is the new king.” Sure, I forced the facts into a conclusion—I could’ve instead picked equally plausible facts such as, “the constellation of Babylon” or “the king is in the lion’s den” or “a Jupiter/Venus conjunction means war.” But if I forced the facts, so did Larson. If one interpretation is biased, so is the other.

Another interpretation

North Korean legend says that the birth of “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il was celebrated by the appearance of a new star. Was there an agenda here? Of course, but Matthew might’ve had one as well, and the decay of time has blurred Matthew’s story far more. Is the historical credibility of the North Korean tale any less than Matthew’s?

Matthew was written in roughly 80 CE. That’s 80 years after the supposed visit of the magi. Suppose the conjunctions Larson mentions were noted at the time. After many decades of oral history, the author of Matthew (who wasn’t an eyewitness to the conjunctions) wrote a garbled prescientific account through a Christian lens.

Or, suppose that the magi story was entirely fiction, an opportunity to show praise for Jesus from foreign dignitaries while creating a threat from Herod. This sets up the flight to Egypt and the Moses-like fulfillment of “out of Egypt I have called my son” (from Hosea 11:1). In this case, Matthew is writing literature, not history.

We find precedents for Matthew’s nativity story. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas is a Trojan hero whose mother is the goddess Venus. He escaped Troy after its defeat by the Greeks in the Trojan War and was guided to Italy by his mother’s star, the planet Venus.

A precedent for the trip of the magi took place shortly before Matthew was written. The king of Armenia and his magi traveled to Rome in 66 CE to pay homage to Emperor Nero.

There is plenty of room to make a plausible skeptical case against Matthew’s nativity story. Enjoy Larson’s video as a clever tale, not an adequate explanation.

Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines,
which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer.
When this is done, the same question shall be
triumphantly asked again the next year,
as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject.
— George Horne

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Image credit: Wikipedia
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Critique of “The Star of Bethlehem” Video (2 of 3)

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I summarized the video The Star of Bethlehem by Rick Larson here. Let’s continue the critique of the logic behind the claims by moving on to the four astronomical phenomena that were visible in 3 BCE and 2 BCE (part 1 here).

Let me just warm up the crowd with another example of a plausible argument like Larson’s star of Bethlehem. Here’s a viral video from 2014 of an earnest Christian woman who wants to expose the satanic forces behind Monster energy drink.

Monster_energy_drink_featureFirst, look at the green M. Those aren’t three scratch marks. No, that’s three separate instances of the Hebrew letter vav (ו), which is used to represent the numeral 6. That’s right—it proudly says 666. The 32-ounce can says “BFC,” which stands for “Big F-ing Can.” It says “MILFs love it” on the side of the carton. None of this sounds very Christian, and the slogan “Unleash the beast” sounds positively Satanic.

The word “Monster” has a cross in the letter O. Tip up the can to drink, and the Christian cross is inverted, which is just what Satanists like to do. (“Bottoms up, and the devil laughs,” she says)

Some of these elements may be deliberate, edgy appeals to a young audience, but some may have had unintended satanic meanings. With much patient effort, an innocent thing can seem like a conspiracy.

1. Jupiter/Regulus conjunction

The first astronomical phenomenon in the star-of-Bethlehem argument is Jupiter making three passes above Regulus, a star in the constellation of Leo, beginning in 3 BCE. That is, the king planet Jupiter “crowned” the king star Regulus in the constellation of the lion, the sign of Judah.

The first concern is pairing Judah with any Babylonian constellation, given the Bible’s prohibitions against astrology, but Larson pushes ahead. He gives verses such as “Like a lion [Judah] crouches and lies down” (Genesis 49:9) to make his case that “lion” means Judah, but Judah is also personified in other ways. It’s a wild ox in Numbers 23:22 and a scattered flock chased by lions in Jeremiah 50:17.

Lions are often personified as the adversary: “The Lord [rescued] me from the paw of the lion” (1 Samuel 17:37); “Rescue me from the mouth of the lions” (Psalms 22:21); “Rescue me from their ravages, my precious life from these lions” (Ps. 35:17); and Daniel in the lion’s den. Babylon is a lion (Daniel 7:4); God is a lion when he punishes Israel and Judah (Hosea 5:14); and Satan is a lion (1 Peter 5:8).

Countries were often identified with animals in antiquity, but the lion for Judah wasn’t one of the associations.

Jupiter in the constellation of Leo isn’t that big a deal. Jupiter makes one orbit of the sun every twelve years, and there are twelve constellations in the zodiac, so Jupiter is in Leo for roughly one year every twelve years. And the three Jupiter/Regulus conjunctions—the “crowning” of Regulus—wasn’t like fireworks. This was a slow-motion event that took close to a year. It’s not like you could’ve gone outside and seen the event over the course of hours, like a lunar eclipse. It might even have seemed quite mundane: the magi could’ve known enough about Jupiter’s movements that they could anticipate how the entire retrograde phase would play out, or they could’ve tracked it night after night to gradually piece together its movements over months.

Seeing the motion with a modern computer simulation, as Larson talks about doing, is a very different experience, but seeing it in (glacial) real time may not have been noteworthy.

2. Revelation and the woman “clothed with the sun”

Revelation 12:1–5 speaks of a heavenly sign, “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.” The woman is usually interpreted as Mary giving birth to Jesus.

At the beginning of the Jupiter/Regulus series of conjunctions, the sun and moon were both in Virgo. That is, the virgin was clothed in the sun with the moon at her feet, as predicted by Revelation. (Larson has nothing for the “twelve stars on her head.”)

The obvious question is why the magi would care about a prophecy in Revelation, a book that wouldn’t be written for another century.

Another issue is that the sun in Virgo is something that you could deduce, but you couldn’t see it since the background stars that form the constellation aren’t visible during the day. Like the “crowning” of Regulus in painfully slow motion, Virgo “clothed in the sun and moon” wouldn’t have been a stunning visual display but an intellectual conclusion.

Note also that the sun is in Virgo for one month out of twelve, and the moon joins it in Virgo for a few days. This isn’t a rare event; it happens every year.

3. Jupiter/Venus conjunction

Next up was an unusually close planetary conjunction. Jupiter and Venus were less than one minute (1/60 degree) apart on June 17 of 2 BCE.

There is a Jupiter/Venus conjunction roughly once per year. In 2016, there was a Jupiter/Venus conjunction just four minutes apart, and there are 17 conjunctions less than 30 minutes apart in the seventy years 1990–2060. Add in conjunctions between other planets, and surprising conjunctions aren’t that unusual. Close conjunctions appear to be little more than opportunities to observe, “Oh, cool—look at that. You don’t see that every day!”

Larson calls Venus the “Mother Planet,” but the Bible has another interpretation.

How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! (Isaiah 14:12)

This is a reference to Lucifer, the morning star (another name for Venus). A Lucifer/Venus connection is probably not what Larson was hoping for, but it’s no less valid.

Larson opted for a planetary conjunction as the Bethlehem star because he says that comets and novas were often seen by the ancients as bad omens. Unfortunately, the same might’ve been true for Jupiter/Venus conjunctions. In Assyria, this was considered a sign of war or danger to the king. Assyria was a long-time neighbor of Babylon, the region where the magi might’ve come from.

Concluded in part 3 with the last claim plus some final thoughts. 

In the last 3500 years, what do we absolutely know
about God and the supernatural realm
that wasn’t supposedly known by the shepherds and fishermen
who claimed to be in contact with the divine then?
Think about that.
Within religion, is there any information there
that we can act on with any degree of certainty,
knowing and seeing that a given result will follow?
— Mr. Deity video @5:05
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Image credit: wetribe, flickr, CC

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Critique of “The Star of Bethlehem” Video

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On Epiphany, the Christian celebration of the visit of the magi to Jesus, I wrote about the video The Star of Bethlehem by Rick Larson here. That post was an uncritical summary of his argument that the conjunctions of Jupiter with Regulus and Venus during the years 3 and 2 BCE explain the story of the magi following the star in Matthew chapter 2. Volumes have been written with many other attempts to explain the star, but this video is a popular explanation, and I will use it as a representation of the field.

It’s time for a critique. The video makes a clever and intriguing argument, but an intriguing argument isn’t necessarily that big a deal. Let me illustrate that with a recent online question, why is the mathematical constant e = 2.718281828459045…? One answer:

It has a lot to do with a $20 bill.

Note that Andrew Jackson’s picture is on a twenty. He served two terms, hence the 2. He was the seventh president, now giving us “2.7”. He was elected by a vote that was held in 1828 and since he served two terms we will repeat this, giving us “2.718281828”. If you fold the bill in half then fold it corner-to-corner you end up with a 45–90–45 degree triangle. Append that sequence and you get “2.718281828459045”. That makes the answer to your question pretty clear, doesn’t it?

Of course, the author of this ingenious answer wasn’t being serious, but it does illustrate how it may not be that remarkable to weave an interesting argument when you’re not following evidence but selecting it to pave a path to a conclusion you’re determined to reach.

Larson knows that he wants to find celestial fireworks at the time of the birth of Jesus to map onto Matthew’s Bethlehem star story, so he sifts and shoehorns the data to reach that conclusion. The result is an interesting argument, but it ultimately fails under the weight of many questions.

The New Testament contains two nativity stories, but Larson, without apology, doesn’t bother to reconcile them. He ignores Luke and focuses on Matthew. And like the zombies stumbling through the streets of Jerusalem in Matthew 27:52–3, we’re left to wonder why the star and magi are also only in Matthew. If it was important enough for Matthew and it actually happened, why wasn’t it reported in the other gospels?

When was Jesus born?

Matthew’s nativity account says that Jesus was born before King Herod died. 4 BCE is the traditional date of Herod’s death, but this prevents Larson from using the celestial events of 3 and 2 BCE to make his story. Larson tries to salvage his theory by arguing that Herod died in 1 BCE.

4 BCE is the scholarly consensus, and the defense of that date sounds convincing to me (Wikipedia summary here). A summary of the debate is tangential to the purpose of this post, but I do want to highlight one point. I have no problem considering minority views in religious scholarship, but the people who want to reject the consensus view here are probably the ones who ridicule those who challenge the consensus view of the historicity of Jesus. For example, “Aside from a very small [handful] of mythicists who don’t hold professorship in any relevant fields, the consensus [that Jesus was a historical figure] is just as universal among historians as the theory of evolution is among biologists.” I’m just asking for consistency.

Herod dying in 4 BCE defeats Larson’s argument, but let’s ignore that and continue.

Astronomy vs. astrology

Larson says that the Bible’s warnings against astrology gave him pause, and we can see why. For example,

If a man or woman . . . has worshiped other gods, bowing down to them or to the sun or the moon or the stars in the sky, . . . take the man or woman who has done this evil deed to your city gate and stone that person to death. (Deuteronomy 17:2–5; see also Isaiah 47:13–15, Job 31:26–8, Deut. 4:19 and 18:9–14, Jeremiah 10:1–3)

The constellations come from the Babylonians, the civilization that conquered Judah in the sixth century BCE. God’s rejection of astrology built on Babylonian constellations is understandable, and yet Larson imagines God using that invention to communicate Jesus’s birth.

We’ll ignore the Bible’s protests as well and move on.

Continued with the astronomical phenomena in part 2.

When the facts change, I change my mind.
What do you do, sir?
— attributed to John Maynard Keynes
(probably falsely)

 Image credit: Florian Lehmuth, flickr, CC

Can the Star of Bethlehem Be Scientifically Verified? (2 of 2)

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WISE MEN

This is the conclusion of a summary of the video The Star of Bethlehem by Rick Larson. See part 1 for the preliminaries.

In part 1, I listed the nine points Larson pulled from the magi/star story in Matthew 2. He claims that Jupiter is the key player in a story that the magi would’ve been able to interpret for its symbolic meaning. He identifies four events in his Bethlehem star scenario that extend for a little over a year beginning in 3 BCE.

1. Jupiter/Regulus conjunction

From a human standpoint, the stars in the sky seem fixed. Planets, however, gradually move against the fixed background of stars (the word “planet” comes from the Greek for “wanderers”). While they do move, and the magi would’ve known this, the motion is subtle. Only by looking night after night is this motion apparent.

Jupiter had not one but three conjunctions with Regulus (September of 3 BCE, then February the next year, and finally in May). Regulus is actually a four-star system, but the magi would have known it as a single, bright star in the constellation Leo.

Planets farther from the sun than earth (Mars and beyond) sometimes move backwards against the background stars. This is called retrograde motion. For example, Jupiter moves forward for nine months, backward for four months, and then forward again.

The three Jupiter/Regulus conjunctions are because of Jupiter’s retrograde motion. Looking at the symbolic meaning, the king planet Jupiter moved past the king star Regulus three times. Larson sees this as Jupiter crowning Regulus. And this happened in the constellation of the lion, the symbol of Judah (for example, “Like a lion [Judah] crouches and lies down, like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?” [Genesis 49:9–10]). He says that the magi would’ve known that Judah was getting a new king.

2. Revelation and the woman “clothed with the sun”

Revelation is full of unfamiliar symbolism, and Christians argue about precisely what it means. We’ll go with Larson’s interpretation.

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon. . . . The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” (Revelation 12:1–5)

The woman is Mary, the child is Jesus, and the dragon is Herod (or Satan in the guise of Herod). On September 11 of 3 BCE, during the Jupiter/Regulus conjunction, the sun and moon are both in the constellation of Virgo. In other words, Virgo the virgin is clothed with the sun and has the moon at her feet (as mentioned in Revelation) at the same time that the king planet is crowning the king star in Judah’s constellation.

3. Jupiter/Venus conjunction

Next on the calendar was a very close Jupiter/Venus conjunction on June 17 of 2 BCE, so close that the distance separating them was about the apparent width of either planet. Specifically, they were about 40 seconds apart. (There are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in a degree and 360 degrees in a full circle. For comparison, a full moon is 30 minutes in diameter.)

The magi would’ve been familiar with conjunctions, and the remarkable thing about this conjunction wasn’t the brightness but the closeness. Conjunctions this close aren’t that rare astronomically, but they would’ve been unusual or unique in the lifetimes of these men.

4. The star stops over Bethlehem

The last element in this lightshow was the stopping of the star (Jupiter) over Bethlehem. Larson says that Jupiter’s switching directions from regular motion to retrograde or vice versa (there are two such switches every 13 months) counts as “stopping.” One of those “stopping” points was December 25 of 2 BCE (though he’s quick to state that this being Christmas day is just a coincidence, since the magi aren’t thought to have visited Jesus as a newborn).

Critique

This is an interesting set of facts, but Larson has 20/20 hindsight. He knows what he wants to find, so he scans the possibilities (moving Herod’s death as necessary) to find what he wants. The nativity story is feeble evidence that any magi could or did draw the conclusions Larson would like.

Perhaps you’ve had some questions as you read along. Here are some that come to mind for me.

  • Revelation was written a century after the Jesus’s birth. Who would marvel about seeing a fulfilled prophecy from Revelation before Revelation had ever been written?
  • How could the magi make the Leo = Judah connection and care enough about the tiny state of Judah to make a difficult trip but not know the Old Testament enough to know about the Bethlehem reference in Micah 5:2?
  • How can Jupiter be deliberately be over anything on earth? It moves across the sky each night. From a vantage point in the Middle East, it’s “over” lots of things—pretty much everything to the south of you, depending on the time. Matthew says that “[the star] stopped over the place where the child was.” This could apply to Jupiter only if you had a precise moment at which to take its position. And only if the star were like Tinker Bell (rather than something that might as well be infinitely far away like Jupiter) could you identify “the place where the child was.”

Those questions and more discussed next in the critique.

It takes a certain maturity of mind
to accept that nature works
as steadily in rust
as in rose petals.
— Esther Warner Dendel

 Image credit: Morning Star, flickr, CC