Transcript

Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World is brought to you by the StarQuest Production Network and is made possible by our many generous patrons.

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You're listening to episode 75 of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, where we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason.

And in advance, Merry Christmas, everyone!

Yeah, in this episode, we're talking about the mysterious Magi of the Bible.

I'm Don Bettinelli, and joining me today is Jimmy Akin.

Hi, Jimmy!

Merry Christmas, Dom!

Thank you and Merry Christmas to you as well.

So, according to Matthew 2:1, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem.

But this translation is problematic.

The Greek text doesn't say just that wise men came from the East; it says that Magi came to visit the baby Jesus.

So, who were the Magi, and how did they know to come to look for Jesus?

And that's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World.

First, Jimmy, I understand you'd like to start by dispelling a few myths about the Magi.

What are they?

Well, so a lot of the ideas that we grow up with are inspired really by Christmas cards that kind of take different elements from the Gospels, and particularly Matthew and Luke, and then compress them down together as if they all happened on Christmas Day, on the original Christmas Day.

And that, so you have like the shepherds there, and you have the wise men there, and it's like, guys, these didn't show up at the same time.

The wise men, so-called wise men, did not arrive the night Jesus was born; it was up to two years later.

They were not still, Jesus was not a little baby in a manger; they were living in a house, and he was a toddler or at least a larger baby.

There also probably were not three of them.

You know, they're often depicted as the so-called three wise men or three kings.

We have no statement in Scripture that there were three of them.

Where the number three comes from is the fact they offered three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

So people have said, oh, well, that means there were three wise men.

No, there were three gifts.

There were at least two wise men because then just three, and it probably wasn't just them.

They probably, since they were coming from another country and travel was dangerous, and you could run into brigands on the road, especially if you were carrying valuable gifts like gold, frankincense, and myrrh, you probably came with an armed caravan.

And so it was probably a big caravan, and who knows how many actual so-called wise men were in it?

They also were not following the star; they were on a star quest in that their quest was inspired by a star, but it wasn't leading them around by the nose.

It didn't move around in the sky that way, and we'll talk about the reasons how we know that.

And then finally, they weren't kings or wise men; neither one of those is a good English translation of the term magi.

And I do want to take a moment to mention Starquest.

That's where the name of our network comes from; it's inspired by the mission and imagery of the Magi from the East seeking Christ.

And that's what we do; we seek Christ through our media that we produce.

So let's look at that term Magi.

Where does it come from, and what does it mean?

The Greek word that's used in Matthew chapter 2 is Magoi, which is the plural of Magos.

People though may be more familiar with this term's Latin equivalent.

In St. Jerome's Vulgate, we read that Magi, so that's the Latin equivalent of Magoi, came from the East.

An individual member of this group, instead of being called a Magos, would be a Magus, so it's just a little bit different on the ending.

Originally, the term Magi referred to a group of people from Persia, which is in modern Iran.

Around 440 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus listed the Magi as one of the six tribes of the Medes in his Histories.

Apparently, this tribe functioned a lot like the Jewish tribe of Levi because they had priestly duties.

Herodotus says that when about to sacrifice, the Persians do not build altars or kindle fire, employ libations or music, or fillets or barley meal.

When a man wishes to sacrifice to one of the gods, he leads a beast to an open space and then, wearing a wreath on his tiara of myrtle, usually calls on the god to pray for blessings for himself alone.

It is not lawful for the sacrifice; rather, he prays that the king and all the Persians be well, for he reckons himself among them.

He then cuts the victim limb from limb into portions, and after boiling the flesh, spreads the softest grass, trefoil usually, and places all of it on this.

When he has so arranged it, Amagus comes near and chants over it the song of the birth of the gods, as the Persian tradition relates it, for no sacrifice can be offered without Amagus.

So the Magi originally were a tribe that had priestly functions.

They also came to be regarded as soothsayers or truthsayers; that's what soothsayer means.

In the Book of Daniel, the Magi are called upon to interpret dreams.

In Daniel chapter 2, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon asks his Magi, or the Magi in his court, to tell him what his dream was and how to interpret it.

Magi were also called upon to interpret heavenly omens, you know, things in the sky.

There is a famous case involving the Persian King Xerxes I, also known as Ahasuerus, who married the biblical Esther on April 9th, 480 BC. He asked the Magi to tell him the meaning of a solar eclipse that occurred as he was about to do battle with the Greeks, according to Herodotus.

At the beginning of spring, the army made ready and set forth from Sardis to march to Abydos.

As it was setting out, the sun left his place in the heaven and was invisible, although the sky was without clouds and very clear.

The day turned into night.

When Xerxes saw and took note of that, he was concerned and asked the Magi what the vision might signify.

They declared to him that the god was showing the Greeks the abandonment of their cities, for the sun, they said, was the prophet of the Greeks, as the moon was their own.

Xerxes rejoiced exceedingly to hear that and continued on his march.

So the Magi said that the eclipse of the sun predicted defeat for the Greeks.

However, things didn't work out so well for Xerxes, and his expedition against Greece ended up failing.

But this does show that the original Magi were interpreters of portents in the sky, as the later Magi would be for the Star of Bethlehem.

With time, the term Magi ceased to refer exclusively to members of the Persian priestly caste.

The skills that they practiced came to be known in Greek as magia, from which we get magic in English.

This is the origin of the term magic.

Magic is a notoriously difficult term to define, and scholars have proposed all kinds of definitions.

We'll talk about them in an upcoming episode on the history and concept of magic.

However, one thing that historians have determined is that people usually did not describe their own rituals as magic.

Instead, they usually referred to the rituals that other people did as magic.

On this understanding, the term magic functions to indicate a foreign ritual.

It's not what we do; it's what those other people do.

Foreign rituals were exotic, and so they could be interesting and attractive for that reason.

But precisely because they were foreign, they were also unauthorized in a given social setting, and so they were often regarded either as forbidden or as at least kind of shady.

That's that foreign thing.

By the first century, you didn't have to be a member of the original Median tribe to be called a Magi or to be called a Magus.

Anybody who practiced magic could be called a Magus.

For example, in Acts chapter 8, we meet a man named Simon, who was a Samaritan, meaning he had mixed Jewish ancestry.

Simon practiced magia according to Acts 8, verses 9 and 11, and so he became known as Simon Magus.

Full Jews could also be Magi, and in Acts 13, we meet a Jewish man named Bar-Jesus, who is described both as a Magus and as a false prophet in Acts 13:6. In both of these cases, Simon and Bar-Jesus were practicing rituals that were not authorized for devout Jews, and so that's why they were considered Magi.

If the term magus was flexible in Jesus' day, then who were the Magi that visited Him at His birth?

That gets us to the theories that we'll be looking at in this episode.

Okay, so what theories are there about the Magi?

They fall into different classes.

One concerns who they were; the second concerns how they knew to come look for Jesus; the third concerns what they saw in the sky.

As part of that, we're also going to have to talk about the year that Jesus was born.

We'll also need to talk about the influence that Jewish thought may have had on the Magi, and we'll finish up by talking about astrology.

So what can we say about the Magi from the reason perspective?

The first issue concerns who these particular Magi were, the ones that came to visit Jesus.

Matthew's Magi were clearly dignitaries of some kind, and this is shown by several facts.

First, they saw themselves as worthy to congratulate a distant royal house on a new birth.

Second, they had the resources and the leisure to undertake a lengthy journey.

Third, they could offer costly gifts, and fourth, they got a royal audience with King Herod the Great.

Peasants couldn't do these things, so these weren't low-class Magi like Simon Magus; they were from the upper class.

Matthew says that they came from the East, which from the perspective of Jerusalem would point to locations like Arabia, Babylonia, and Persia.

In all of these regions, some interpreters have proposed that the Magi who visited Jesus were Jews who would, you know, naturally be interested in the newborn King of the Jews.

But most scholars have concluded that that's not likely.

If they were visiting Jewish dignitaries, Matthew would have identified them as co-religionists.

The fact that he describes them as being Magi from the East suggests that they were Gentiles who came from a... and Matthew also says they went back to their own country in Matthew 2:12, suggesting that they were among its native inhabitants rather than Jews who were living in exile.

Because if you're a Jew, your own country is, well, that's Judea, no matter where you're living.

In Matthew's Gospel of Gentiles who respond to the true God, Matthew uses this pattern to show his readers that Gentiles can be Christians.

The pattern culminates at the end of the Gospel with the Great Commission when Jesus tells the apostles to make disciples of all nations, which you could also translate as make disciples of all the peoples, or bending a little bit, even make disciples of all the Gentiles.

In Matthew 28:19, the Magi are part of this pattern.

They're Gentile dignitaries who represent an early response to God's Messiah in contrast to the Jewish King Herod, who seeks to kill the Messiah.

This prefigures how the Jewish authorities will later seek to kill Jesus, but the Gentiles will embrace his Gospel.

Scholars have thus concluded that Matthew's Magi were Gentile astrologers from an eastern land, but we can't be sure which one.

Some early sources say they were from Arabia, although Arabia does not necessarily mean Saudi Arabia.

You know, the geographical borders were different than they are today, so lands were considered Arabia that were not part of Saudi Arabia.

The earliest discussion we have of the idea that they came from Arabia is found in St. Justin Martyr, who wrote about it around the year AD. 160 In chapter 78 of his Dialogue with Trifo the Jew, he wrote at the time when the Magi from Arabia came to King Herod and said, From the star which has appeared in the heavens, we know that a king has been born in your country, and we have come to worship him.

So Justin says they came from Arabia to pay homage to Jesus.

Similarly, around AD 210, Tertullian, the North African author, deduced that this is where they were from based on the gifts that they offered.

You can read about that in his book Against Marcion, chapter 3, section 13. In the ancient world, gold and frankincense were associated with Arabia, but this isn't conclusive evidence because they were widely traded in the region.

I mean, think about all that gold they've got all over everything in Egypt.

Clearly, Arabia wasn't the only place to get gold, and there was a big trading industry with frankincense.

So just because they had these gifts that were associated with Arabia doesn't mean that's where they're from.

Many scholars have seen Babylon, so think modern Iraq, as a possibility of where they came from.

The Jewish readers of Matthew, it's been pointed out, would have been familiar with the book of Daniel, which has Magi in Babylonia in King Nebuchadnezzar's court.

It's also been argued that the major Jewish colony in Babylon could have given the Magi a special interest in the Jewish Messiah.

But again, that's not conclusive because Jews in every land were expecting the Messiah.

So wherever the Magi were from, they could have encountered Jews who said, Hey, there's going to be this great king that's going to be born.

Most of the Church Fathers thought that the Magi came from Persia, so think modern Iran.

Just after AD 200, Clement of Alexandria identified them as coming from Persia in book 1, chapter 15 of his Stromata, where he talked about how philosophy was practiced in different lands.

First in philosophy's ranks were the prophets of the Egyptians and the Chaldeans among the Assyrians, and the Druids among the Gauls, and the Samanians among the Bactrians, and the philosophers of the Celts, and the Magi of the Persians, who foretold the Savior's birth and came into the land of Judea, guided by a star.

This understanding became the dominant one among the Church Fathers, and the Magi were commonly depicted in early Christian art as wearing Persian clothing.

How would the Magi know to come find the baby Jesus?

Well, in popular accounts, as we mentioned, the Magi are depicted as following the star, which then led them to Bethlehem.

That has led many people to see the star as a supernatural manifestation that moved in the sky in a way stars don't. That of itself would make the star problematic.

I mean, if this is a one-off supernatural phenomenon, how would they know how to interpret it?

I mean, this star could mean anything.

If you've never seen one like this before, it doesn't move like anything else.

How does that tell you Jewish king?

But Matthew never claims they were following the star; he only says that it was ahead of them as they went to Bethlehem and that it stood above the house.

From their point of view, this is Matthew 2:9. This is really a providential coincidence.

They weren't being led by the star, for as Benedict XVI points out in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, and this is in chapter 4 of the book, they initially went to Herod's palace in Jerusalem, which is the natural place to find a newborn prince.

They assumed that Herod the Great or one of his sons had just had a baby boy who would grow up to be king.

And when they learned that, to their surprise, there's no new prince at the palace, a consultation had to be held with the chief priests and scribes to learn where the Magi really needed to go: Bethlehem, according to Matthew 2:4. So the fact that the chief priests and scribes looked to a well-known prophecy of the birth of the Messiah, which is found in Micah 5:2 and then quoted in Matthew 2:6, suggests the Magi could have seen the appearance of the star as signaling not just the birth of an ordinary king, but the birth of a particularly great one, like the predicted Messiah.

And so, while they weren't following the star, it did tell them that this king had been born.

They said, We have seen his star in the east (Matthew 2:2). Recently, scholars have argued that this phrase may be a mistranslation and that the Greek phrase rendered in the east when they say, We have seen his star in the east, the Greek there is ente anatole, and they've argued that this instead should be translated as at its rising.

We have, you know, because stars rise in the east just like the sun does, based on the rotation of the Earth.

And so, that they saw it when it rose over the eastern horizon as the Earth turned.

Some have argued that this is even a technical term for what is known as a star's helical rising, which occurs when it briefly rises above the horizon just before sunrise.

That doesn't happen all the time; it's considered a significant helical rising, particularly by some ancient astrologers.

And so, that may be what they're saying here: we saw the helical rising of this king's star.

What told them that the star was significant, and why did they link it to a king of the Jews?

Well, here we can only speculate.

The system of constellations in use at the time, which includes our own zodiac, was developed in northern Mesopotamia around 1130 BC, and it was used by both Babylonian and Persian astrologers.

It's not surprising that they would associate a particular star with the birth of a king because, at the time, astrology was principally used to forecast national affairs.

It wasn't like today, where you read your horoscope in the newspaper.

If you have a newspaper, horoscopes weren't normally done for ordinary people.

Instead, heavenly signs were interpreted as having to do with things of national importance, like relations between nations, or wars and rebellions, or epidemics, or whether the crops would be good or bad, or what's going to happen with a king.

It's thus not a surprise that the Magi would be looking for signs dealing with the birth of kings.

What the star they saw might have been is difficult to determine, but one possibility is Jupiter.

Today, we think of Jupiter as a planet rather than a star, but at the time, Jupiter and the other planets were considered wandering stars because they were little points of light that moved against the background of the fixed stars.

In fact, that's where the word planet comes from; in Greek, planetes means wanderer.

So, the planets, like Jupiter, are the wandering stars.

Unlike some later Greeks, Mesopotamian astrologers didn't think that the stars were controlling events on Earth.

Instead, they thought the gods were just making their wills known through these celestial phenomena, so you could look at the sky as a kind of divine revelation.

It's not controlling you, but it tells you what's going to happen by divine revelations.

Jupiter, in particular, was associated with Marduk, the king of the Babylonian pantheon, just like Jupiter was the king of the Roman gods.

So, Jupiter is the king planet, and it had this same kind of role in Babylonian astrology.

For example, there's one text that says if Jupiter remains in the sky in the morning, then enemy kings will be reconciled with each other.

So, that's one way that Jupiter was taken as affecting the affairs of kings.

There's an Assyrian text that says if a lunar eclipse takes place and Jupiter is not in the sky, the king's going to die.

To protect the kings, the Assyrians came up with an ingenious solution: they took a condemned criminal and made him a temporary substitute king who could then be executed to save the life of the real king.

Here's what Francesca Rothberg has to say in her book, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture.

The most extreme situation posed by an omen was that of the lunar eclipse that portended the death of the king.

Because the possibility of a lunar eclipse was predictable by the 7th century BC, the danger portended for the king by this phenomenon could occasionally be addressed before the fact.

More often, the eclipse had first to be observed to determine particular factors affecting the Assyrian king, such as the portion of the lunar disk darkened by the eclipsing shadow and the presence or absence of the planet Jupiter in the sky during the eclipse.

The response to such an eclipse was to put in motion the ritual of the substitute king, who acted as a scapegoat, taking on himself the portended evil in place of the king, and who, when the danger period of a hundred days was over, was to be put to death in order that the evil be carried with him into the netherworld.

So it's kind of like the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado, where you have a substitute who needs to be executed to save the important guy from being executed.

But for a month, he'll be treated like a fighting cock and given everything he wants, and then at the end of that, he's going to go get the chop.

I've read accounts of and heard accounts of the substitute king ritual where, you know, they do all this stuff to try to fake out the gods into thinking this criminal is now the real king.

See, we did all this king stuff with him.

Meanwhile, the actual king is pretending to be a farmer or something, and they just happen to consult this farmer for important state affairs.

In any event, they took whether or not Jupiter was present in the sky during a lunar eclipse very seriously.

It had life or death consequences for the king.

Of course, though, whether Jupiter was the star that the Magi saw will depend on the year that Jesus was born.

And when was that year?

Well, this is something that scholars debate, and since Jesus was born during Herod the Great's reign, he would have had to have been born sometime before this.

In Matthew 2:7, Herod secretly learns from the Magi when the star appeared, and in 216, he kills all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men.

This indicates that the star was understood as appearing at Jesus' birth, which is what you'd expect since such portents were associated with births rather than conceptions.

It also indicates Jesus was born up to two years before the Magi arrived, although it may not have been a full two years since Herod may have added a safety margin to his execution order.

Want to make sure he gets the right kid.

Many scholars have thus proposed that Jesus was born since Herod died around 4 BC. On this account, that Jesus was born, that Herod died around 4 BC, that Jesus was born around 6 or 7 BC. So that's the date you commonly hear.

But other scholars have argued that this calculation is wrong, and I agree with the other scholars.

A better case can be made that Herod died in 1 BC, and if you want to read the evidence for that, you can see Jack Finnegan's book, The Handbook of Biblical Chronology, second edition, and Andrew Steinmann's book, From Abraham to Paul, both of which are excellent books on biblical chronology.

This would put Jesus' birth in 3 or 2 BC. That's the latter half of the year 3 BC or the first half of the year 2 BC, which is the year that the Church Fathers identified as the correct one.

The overwhelming bulk of the Church Fathers who addressed the subject say it's 3-2 BC, and that fits with Luke's statement that Jesus was about 30 years old when he began his ministry.

He says that in Luke 3:23. This was just after John the Baptist began his ministry in the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar.

According to Luke 3:1, the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar was AD 29. You subtract 30 from AD 29, and you remember the fact there is no year zero, and you end up in 2 BC rather than 1 BC because there's no year zero.

But regardless of which view of Jesus' birth is correct, we can say it happened in the first decade.

Whether you want to go with the earlier dating or the traditional later dating, it's sometime in the first decade BC. And if listeners want a fuller treatment of the dating of Jesus' birth, they can go to our Christmas 2018 episode, episode 19. Yeah, we talked about that at length.

Good.

So what was in the sky at this time that could have been the star?

Well, a large number of things have been proposed, and the list I'm about to give only contains some of the proposals.

But in 7 BC, on December 1st, Jupiter and Saturn were in conjunction.

In 6 BC, on April 17th, Jupiter had its heliacal rising in Aries, which was a constellation associated with Judea, along with several other significant features in the sky.

Also, in 6 BC, on May 27th, Jupiter and Saturn were in conjunction, and that happened again on October 6th of 6 BC. In 5 BC, in March, a comet appeared in Capricorn.

In 4 BC, in April, a comet or a nova—we're not sure which one—could have been either a comet or a nova; the records aren't clear enough.

It appeared in the constellation Aquila, the Eagle.

In 3 BC, on August 12th, Jupiter and Venus rose in the east in conjunction with each other in the constellation Leo, near the star Regulus, and we'll go into the significance of that in a bit.

Also, in 3 BC, on September 11th, the sun was in mid-Virgo, with the moon at the feet of Virgo.

On September 14th, Jupiter was in conjunction with Regulus again.

In 2 BC, on February 17th, Jupiter was in conjunction with Regulus; that also happened on May 8th of 2 BC, and on June 17th of 2 BC, Jupiter again was in conjunction with Venus.

When you say in conjunction, that means that they were very close together in the sky.

It means they were relatively close.

How specifically close depends on the degree of conjunction.

Okay.

But for astrological purposes, it means they're in the same house.

It could mean, in a particular case, they were so close that they actually looked like a single star.

Okay, okay, so which of these various astronomical phenomena is most significant?

Three of them we should talk about in particular.

The first is what happened on April 17th of 6 BC. That was the heliacal rising of Jupiter in Aries, and the idea that this is what the Magi saw is a very popular proposal in the last few years.

It has really taken off in astronomical circles.

It was proposed by a gentleman named Michael Molnar, who has written a series of articles about what light horoscopes of famous people in the ancient world can shed on history and how these horoscopes would have been regarded in their own day.

He's done horoscopes for Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Domitian, Mithridates, and other famous ancient people who had significant horoscopes.

He found that on April 17th in 6 BC, there was a set of factors that, in terms of Greek astronomy of the time, would very plausibly be read as signaling the birth of a very great king in Judea.

He explores this in his book, The Star of Bethlehem.

His case is credible, but I have some criticisms of it.

First, I think he's got the wrong year.

I think Jesus was born in 3 or 2 BC, not 6 BC. Second, he's too dependent on Greek astrological ideas that can only be documented a century after the time of Jesus, when the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy lived.

I think the Magi may not have been using Greek astrology but Mesopotamian or Arabian astrological ideas, and we can't just assume those are the same as Greek astrological ideas.

So even though, yeah, he's got a horoscope that says big important Judean king in Greek astrology, that's not necessarily what the Magi were thinking because they weren't from Greece; they were from the East.

The second possibility that we need to call attention to is the rising of Jupiter and Venus on August 12th in 3 BC. Since Babylonian times, as we mentioned, Jupiter has been seen as a heavenly king, and of course Venus was seen as a heavenly queen.

So you get a king and a queen together; it could suggest a birth.

Further, the Babylonians named Regulus, which is the brightest star in Leo (it's Alpha Leonis). They called Regulus the king, which is actually even what they called it in their own language.

But even Regulus is, you know, related in Latin to rex or king, and the lion was a traditional symbol of Judah if you look at Genesis 49:9. So if you have the heavenly king and the queen getting together in the tribe of Judah's constellation by the king star, that could suggest a new Jewish king.

The third possibility that we need to call attention to is what happened the next month on September 11th of 3 BC. This possibility has some extra-biblical backing in the Book of Revelation.

In chapter 12, John says, A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.

This woman then gives birth to Jesus.

Well, some have proposed that this image encodes information about when Jesus was born, when the sun was in the middle of Virgo, the Virgin, and thus clothing the Virgin with the moon at Virgo's feet, or the feet of the Virgin.

This is also happening, and that happened on September 11th of 3 BC. This is also happening in proximity to several encounters that Jupiter, the king planet, had with Regulus, the king star, in the constellation of Leo, the lion, the symbol of Judah.

So September 11th is a very popular proposal in some circles.

September 11th, 3 BC, it's the date, or one of the dates, that's discussed in the 2007 documentary called The Star of Bethlehem by a guy named Rick Larson, and this is a very popular documentary in evangelical circles.

I think that what the documentary proposes is quite possible, but there are also reasons to be cautious about it, so I don't recommend that people watch it and conclude that everything it said is necessarily right.

We'll talk about that in a future episode of Mysterious World just devoted to the Star of Bethlehem, so maybe next Christmas.

Unfortunately, we can't say which, if any, of these events corresponds to the Star of Bethlehem without knowing precisely when Jesus was born, and that's something the Bible never tells us.

These are good possibilities, but the Church Fathers had different opinions.

They did identify 3-2 BC as the year he was born, the latter half of 3 or the first half of 2, but only some of them proposed December 25th.

So we can't know for sure which of these it might have been, but these are the leading possibilities.

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Okay, so that's the reason perspective.

What can we say about the Magi from the faith perspective?

Would God really use pagan astrology to signal the birth of His Son?

That's a matter for God to decide.

Scripture indicates that God cares for all people, and He makes Himself known to them in various ways.

For example, in Romans 1, you look at verses 19 and 20. Paul makes it clear God has given revelation of Himself through creation to everyone in the world, including pagans.

If He chooses to let pagans perceive the birth of His Son through the stars, well, He can do that.

It wouldn't be so much a case of God using pagan astrology to mark the birth of His Son as choosing to preserve certain true ideas among Gentiles that would then point to this event.

Also, if the Magi were Persians, they wouldn't necessarily be considered pagans because they weren't polytheists at this time.

They had been polytheists early on, but by this period, the Persians did not believe in the old gods.

Their dominant religion was Zoroastrianism, which teaches that there is a single great all-good Creator God, whom they refer to as the Wise Lord, and who will vanquish all evil in the end.

They also believe in the renovation of the world, the final judgment, and the resurrection of the dead.

So, single great all-good Creator, the Wise Lord, who's going to vanquish evil, renovate the world, have a final judgment, and raise the dead?

You know who else believed that?

Jews!

And so, if the Magi were Persians, they could have seen themselves as spiritual kin to the Jews and as worshiping the same God, the only true one, just using a different language.

Finally, they may well have had contact with Jews living in their own land and thus come into contact with biblical revelation that could have influenced their perception of the star.

They could have learned, for example, that the lion was a symbol of Judah, and they could have thus associated the coming of the Jewish Messiah with a star in Leo.

One of the most famous messianic prophecies of all time is in Numbers 24:17: A star shall come forth out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.

Well, this prophecy was already in their time associated with the Messiah, which is why in the AD 130s, the messianic pretender Simon Bar Kosiba was hailed as Simon Bar Chachba, which in Aramaic means Simon, son of the star.

So, stars were already used as a symbol for the Messiah at this time, and so if you associate a star with the heavenly lion, that could tell you, New Jewish king.

So, Jewish thought may have itself provided some of the background that helped the Magi recognize the star.

So then, what about the role of astrology itself in this account?

Isn't that problematic?

Listeners can go back and listen to episode 23 of Mysterious World to get a full analysis of astrology, but here we'll cover it briefly.

Astrology was popular among Gentiles, but it wasn't as popular among Jews, who often looked down on it.

Interestingly, this is itself a sign that Matthew's tradition about the Magi is historically accurate, because it's not the kind of thing that Jewish Christians would tend to make up.

Since they didn't look up to astrology, they wouldn't naturally make up, Oh, and these astrologers came to visit the Messiah.

But it did exist; astrology was out there in the ancient world.

Genesis says that God made the sun, the moon, and the stars.

This is Genesis 1:14. It says He made them to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.

That could simply mean that you can use them as timekeeping markers, but some Jews thought that their function as signs went beyond just being timekeeping markers and included information about future events, that God was revealing His will.

Just like He gives signs through other miracles, He gives signs through the stars.

So they see right here in Genesis it says they're for signs, so they can predict things for us.

Thus, for example, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls contain astrological texts.

So there were Jews who entertained astrology, or at least the version of astrology that says God can reveal His will through signs in the heavens.

In the ancient world, of course, there was no rigid distinction between astronomy and astrology.

It's only been in the last few centuries that the two have been disentangled as scientists have learned more about the effects that the sun, the moon, and the stars do and don't have here on life on Earth.

Even Thomas Aquinas, back in the 1200s, based on the science of his day, thought that the heavenly bodies had an influence on our passions and could, for example, make a man prone to anger, but not in a way that it would overwhelm his free will.

If you want to read about that, we talk about it back in episode 23. Also, he mentions it in his commentary on this passage, Matthew 2, verses 1 and 2, in his commentary on Matthew, and he talks about it in the Summa Theologiae, and we'll have that in the links.

Subsequent scientific research has showed that the stars don't have this kind of effect, and so consulting the stars for these purposes is superstition.

And so if you look in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it warns against consulting horoscopes.

But while the stars don't have the kind of influence many people once thought, that doesn't mean God can't use them to signal major events in His plan of the ages.

In fact, He signaled the birth of His Son with a star, and that shows He can do this.

That isn't what people think of as astrology; instead, it's part of divine providence, and it doesn't even appear to be the only time God has done this.

On the Day of Pentecost, Peter cited the prophet Joel's prediction that in the days of the Messiah, the moon would be turned to blood, and he says this was fulfilled in our own day.

Well, guess what?

It so happens that on the night of the crucifixion, April 3rd, AD 33, there was a lunar eclipse visible from Jerusalem, and in a lunar eclipse, the moon looks red.

So the moon did turn to blood on the day the Messiah was crucified.

So God can give signs in the heavens to mark the stages of His plan.

So, Jimmy, what's your bottom line on this mystery of the Magi?

Well, they weren't kings and they weren't simply wise men; they were astrologers.

There weren't just three of them; we don't know how many there were, but they were probably accompanied by a large caravan.

They arrived as much as two years after Jesus was born.

They weren't led around by the star, which is why they went to the palace in Jerusalem.

They came from an eastern country, though it's unclear whether this was Babylon, Persia, or Arabia, and Jupiter, the king star, likely played a role in their calculations.

Jupiter itself may have been the star that they saw rise.

Great!

And so, what further resources can we offer to the listeners who would like to do a little deeper dive on this, perhaps before the Feast of the Epiphany?

Well, Jack Finnegan's book, Handbook of Biblical Chronology, we'll have a link to that.

It's an outstanding book.

Andrew Steinman's Biblical Chronology from Abraham to Paul, we'll also have a link to that.

Francesca Rothberg's book, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture, so you can dig into what people in Babylonia actually, how they actually read signs in the sky.

Michael Molnar's book, The Star of Bethlehem, he proposed the theory that's popular right now, even though I think there are problems with it, but you can read his case for yourself.

We'll also have an article I wrote on Mysteries of the Magi, as well as stuff I've done on the Star of Bethlehem, including a response to a skeptic of the Star of Bethlehem.

We'll also have links to previous Mysterious World episodes on astrology and when Jesus was born.

We'll have a link to Rick Larson's Star of Bethlehem documentary and a link to a video where I throw out a few notes of caution about Rick Larson's Star of Bethlehem documentary.

And also in the show notes, we'll have a link to where Thomas Aquinas talks about astrology in the Summa Theologiae.

So let's move on to our mysterious feedback, and this time we're hearing feedback on our recent episode on numbers stations.

Our first feedback comes from Earl, who sent an email.

He says, I'm a longtime listener and love your podcasts.

After listening to today's episode, it reminded me of an article I recently read about California trying to eliminate ham radio.

Also, I was wondering when Jimmy would be providing the solution to his number station broadcast at the end of the episode.

I recognize the first five digits to pi as 31415 and the first 11, not including the 1, prime numbers at the end.

I'm sure Jimmy has more to the puzzle than that.

So, at the end of the number station episode, during the course of that episode, we played a number of audio clips from number stations, including the Lincolnshire Poacher.

We showed how the messages typically were divided into two blocks.

One block had kind of the metadata for the message, like who this is for, and the other had the numbers that actually, if you decode them, spelled out the message.

Then, they'd have an attention signal at the end to signal the end of the transmission.

Just for fun, I composed such a thing using sound from the Lincolnshire Poacher and my own voice.

For the first part of the message, I used the first five digits of pi because those tend to have five numbers in them.

In the Lincolnshire Poacher, the first block of information was five numbers.

Then, for the second block of numbers, which would be longer, I included the first 12 prime numbers.

Because, in my view, the number one is a prime number, it fits the definition; it can only be divided by itself and one with no remainder.

I don't know why people don't consider one a prime number; it just is, deal mathematicians!

So, that was the only really missing bit of that second block of numbers.

One is in there deliberately because I think it is a prime number.

Then, for the final message, I included a clip of Yosemite Sam.

In the episode, we played a clip of the numbers station Yosemite Sam that uses an audio clip at the end of a data burst where Yosemite says, I'm going to blow you to smithereens, varmint!

I couldn't find that, but I found one that I think was even more appropriate for a Catholic broadcast.

So, at the end of my little number station clip, I had Yosemite Sam saying, Say your prayers, you long-eared galoot!

That seemed appropriate for a Catholic podcast.

It did!

Those are the only additional elements to the clip.

I deliberately wanted the code to be easy for people to break.

And then California trying to eliminate ham radio.

Interesting, it sent me on a little quest to go find out more about ham radios and what's out there now and what you can do.

It's a very interesting area to look into, and among the many, many never-ending list of things California wants to eliminate.

Then KnightU on YouTube wrote, Jimmy Akin deserves a pie in the face, a pie as in P-I. For that number sequence at the end, I was all primed to break the code.

Well, all I can say, Knightu, is you better say your prayers, you long-eared galooot.

Studio Lambs on YouTube writes, I've been interested in these since they first popped up in an early season of Lost.

It's kind of sad in a way that these analog forms of encryption are being rendered obsolete, as they were really clever.

Yeah, and I know a lot of people mentioned Lost and the fact that these were used on Lost.

And yeah, they were clever, and they were in the clear in a way that made it obvious to people.

So you could, it made them fun to, you know, listen to and speculate about.

And then Santiago writes on YouTube another super megazord episode.

Yeah, thank you so much, Santiago.

Joey on YouTube writes, I wonder how many number stations are on YouTube between content and comments.

Yeah, this is something that is almost certainly, I think, happening: that people are using YouTube and other web services to effectively do the same thing as number stations, to hide transmissions or hide messages in plain sight, either in videos or in the metadata of videos or in the comment section.

There's probably spy conversations happening on YouTube and other web services, Facebook, all kinds of things, Twitter, all the time.

And just because we're so much better at it now and have these new means of communication, it's easier to disguise them than it was in the day when you had to use a shortwave radio station and stuff to broadcast your messages.

Then Jennifer writes on Facebook, I ended up in a lengthy conversation with a friend about this episode and finally just sent them the link for the show.

I'm a patron and voted for this topic because it sounded cool, but I had no idea what it was about.

Fascinating!

Thank you so much, Jennifer.

We really appreciate your generosity and that of all of our patrons, and we love doing our monthly patron episode for you.

And Jimmy, what do we have for mysterious headlines this week?

Well, since we were talking about the Star of Bethlehem, which may well have been Jupiter or other phenomena here in our solar system, I thought I'd have a solar system theme for the headlines.

So the first link is going to be to the mystery of Saturn's rings.

There is a controversy about Saturn's rings.

Initially, people assumed they'd been there for four and a half billion years, so they were as old as the solar system.

But then evidence came to light that they may only be about 100 million years old, which would date them back to the time of the dinosaurs.

But then there's now a dispute about exactly how old they are, and they also may not last for much more than 100 million years into the future.

We can see material raining out of them onto Saturn, and so that ring system may be disappearing.

And so we may live in a privileged position in our solar system's history where we get to see these really beautiful rings.

So we'll have a link to all of that for you.

Also, if you want to go to Saturn like they did in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, you might want to use artificial hibernation to get there because it's kind of a lengthy trip.

And we have now successfully induced artificial human hibernation.

They're not using it for space travel at the moment, but they have cooled people down and replaced their blood with like—saline solution.

Yeah, saline solution, chilled saline solution, to keep the body cold so it would stay alive longer while they performed a medical procedure on them, then pumped their blood back in and warmed them up.

And you could hypothetically do the same thing just like the astronauts in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And unless your antenna starts to break or your AI starts to go crazy, you should get to Saturn just fine.

I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that.

So before I'm going to end in a minute, I'll ask you, what's our next episode going to be about?

But first, I want to take a moment to thank our patrons who make this show possible, including Stephanie W, Kathleen F, Daniel D, Kelly B, and Max S. Their generous donations at SQPN.com/give make it possible for us to continue Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World and all the shows at StarQuest.

You can join them by visiting SQPN.com/give.

So, Jimmy, what's our next episode going to be about?

Well, since it's going to fall in the week between Christmas and New Year's, we're going to have a weird questions episode for people who are listening to their podcast during that time.

Then, in the first week of January, we're going to have our patrons episode for the month, which is going to be on Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

That's the book that infamously inspired the infamous Da Vinci Code.

It's a conspiracy about Jesus, and we're going to take a look at it.

So, Holy Blood, Holy Grail in January.

Excellent.

Well, that's it from us.

What do you think about the mystery of the Magi of the Bible?

You can let us know by visiting SQPN.com slash mysterious or the Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World Facebook page.

Send us an email to mysterious at SQPN.com or send a tweet to @Mys_underscore_world with the hashtag of #MysteriousFeedback.

If you have not yet done so, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, iHeart Radio, your favorite podcast app, or on our YouTube channel, where you should hit the bell to get notifications.

You can find all the links from Jimmy's resources from our discussion and links to those mysterious headlines on our show notes at SQPN.com slash mysterious.

Until next time, Jimmy Akin, thank you for exploring with us our Mysterious World.

Thank you, Dom, and Merry Christmas to you, and Merry Christmas to all the listeners.

And once again, I'm Dom Bettinelli.

Thank you for listening to Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World on StarQuest, and Merry Christmas, everyone.