Epiphany 2008
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
6 Jan 2008
Today is the Feast of the Epiphany, of the three wise men who visited the Christ child.
Before Christmas, the Archbishop of Canterbury prompted world wide discussion by questioning the historical basis of the visit, and wondering about the number of visitors and whether they were priests or philosophers, kings or astrologers.
The origins of the feast celebrated on 6 January are typical of the tangled web we find on examining Christian origins of up to two thousand years ago.
The feast was introduced into Western Christianity in the fourth century, when the persecutions had ceased, although it had originated earlier in the East as a celebration of the baptism of Christ. In some places it ranked with Easter and Pentecost as one of the three major Christian festivals.
The unrivalled prominence of Christmas celebrations in Australia today is not an ancient practice, and even in Italy fifty years ago the Epiphany, when presents were exchanged, rivalled or exceeded Christmas in importance.
Christians and their opponents are often fascinated by the details as well as core events in biblical narratives. What are the facts? Are the particularities only flourishes to enhance the importance of the claim, or is there a core of truth?
Matthew’s gospel does not tell us of three wise men, but that they (number unspecified) brought three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. For thousands of years astrology, the belief that the stars influence human affairs, was a respectable area of study. Even the great English scientist Issac Newton, who discovered the law of gravity, was interested in astrology, and it is a reasonable conjecture that Christ’s foreign visitors were Zoroastrian astrologers, who followed the “star” to Bethlehem.
While we count our years from Christ’s birth, the best opinion today is that he was born between 4 and 8 BC. Herod was king and died after an eclipse of the moon before the Passover, sometime between 6 BC and 1 AD, while the star could have appeared up to two years before Christ’s birth.
Grant Matthews is a theoretical astrophysicist at Notre Dame University in the USA with access to NASA’s databases, which can discover any star provided they know where to search.
He believes the star could have appeared between 8 to 4 BC, and Chinese and Korean astronomers recorded a comet with no tail, which did not seem to move, about 4 BC.
A couple of supernova about that time would not have been clearly visible, while the more visible Nova Aquilae V603 was a portent of disaster.
By elimination, Matthews believes the heavenly sign was an alignment of the planets and he nominates 17 April 6 BC as the best possibility, when the sun, Jupiter, the moon, and Saturn aligned in the constellation Aries.
Christian faith does not stand or fall on these details, but searching is interesting because the truth can be stranger than fiction.
