OR any of the following stars- Pulsar, Altair, Antore, Canopus or just a special stellar object of the Milky Way? “Astronomers and Biblical Scholars have long pondered this question”, wrote the Science Guardian of December 25, 2003 in an article entitled: “Moon and Venus adorn Christmas Sky,” remarking: “New knowledge of the old astrological beliefs and modern computer based planetary knowledge may yet shed new light on this age-old question.” Not even the January 2010 discovery of sun-like stars or exoplanets outside the solar system by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Kepler Space Telescope could unravel the mystery. Not even the International Earth Rotation and Universal Time Authorities (IERS) in Paris that added one second to the clock at the 23:59:59 mark on June 30, 2015, delaying the onset of July 2015 by one minute. Perhaps modern advances in cosmology may fill the lacuna at a future date!

A problem with deciphering the star’s identity has been the uncertainty as to the exact date and even year, when Jesus may have been born. Not knowing this date, it is difficult for experts to offer an irrefutable answer to this puzzle, even when the date is narrowed down to a period spanning 1 and 8B.C., based on events such as Herod’s reign, taxation records and the call for census. It is even more difficult to determine the type of mysterious star that served as a compass to the Magi and led them to the place where the Infant Jesus was.

In retrospect, it has been noted that the Emperor Augustus (month of August), previously known as Octavian (month of October), corrected the Calendar introduced by Julius (month of July) Caesar to the Roman Empire in 45B.C. A much bigger correction was made on the instruction of Pope Gregory XIII in the 16th century. The Pope recognised by then that the calculation, on which the Julian Calendar, was based were not entirely correct and that each year was in fact eleven minutes too long. The new Calendar also took cognisance of the slight error in calculating the Christian era by Dionysius Exiguus (d.545A.D.), the Roman Biblical Scholar, who literally regarded 1A.D. as the date of the Incarnation. This new calculation for the Calendar was indeed correct, and is, therefore, definitive. It showed that the modern Calendar was the full responsibility of the Church, and it has ever since been called the Gregorian Calendar. This new Calendar cuts across culture, customs and traditions, time zones, seasonal changes such as harmattan, winter, summer, autumn and spring and all investigations on Christmas Star can always take cognisance of this.

Of the seemingly endless suggestions that have been put forth as to the nature of the Christmas Star, four stand out as the most popular. The first idea holds that the star may have been a bright comet. Throughout history, various cultures have seen comets as omens of earthly changes, either good or bad and usually thought in some cultures as heralding a catastrophe, so that it would be unusual to interpret its appearance as heralding a salvific figure. For example, the Roman orator and statesman, Cicero (106-43B.C), reports (De Devinatione I xxiii 47) that on the night the great temple of Diana at Ephesus burned, when the light began to dawn, the Magi who were wise and learned among the Persians clamoured that this presaged the birth of one who will be a great peril for Asia, one who turned out to be Alexander of Macedon (356-323B.C). It is understandable that a bright comet could be interpreted as “the star.” Another example is the account of Josephus, the Jewish Historian and Pharisee (37-100A.D.) on the destruction of Jerusalem in 70A.D by the Roman warmonger, General Titus. He speaks “of a star that stood over Jerusalem and of a comet that continued for a year at the time of the fall of the city” (War VI v 3 #289). However, the Chinese, Roman and Arab sky watchers of the time kept very accurate astronomical records, and nowhere do they make mention of a comet between 1 and 8B.C. when time momentarily stood still at base zero to usher in Anno Domini (A.D) or the year of Our Lord).

Origen (b.185A.D), a Christian theologian, who was head of the Catechetical School of Alexandria, Egypt, had concluded that the star of the Magi was not an ordinary fixed star, “but is to be classified with the comets which occasionally occur, or meteor or beaded or jar-shaped stars or any other such name by which the Greeks like to describe the different forms”(Against Celsus 1 58). As a rider to this, Scripture Scholar, Rev. Fr. Raymond Brown, in his book, “The Birth of the Messiah”(pg.171), described by Newsweek Magazine as “a line by line exegesis…that not only synthesises a generation of modern scholarship, but also provides a coherent and compelling explanation of what the stories of Christ’s birth were meant to convey” posits that “comets move in regular but elliptical paths around the sun and occur every 77 years dating back to 240B.C in Europe, China and Japan.”
• Sunny Isu, a Chartered Accountant (Fellow), is a budding freelance essayist based in Abuja and can be reached on 07013216992.