Ask a Pastor Column

Q: What do we know about the Christmas star?

A:  The term “star” in the Bible can refer to any small heavenly body. Shooting stars, planets and galaxies would have all been referred to as stars in biblical times, because they all look the same to the naked eye. The sun and moon would not have been thought of as stars, even though we now know that the sun is a kind of star, it wasn’t called a star in Bible times. So then, when the magi claimed to have seen the star of the newborn king of the Jews, shooting stars, galaxies, planets and genuine stars are all possibilities to consider.  There is also a possibility the star was some kind of miraculous or angelic event, separate from any natural explanation.

We can take these possibilities to Matthew 2:1-12 to see if the description in the passage rules any of them out. Verse 2 gives us very little definite information, only that they saw the star in the east (could mean the star was in the eastern part of the sky, that they were in the east when they saw it, or that they saw the star “in it’s rising”). We can also see that the magi interpreted this star to mean that the promised king of the Jews had been born.

Matthew 2:9-10 gives us more to go on. When the Magi are departing Jerusalem for Bethlehem, the star appears again: travelling south towards Bethlehem, and then stopping over the place where the child was. It is difficult to imagine any natural phenomenon like a comet doing all the things that the passage describes. While some think that a natural explanation is likely, personally I tend to lean more towards the star being some sort of supernatural event, like a miracle or angel.

In the end, however, the only thing we really need to know about the star is that it fulfilled it’s supernatural purpose in guiding the wise men to the Infant King they were seeking.

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