Ep 37: Follow That Star!

00:00So, what you're saying is, if a disciple shows up in your room, don't get medical attention,

00:07just believe whatever he says.

00:09I think you should at least get out some milk and cookies.

00:11He's at least 1,000 years old at this point, arthritis is through the roof, get him some

00:16help.

00:17Yeah.

00:18Hey, everybody.

00:19I'm Dan McClellan.

00:20And I'm Dan Beecher.

00:23And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the

00:29academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about

00:34the same.

00:35How are things today, Dan?

00:36You know, the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful.

00:42Let's not get to two in the weeds of that, that trouble.

00:46Listen, listen, it's, it's, it tis the season, man, and, and that's, that's the theme of

00:52the show today is, is sort of the Christmas season and all right.

00:56So I, I figure that's what we need to be talking about.

01:00That sounds reasonable, which is unusual for us, but we have a, we have a guest with

01:05us today.

01:06I want to go ahead and introduce a good friend of mine, Aaron Adair.

01:09He is a research affiliate in physics education at MIT and also make some Filthy Luca on the

01:16side working for a defense contractor.

01:19Welcome to the show, Aaron.

01:20Hello.

01:21Hello.

01:22Thank you for having me.

01:23Dan and Dan.

01:24Well, thank you for being here.

01:25Thank you for your time.

01:26Aaron is the author of a book entitled the star of Bethlehem, a skeptical, I don't have

01:33a copy in front of me, a skeptical approach, a skeptical view, a skeptical view.

01:38Now Aaron, as a PhD in physics is approaching the yield star of Bethlehem from the perspective

01:45of a critical physicist trying to better understand what's going on with this tradition.

01:52Well, I mean, that's awesome because as anyone who is like me, who like me as a child thought,

02:00hey, you know, went out and looked up at the sky and thought, wait, how do you follow one

02:06of these to a house?

02:07I don't know how to do that.

02:10I'm very glad to have a physicist on to help answer our questions.

02:16Yeah.

02:17It does.

02:18It doesn't seem like it's a very complicated thing.

02:20It seems like it just doesn't work, but we have someone with a PhD here who can help us

02:27figure this out.

02:28We're going to be talking about ideas associated with Christmas, associated with astrology associated

02:33with UFOs and aliens and all these things that pop up around Christmas time.

02:38But I wanted to start with the book.

02:40Aaron, could you give us a little breakdown on what you're trying to do with the book?

02:44Yeah, just to give it a bit of intro with my history with it, that I first discovered

02:51this when I started college and I was able to get a job at the universally planetarium

02:55as a show presenter.

02:57And Christmas show time comes around and I learned of basically a tradition that's been

03:02going on in America, planetarium since literally the early 1930s.

03:07And I'm sitting in there, you know, watching the show because eventually I'm going to have

03:10to also present the show later.

03:12This is how a psych episode starts, doesn't it?

03:15Perhaps so, yeah.

03:17I'm sorry.

03:18Continue.

03:19But yeah, I'm watching the show and I am blown away with the way of how the story of

03:27the star Bethlehem coming from the gospel of Matthew is being explained in completely

03:30scientific terms.

03:32At this time, I was calling myself a Catholic deus.

03:35That was my religious categorization.

03:37So I'm like, hey, using the laws of nature to get this exact result, that is exactly

03:42what the master of the universe would do.

03:44He has the power, sorry, different reference there.

03:48That's a different power.

03:51That's the power of the babe.

03:52I think you're referring to it or or a grace call.

03:54One of the two.

03:55Yeah.

03:56I was going to say.

03:57I was going to grace call in this case.

03:58Okay.

03:59Yeah.

04:00So I see this.

04:01I'm like, Florida that this awesome presentation works.

04:05And I remember going home either that holiday or a later holiday and seeing, oh, on TV,

04:10they also have a TV special about it, and they were giving a hypothesis.

04:13And it wasn't the one from our show.

04:15And I'm like, huh.

04:17And then I also found out, hey, the one in our show requires basically redating the rain

04:21of important kings and things like that, I realized, okay, there's a mess here.

04:25Let me start looking this up and I realized, okay, there's about as many hypotheses as

04:29there are people making up hypotheses and like, okay, let's try to get to what's actually

04:35going on here.

04:36Maybe there are these people who study this Bible thing have a thing or two to say about

04:40this.

04:41And lo and behold, I learned all this history of interpretation, how it's also extremely

04:46recent and that ultimately, if you take the text for what it says, it doesn't work.

04:50If you don't take the text for what it says, you still have a whole lot of conundrums both

04:55in terms of interpretation and just general historicity of the tale.

04:59And I think this is fascinating background because as with so many people, I know who

05:05right now take a rather skeptical approach toward religion and claims in the Bible.

05:12Your understanding that you have today is not rooted in a desire to tear anything down,

05:18is not rooted in a desire to destroy, but is rooted in honest, sincere confusion and curiosity

05:25about what's going on here and seeking answers.

05:27And it sounds like initially in a bit of a context of faith, but ultimately deciding,

05:33I can't, I cannot be intellectually honest about this and make it work, which is how

05:39this works for so many folks who are spoiler alert, Dan.

05:44Well, I thought we knew we already knew this about you, Dan.

05:50Well, yeah, yeah.

05:51Sure.

05:52But I just want to make note that for a lot of people out there who think folks who take

05:56a write a book and say a skeptical view that this is not because they set out to tear something

06:02down, but because they set out to honestly understand.

06:05Yeah.

06:06And it is worth noting that as much as, of course, I'm going to, you know, ultimately

06:11go against the actuality of the story, let alone being scientifically verified, I would

06:16still say, hey, once you understand how the story was put together, you can actually see

06:20the beauty and the poetry behind it.

06:22And that's a whole lot better to me.

06:24It'd be like, I could just imagine somebody going in and saying, well, I'm going to debunk

06:28Lord of the Rings.

06:29You're kind of missing the point in so far as there are Lord of the Rings is out there

06:35who are looking for middle earth, you need to debunk them.

06:38And then the rest of the time is like saying, well, look at how the imagery is based on

06:42the life and times and mythologies that talking to me, that is the more appropriate approach

06:48and the whole either literalist or scientific rationalist approach misses the point.

06:53And unfortunately, when I say missing the point, this was a point made almost 200 years

06:58ago by David Friedrich Strauss.

07:00I am in some ways only repeating what one guy said in German 200 years ago.

07:05Well, let's start with before we get to the sort of the poetry of the thing, let's start

07:12with some of those ideas that you encountered for how to explain this and maybe, you know,

07:21there may be some people who don't even know what story we're talking about.

07:24So we're on three wise men, not three, I caught myself the first time I realized that it doesn't

07:32say three, it blew my mind, but yeah, we're on wise men from the east, the Magi, yes,

07:41coming in to see Jesus and there's this thing of a star.

07:47Talk about that, talk about what's problematic about it and let's get to some of these theories

07:53about how it could work.

07:56Yeah.

07:57Yeah.

07:58So the story of the wise guys as we get from the second chapter of the gospel of Matthew,

08:02story is basically first, give us some setting that this is during the time of King Herod

08:07the Great, or if you were one of his subjects, may not feel he's so great because he was

08:12pretty notoriously, let's put it very, very kindly, a mean dude, especially if you were

08:17in his family, Holy Crud, but the wise men are coming in saying, Hey, where is the newborn

08:22king of the Jews, we've seen his star translations will differ at this point, but more commonly

08:26say at its rising, the traditional one is in the east.

08:29So we've seen the star, we saw it rise, where do stars rise normally in the east, that's

08:32why there's that confusion.

08:34And so to say, and now we're here to worship him, Herod is courses like, wait, you're coming

08:38for the newborn king of the Jews, I'm the king of the, oh, this is a problem.

08:42So you can just imagine, it's like, all right, let's bring them in, let's, you know, at least

08:46ask some questions, find out what's going on there.

08:49And Herod, get some information from them, get some information from the Jewish scribes

08:54in Jerusalem to find out what is supposed to be going on.

08:57And basically tell us the wise men to, okay, go search out diligent Philly for him.

09:02And when you find him report back to me, so I too may come and worship him.

09:06And every time I think of him saying that, I imagine him twirling his mustache in the

09:10most early 20th century cinema mustache possible.

09:16One does question the wisdom of these wise men to go to this guy and say this to him

09:21specifically.

09:22But that's okay.

09:23That's not the point of what we're talking about.

09:25Yeah.

09:26And then the wise men go out and lo, again, they see the star that they had seen earlier

09:31and this says the star went before them until it arrived and came over the place where the

09:35young child was the wise men are filled with great joy, enter the house that they are in.

09:41And of course, note that it's not a house rather than say a cave or anything in the other

09:45later traditions, enter the house, give gifts, and then they're told the dream, hey, get

09:50out of here.

09:51And then of course later, Mary and Joseph are get told in another dream, hey, get out

09:55of here.

09:56And then eventually Herod finds out he's been bamboozled, goes sends an army to slaughter

10:01all the babies, at least male babies and Bethlehem all the two years and younger.

10:05But of course, our hero escapes, Herod eventually dies, holy family comes back at some unknown

10:10date. And then after that, we hop into as what was it Paul Harvey say the rest of the

10:17story.

10:18Yeah, exactly.

10:20So but for our purposes, the most interesting part of that story seems to be a star that

10:28goes ahead of guys and guides them to a specific, not like we're talking GPS coordinates here,

10:37we're talking like straight to a house that is not like any star I've ever met.

10:46And you would be correct if you were leading in that, you know, very direct way. Most astronomers

10:51are trying to read it in a multiplicity of different possible ways. One might be that

10:56when the wise men were leaving Jerusalem going towards Bethlehem and Bethlehem is pretty much

11:00south of Jerusalem, they're looking and they're seeing the star in the direction they are

11:05going. And when they are saying it was over the house, it was either it was over the house

11:09when they were looking or when they got to there, it was basically at zen at the highest

11:13point in the sky. That is how they might try to interpret that bit of text. Though it does

11:18lead to an interesting logistics question. When the wise men arrive to Bethlehem, how do

11:24they know which house to go to? Do they literally knock on the door at each one and say, you

11:28don't need urgent bursts in there? It's a little bit hard to know like, no, at the very

11:32least, there is nothing in there demonstrating any sort of searching and finding besides the

11:38star hanging over the right place. And if you want to see what sorts of problems that

11:42can produce, the excellent documentary, The Life of Brian starts off showing what happens

11:47when the wise men show up at the wrong manger. And the mother there is just very happy to

11:52accept the gifts on the part of the base. Right. Yeah, first of all, I do want to ask

11:58though, you mentioned the star being at zenith right over Bethlehem. Would it not seem pretty

12:05much zenith also at Jerusalem? How close to a thing can you be and the star no longer be

12:14at a zenith over something? It all depends on how accurate your measuring equipment is.

12:21And at the time of this going on, they definitely weren't traveling around with a radio telescope

12:25array to get like a milli arc second measurements of things in the sky. How dare you? How do

12:30you know? It doesn't mention. Actually, what we know about astronomy and astrology for

12:38these guys is going to be another problem. But I'll see if that a little bit later. But

12:42nonetheless, most likely, all they would have is their eyes for doing any sort of measurement.

12:47And yeah, the difference in how high up a star is in Jerusalem versus Bethlehem is pretty

12:52minuscule. There's also the issue of the fact I mentioned that they're going south.

12:57And the problem is for the star to be going before them to be going in that direction,

13:02that would be the stars traveling southward. But the rotation of the night sky has everything

13:06going from east to west. So quite literally, the star would have to be moving perpendicular

13:11to the normal motion of all the stars and planets. The only way that could even be possible

13:15is something to like move backwards at the same rate as the sky and nothing in the nighttime

13:20sky does that. Unless, again, there were some sort of really weird GPS satellite that somehow

13:26time traveled to for BCE to do this special thing. Of course, now I'm getting into the

13:31aliens, aren't I? Yeah. Yeah, don't want to get out ahead of our skis quite yet.

13:38Yes. I know that from the perspective of the study of early Judaism, a lot of my colleagues

13:44would say they probably conceptualize this star as an angel, because the stars were divine

13:50beings. They were considered to be in this time period, most closely linked with angels.

13:55And so this could be they speak of it as a star, but it's really an angel flying through

14:01the sky. But I had a question about this idea of the star at the at its rising when I hear

14:06from people who are hip, deep in astrology, they'll talk about the rising of the stars.

14:14All I can think of is Pisces Virgo rising is a very good sign, strong and kind and the

14:21little boy is mine. That's all I know about rising stars, but does do you think the rising

14:28here has to do with constellations and the different signs? Or do you think that's reading

14:36something into it? I think it's reading it, but I do want to, of course, give the fuller

14:40story here, because this phrase has been probably the most contentiously part of translation

14:47of interpretation. Like if I look at KJV versus NIV or versus other ones, this is probably

14:51the point you'll see the greatest diversity and discussion. So the Greek there itself,

14:56there's ambiguity because the underlying word, anatole, can mean either East or rising. It

15:02comes from the vervanna tello, but where do things rise? Well, they rise in the East.

15:06So that's why there's that kind of complexity there. And depending on who's interpreting

15:10this phrase, they might be thinking the wise men who were from the East were in the East

15:15when they saw the star. That's one way some people have tried to interpret. But like I

15:18say, the much more common version now is to interpret this as the actual rising. And

15:23yeah, as you mentioned, rising of stars is often an important part of any sort of given

15:27horoscope. In horoscope, literally the rising point is one of the cardinal points in a given

15:33horoscope. So if you go have someone to write up a horoscope for you, first off, why you

15:37wasting your money, but secondly, one of the things they're going to care about is your

15:40exact date and location of birth. So they can put four different coordinate points on

15:46your zodiac and then figure out what was rising, setting what was at the high point of the

15:49sky, et cetera. And some have also argued that the phrase being used by Matthew isn't even

15:55a more specific term for something called a helical rising. And this would be specifically

16:01something rising just before sunrise. So the very first rising of a star just barely

16:07outside to the glare of the sun. And that is even more precise than if true. And of course,

16:14if you're getting such precise wording in there, then you might be saying, Hey, is this some

16:18sort of at least artifact of an astronomical or astrological belongings there. Problem

16:24is we know what sorts of terms are used that are more specific. We literally actually have

16:28school textbooks that explain the difference between an actually and the word that is actually

16:32the technical term for helical rising epitoly. So it's like if Matthew was trying to use the

16:37scientific term, he decided not to. But the idea that there's not most is rising is interesting

16:44to me. And one thing I've been exploring beyond what I've done earlier, because the idea of

16:50a early rising star or a star rising, especially a little bit before sunrise, that would make

16:55it a morning star, which is, for example, one of the titles for Jesus in Revelation and

17:00second Peter, the morning star seems to have some other interesting connotations that I've

17:05seen in some other Jewish literature that I've actually written an article up on. I'm hoping

17:08it'll finally get published in the not too distant future, but we'll see what happens

17:12there. The key thing then is if this is also a morning star, this actually gives us another

17:18avenue of seeing what sort of imagery was the author going at. There's in particular another

17:23magical guiding star in Roman mythology that is perhaps a precursor to the story. We find

17:33hints of it in the Roman epic, the Aeneid, which is basically the story of Aeneas, one

17:38of the last survivors of Troy, who then with him and his surviving Trojans are basically

17:44divinely mandated to travel from Turkey to their new homeland in Italy and then become

17:51the Romans. And in chapter two or scroll to of the Aeneid, you actually have this other

17:58magical star that's supposed to guide them from Mount Etna to their new home. And the

18:03imagery this has been adjusted to match also a different magical star, the one for the

18:08glorious ascension of Julius Caesar that he turned into a comet and flew up to heaven

18:11according to various sources, literally became part of the cult of Caesar. But we have some

18:16other comments saying the older version of this myth of India as being guided by a star

18:20was specifically by Aeneas' mama Aphrodite or Venus, and specifically Venus in her morning

18:28rising. So the text that actually say specifically, this was Lucifer as their guide and not that

18:33Lucifer, that the kinder, brighter Lucifer, which obviously related to Isaiah, where we

18:42have the sarcastic reference to the king of Babylon as Hillel Benchacher, which is just

18:49shining one son of the dawn, a reference to Venus, later translated as Heil's florose

18:55and then Lucifer in the Latin. Oh, it's a it's a big tangled mess, isn't it?

19:01Oh, yeah. Well, I want to I want to untangle a little bit and go back to because Dan,

19:07you know, you've given us a good, like, for a believer, the explanation that it was just

19:15that it was an angel is a wonderful explanation. For a physicist, it doesn't do us any good

19:21at all. So I want to get back to some physicists related explanations for what what this could

19:29mean. I want to know what the planetarium thought. I want to know I want to know some

19:33of these some of these physicists physics based ideas of what this could possibly be.

19:39Yeah, yeah. So the most common explanations you will see coming out of the more scientific

19:46literature is a combination of either a comet, a supernova, which is an exploding star,

19:55or it's some sort of combination of the planets, especially in what something is called a conjunction.

20:00The technical definition of a conjunction is when two planets are basically on the same

20:04line of latitude on the celestial grid, but more commonly just to say, when two planets

20:09are very close together, there have been a few conjunctions of note that are pretty interesting.

20:14In fact, he was back in 2020 that people were saying, Oh, this is a recreation of the Christmas

20:18star. It was an extremely close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, where they became very

20:24close, almost close enough that the two would kind of blend into each other. And then it

20:28would look like one big bright star. I remember that I went out I went out to see that I went

20:32up on a mountain to to look at it. And they were they were not that close. I'm just going

20:36to say they were they they weren't even touching. Wasn't it just the light on the sewer treatment

20:41plant? That's right. Maybe with a little extra glare that it became that way. Yes, there

20:49was a much there wasn't even a closer one back in early one B.C. if I remember correctly,

20:55where the two were close enough that yeah, it would have actually been hard to distinguish

20:57the two and they would say, Oh, this extremely close conjunction. That must have been the

21:01start of this, you know, extreme brightening. And you will also now get that not just in

21:06planetaria. There was a BBC four part miniseries of the Nativity story from 2010, if I remember

21:12correctly. And they also use that sort of explanation. I actually haven't had a little

21:17bit of conversation with the director by email saying that, yeah, they like purposely try

21:20to make it sound like when the planets are over you hear like all this like mechanical

21:23noise, like it's a giant mechanical clock for the mechanical universe, making everything

21:27perfectly aligned just as God ordained, you know, respectively, from the beginning of time,

21:32which again, was young Erin's view of how the universe worked. So a big, old, a big

21:38antica theorem mechanism going tick tick tick tick. Yes, yes, pretty much. Yeah. And

21:45I mean, the view for that is if that sort of thing is true, especially the planetarium

21:50ones, is that we can know the locations of the planets with extremely high precision

21:56thousands of years ago. So if we can say, Hey, here's what the Bible is describing. If

22:01this is what Matthew is describing, we can use that to basically run the clock back and

22:06find out the date of either Jesus's birth or the arrival of the wise men, some aspect

22:11of the story that we can now like pinpoint. And of course, deal with some of the other

22:14problems like everyone has been noting for a long time. Hey, the Matthew and story and

22:18the Luke and story about when things happened, aren't really directly reconcilable. If we

22:23could have any sort of better information to get this down. And if we can use the power

22:27of science, then, then we are in a much better shape. And a lot of this effort has been to

22:34like, you know, exactly pinpoint where when Jesus came into the world. And also a big chunk

22:40of it has been literally to push back against skeptics and atheists and deus, the earliest

22:46versions of star Bethlehem theories I can see are literal direct responses to English

22:51deus. Well, yeah, I, and then, then's came an entire sort of cottage industry of trying

23:00to explain biblical difficult biblical conundrums. Yes. Using using the powers of science, diplomatic

23:10there, Dan. Yeah, I've actually also been surprised how relatively recent it is actually

23:20completely switched over to the scientific side. So there were some Bible scholars in

23:24the late 18th, early 19th century, pushing this idea and the rationally school of interpreting.

23:31So all the various myths of the Bible old and New Testament, these were all naturalistic

23:36things misunderstood. The key example that's off to given is a guy by the name of Heinrich

23:41Paulus writing in the 1820s. And he's pretty much the epitome of this sort of thing. He's

23:45collected like the last like 30, 40, 50 years of this sort of stuff. And every single miracle

23:49story of Jesus just slightly misunderstood story. So Jesus walking and water. It was

23:55a dark and stormy night. The disciples had completely lost their sense of direction

23:59being tossed around and didn't realize that they had actually crash landed on the beach.

24:03So when Jesus was walking along the sea shore, it looked like Jesus walking and water complete

24:07total accident that they thought that he was literally walking in water. Repeat that thought

24:11process for every single miracle story, including the resurrection. Well, that that seems like

24:15a pretty natural outgrowth of the debate that was going on between the ideas of rational

24:19religion and revealed religion in this time period, particularly with deism that you're

24:24going to have people say, Oh, this is all reconcilable with what we are now learning

24:27about the natural world around us. And then you have the the pushback. And then in the

24:3419th century, we have evolution, we have the origin of African peoples, we have slavery,

24:41we have all these things kind of bringing this all to a head. And we're still experiencing

24:46a lot of the fallout of this kind of stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And while it

24:55later in the 19th century, there are occasional attempts by some Bible scholars. The last

24:59hurrah within anything like within biblical studies that I could find was in the early

25:0420th century. And you could see the debate being summarized and actually being interesting

25:08and poo pooed by goodness. Why does his name escape? All of a sudden, a quest for the historical

25:14Jesus author name just escaped me. Yeah, from Freda Schweitzer, Schweitzer, Albert Schweitzer,

25:19yes. In the second edition of that, which is less read, there's an extra appendix where

25:24he talks about the summary of things that happened since then. And the thing that's

25:28actually interesting to compare is his treatment of the last few people who are trying to like

25:32find these rational explanations for the star Bethlehem and the Jesus mythicists. And he

25:36seems to give more credence that the debate that Jesus mythicists are actually having

25:39is more worthwhile. And while the star of Bethlehem, people are like, dude, it's been

25:44a hundred years, we understand how this works now. Okay, just stop that debate. So you can

25:50see that that sort of attitude and Schweitzer was no mythicists. But if you can see, like

25:53saying he'll at least give the mythicist argument at the time of day, this one is like, no,

25:58I don't even want to see it. Just stop, stop. That was this condition. Basically early 20th

26:03century, it's basically gone. And it only really, really picks up in the scientific literature

26:07because of an article written in nature in 1977. And as you can imagine, when something

26:13is written in the journal nature, that probably the most prestigious science journal, it gets

26:18a lot of attention. And that has kind of re exploded a lot of the research by more science-minded

26:24people, which also means people who are completely divorced from the conversation that happens

26:28in biblical studies, that people who don't go to seminary, who can't read the underlying

26:32language or know the underlying myths. Well, they can, they can go to social media and

26:36they can find plenty of representatives of all of those kinds of arguments. I'm surprised

26:42by how frequently 19th century, like hobbyist literature gets cited by folks when it comes

26:49to things like a star of Bethlehem, trying to naturalize miracles. You get a lot of people

26:54citing a lot of things that were published in the mid 19th century, not even aware that

26:59there might be an issue with the fact that nobody brought this argument up in the last

27:03175 years. Oh, yeah. So Aaron, if you were Ken Ham trying to do his star of David scientific

27:13apologetic attraction theme park, what would be your go to scientific explanation? What

27:21do you think is the strongest one for someone to try to use? Hmm. Okay. You probably would

27:30have the best way of doing that with some sort of conjunction planetary hypothesis,

27:37because one, we will know exactly where the planets are. And we do know that this was

27:42something that was important to many people in antiquity. The motions and positions the

27:48planets was sometimes a little too important to the Romans. Occasionally, the Roman government

27:54would ban all the astrologers to make sure that they can't be there to write bad horoscopes

27:58about the emperor. But of course, the emperor himself would keep his astrologer or astrologers.

28:03So we know there's an importance and the fact that we can very precisely calculate what's

28:07there with comets. If it's not recorded, we won't know it was there. And we probably

28:13know very little about the exact orbital parameters of the common unless we have lots and lots

28:18of records, which we probably wouldn't have anyways. And conversely, we also know that

28:21nine times out of 10 comets were interpreted very negatively the very few times that they

28:25are. Somebody has to come along and fix that supernovae the exploding stars again without

28:30an actual record. We probably can't find that though. I will note that if you have the right

28:35sources, maybe a comet could work because I in digging for any examples of people interpreting

28:40comets in antiquity or in the Middle Ages is something positive. I found an interesting

28:44one from the Byzantine emperor under the time of Alexios I, the emperor who is also the one

28:53who started the whole crusade business or helped start the crusade business. Apparently,

28:58he was having plenty of wars with the Franks, basically people from Western Europe. And there

29:03was a common in the sky and astrologer was supposed to try to figure out what this meant.

29:06Astrologer is having a hard time. He goes to bed. He's up in a locked room. And in the

29:10middle night, he wakes up and lo and behold, in his room is John the evangelist, not a vision.

29:15The John the evangelist is in the room there to help explain to him what the comet is actually

29:19supposed to mean and how it's actually bad news for the invading armies, not the Byzantine

29:23army. So if an actual disciple enters your room and it can explain things, that is probably

29:29the best way to figure out what the real star Bethlehem was.

29:32That's a useful tool. So what you're saying is if a disciple shows up in your room, don't

29:42get medical attention, just believe whatever he says.

29:46I think you should at least get out some milk and cookies. He's at least 2,000 years old

29:50at this point. Arthritis is through the roof. Get him some help.

29:54Yeah, absolutely. Well, okay, from the scientific, I know that you also looked at some potentially

30:02wackier ideas. I've heard the word aliens mentioned before. Give us some, let's get

30:10in. Let's have some fun here. Let's explain this thing.

30:14Well, here's the thing. Amongst the actual scientific hypotheses, the ones that don't

30:18require miracles, the alien one actually would fit the date of the best. Can an alien spaceship

30:23look like a star? Sure. Can it move in these sorts of motions that describe? Yeah, can

30:28it hover over a particular location? That's what they do in the movies. So at least conceptually,

30:34can it fit all the description points? Yes, it might be a little bit weird to refer to

30:38an alien spaceship as a star rather than as a boat or some other bit of verbiage. But

30:43we could just accept that little bit of saying, well, it was, you know, so shiny, it was shiny,

30:47like a star, fine. The problem, of course, then is you have to pause it, not just the

30:51mirror existence of aliens, but super advanced aliens, super willing to travel the hundreds,

30:57if not thousands of light years to go here, just to what mess with a few shepherds, a couple

31:03guys, it seems a little bit disproportionate. They've traveled all this way just to act

31:08like a little blinking GPS satellite for potentially a few people, maybe three, maybe 300. We don't

31:15know, of course. The thing is, though, I'm not making this sort of thing up. The earliest

31:19versions I've seen of the UFO hypothesis come from the 1960s. And again, it was against like

31:24this wave of seemingly growing atheism and secularism in the West, and attempts to push back against

31:30that. And so take all the miracles of the Bible. Aliens done it. Well, there, promise all, no,

31:35no miracles needed. And everything is completely scientifically kosher.

31:38And thus the history channel was born.

31:41And yes, unfortunately, the hypothesis I've seen multiple times on ancient aliens is the UFO

31:48explanation of this. I know it's been on there twice. It could have been there three times,

31:52but I have the problem that I can't keep watching ancient aliens. It's too expensive,

31:57because every time it's on, I end up throwing things at the TV and have to buy it. It's just

32:01too expensive to keep watching for me. So there are all kinds of different

32:07ideas that are out there on social media related to Christmas and things like astrology, things

32:12like aliens, the Anunnaki, things like that. Let's get into some of the more interesting ones,

32:19because I know you've got another book out that is discussing some theories of aliens and UFOs

32:26in religion. But let's talk about some of those ideas that intersect with Christmas. What do you

32:32think is one of the cooler ones that you've come across? Oh, specifically with aliens or just pseudo

32:40scholarship in general in Christmas, pseudo scholarship in general in Christmas, but bonus points for

32:45her have an aliens. I know one of the things you've gone at a couple of times in your TikTok channel

32:52is the various claims that come, especially from Zeitgeist about, oh, the star in the east was

32:58actually Spica in the constellation Virgo, which is the Virgin. And so this is also about the Virgin

33:03birth and Virgo is carrying grain, which means bread, and it's the house of bread. That's Beth

33:10Lamont. And the three stars of Ryan's belt pointing to that on Christmas Day, the three stars being

33:15the three kings. And just about everything is wrong, including the science of it, actually.

33:21You ruined it. I was getting into it. This is going great. You guys were making fun, but I was

33:28there. Yeah. In my early YouTube career, I tried doing a video debunking of this where I

33:33took like one of the images from Zeitgeist and showed, well, they're claiming on December 25th,

33:37there's three stars of Orion point to the rising sun. Yes, the rising sun. Yeah. And the problem is

33:45the direction that they point where the sun will rise never happens. You can check that like,

33:50that's not even where the path of the sun would even go. So when will this happen somewhere between

33:55never and ever, ever? Yeah. So it's like, wow, the basic astronomy is wrong. And of course,

34:00I'm not the first person to notice this. I literally found in the comments section of a late 19th

34:05century engineering journal, this like back and forth between people arguing about this,

34:09one of them was an actual like amateur astronomer Edwin Monder, who's actually famous for this book

34:14called the Bible and astronomy from like the early 20th century. And also, if you ever heard of the

34:18Monder minimum related to sunspot activity in the sun, as named after him and his wife doing

34:23sunspot research. But literally, I see in this comment section, like in this back and forth,

34:27like editor notes to the editor section of this engineering journal from the late 19th century,

34:32basically someone coming in making the zeitgeist like claim about that pointing and Monder coming

34:37and saying, Hey, astronomer here, that doesn't happen. And the person comes back, what do you

34:41know about? And I'm like, God damn it, I just found 19th century Reddit. But this show is just

34:48how debunked this is. It's like, no, astronomers have known this was wrong before my grandparents

34:53were born. So by goodness, this should have not been seen the light of day in modern YouTube days.

34:59One of the ones that I've that I've seen a lot, particularly this year, and a little bit last

35:03year, but I see it even more this year is this idea that, well, December 25th is not the actual

35:09winter solstice. But the claim is that the sun is in the grave for three days. And then the 25th

35:16is the day when it rises from the grave. And then it rises on the southern cross. So Jesus

35:23is dying on the cross. And maybe you know this better than I do. But from what I can tell, the

35:30southern cross because of the procession of the equinoxes was not even visible to anybody in this

35:37part of the world anywhere near any potential birth of Jesus. But additionally, the sun is

35:44constantly moving. It is not holding still for three days between the winter solstice and the

35:5225th. These are these are things that are being read into are being made up and asserted for this

35:58period similar to the Zeitgeist stuff. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So just so also for the whole audience

36:05to know when we're talking about procession of the equinoxes, this is an effect that not only is the

36:09earth rotating on its axis, but the axis itself has its own rotations. And this is the processional

36:16period, which is on the order of tens of thousands of years. We have actual ancient knowledge of this.

36:21This was first discovered by Hipparchus in the second century BC. And his estimate with this was

36:27about one degree per century. So this cycle would be about 36,000 years. Modern estimates put it

36:32closer to 27,000, which still I have to say, an effect that takes tens of thousands of years to

36:37complete being noticed and being within any appreciable accuracy is still wow. But to also do those

36:45measurements, they also knew about like say the limitations of their equipment. And from what I

36:49could tell, like Hipparchus was like, well, I'm going to measure like the length of the year from

36:52not from like solstice to solstice, because it's kind of hard to tell when is the sun at its lowest.

36:58And even when the sun is at its lowest, it's not just hanging there in the sky. It's still moving

37:02from east to west all the time. It never stops, especially not in like the stops like it did for

37:07Joshua stops sort of story. It's it stops in one direction while still moving the other way. It's

37:12like, okay, yeah, it stopped turning its wheel. But can you really notice that in such a time frame,

37:16now without much more sophisticated tools that the ancients even said, hey, we can't measure this

37:21accurately enough. So we're going to use not the solstice, but the equinoxes to measure the length

37:27of the solar year. And it was very careful measurements of that that allowed Hipparchus to do his

37:32observational work and realize, hey, there seems to be an additional motion that so there's a

37:37difference between a solar day and a sidereal day that differs a tiny amount. And there's

37:43difference also then because the the procession of the earth. So amazing work that these guys did.

37:48And none of that is known or understood by so much of the other stuff is out there. Or other

37:54claims about procession the equinoxes. So what is it? Hamlet's mill projecting the idea that

37:59procession the equinoxes was known by all ancient peoples for thousands and thousands of years.

38:04Even though again, this is something that you can't see with the naked eye, it took extremely

38:09precise measurements separated out by a couple of centuries to get just close enough to say within

38:15like 50% accuracy of what the actual measurement is. It's like, no, you can't just look and say,

38:20Oh, look, the there's procession going on. You can't see that. Will you explain what procession is?

38:25I don't know what that is. It's it's literally if you have like a spinning top spinning on its

38:29axis, but also it's doing that wobble. Okay, that wobble is the procession. I see. And also,

38:36if you want to impress people, there's also a bit of up and down of the axis itself. That's

38:40called notation and a top will go through all three things. And if you take all three forms of

38:45rotation, then you've completely described the rotational motion of any given three-dimensional

38:49body. But the effect is that the constellations that might be just above the horizon. They go down

38:56and up. And so the Southern Cross was actually below the horizon and invisible to people in that

39:02part of the world for several centuries. In fact, I think it doesn't pop up again until like 14,

39:081500 CE. Not to mention the fact that if we're talking about Jesus dying and like three days,

39:17resurrection, the cross, that would make it Easter, not Christmas. That would not be about the birth.

39:25That's about the death of a guy. Right. So maybe we should be talking about Easter is the is the 20,

39:3125th of December. Well, the idea, the argument is that this is the inspiration for the story.

39:37This is the mythicist account that they made up the story of Jesus based on this. And so the idea,

39:43so the reading is back into ancient history saying they thought the sun died for three days and

39:48then rose on a cross. And so obviously Jesus was just taken from that ancient tradition.

39:55Although again, the data don't remotely support the notion that that any such idea existed

40:00anciently. Yeah. Yeah. Because you can science as the great poet said science.

40:07Oh, so do you have any, do you have any any fun alien ones that are associated with Christmas

40:19or most of the alien ones? Oh, another time of year when it's a little more seasonable for them to

40:25be out and about. Well, it's sure, sure seems like it's the most connected to Christmas to help

40:31explain the light in the sky, the original UFO story. So I mean, it has that somewhat obvious

40:37connection. But like I say, when if you're trying to explain all the miracle stories with aliens,

40:43then yeah, they have to show up. And so they must be hovering over Jesus. So again, how is he walking

40:48on water? It was because of the teleportation beam or tractor beams that the aliens mothership

40:55would use. And of course, in a sense, you have actually seen the alien version of the resurrection

41:02of Jesus. If you have seen the original the day the Earth stood still because Clothoo

41:07is basically coming from the heavens, giving a message of needed peace and otherwise destruction

41:12if, you know, people don't get with things. He is killed, brought back to life, and then sends to

41:18heaven again after giving a final message of an apocalyptic end. So it was basically as close to

41:24the Jesus story as 1950s, America would allow in cinema. Wow. If you're looking for aliens in Jesus,

41:32there you go. It occurs to me that there is a sort of progression here that the

41:41bringing in of aliens as a, as a sort of, as a replacement for divine, for want of a better word,

41:52magic, is just a progression along the same line. It still doesn't, you know, it has some

42:00explanatory power in terms of figuring out how something might have actually happened.

42:07And yet, is there any evidence behind any of it? Or is it just

42:12speculative in the way that we would the ancient peoples would talk about miracles?

42:19It's ultimately, yeah, just like a lot of like armchair speculation, but in a way that makes it so

42:28all of a sudden the story goes from unbelievable to believable again. And that's really a lot of

42:32the purpose there. It's kind of the same way of how people will reinterpret predictions of the

42:38end of the world or the second coming of Jesus and that. And of course, it doesn't happen as

42:41expected. And so something has to come along to reinterpret it. So that way, it could still have

42:45that sort of theological or political force, same sort of thing. And sometimes even explicit,

42:50like saying by explaining this story in terms of the natural instead of the supernatural,

42:55then we make it so the entire story is believable again. And oh, it's you crazy atheists that are

43:01trying to take this all hyper literally and make it look ridiculous. I actually remember reading

43:06that in the apologist, easy Minksen, early 20th century apologist out of Princeton. He writes this

43:14giant book about the virgin birth and say how it's totally real. And then he's trying to, of course,

43:19look at anything else in the Bethlehem or the birth story to try to make sure his bases are

43:24covered. And he's like, well, if you interpret the Bethlehem star story as this hyper literal thing,

43:28you're just trying to make it look dumb on purpose, even though he also goes on and says it's totally

43:32believable as a miracle as well. So he's not even totally consistent. But just enough to say is like,

43:37hey, stop making fun of this. It's totally real. It's also exactly as the fundamentalist think it is.

43:42Yeah, this is part of the pattern of kind of the apologetic approach, which is primarily

43:49designed to perform for the folks who want to believe you are coming up with new ways to try to

43:58make it meaningful and useful and and ginning up things that are not necessarily probable,

44:05not necessarily even plausible, but just something that you can claim is not impossible. Well,

44:10if you imagine this scenario over here and then this scenario over here, and then if this also

44:14happened right at the same time period, but right after this, and you're making up all of these

44:18scenarios, but because none of them are literally impossible, you've ginned up a tiny little sliver

44:24of not impossible. And that's enough room for the folks who really want to believe to operate,

44:29to feel comfortable in this all working out. But it sounds like once the 60s come around and you've

44:36got this UFO fever that suddenly this becomes the new, the new hip explanation. And now we've got the

44:42Anunnaki that a lot of people for some reason are are appealing to because it serves their own

44:51ideas about, you know, DNA manipulation and alien life forms and yeah, and all of that is what's

44:59what is the Anunnaki? I don't know what that is. Dan, I think you'll be able to say better than I.

45:03So Anunnaki is this idea that Anunnaki is a word originally it comes from Sumerian, Anunnaki,

45:11it gets translated into Akkadian as Anunnaki and it's just a generic class of deity. There are the

45:19Igigi and the Anunnaki and some of the later literature or two different classes of deity.

45:24But there are a lot of folks out there who want to treat the Sumerian literature as kind of the

45:30original Bible and the biblical text as kind of a later kind of not perversion but extension of

45:37what's going on. And so it treats it all as one story. And so tries to interpret everything that's

45:42going on in the Bible through the lens of the Sumerian ideas. And this is really Zechariah's

45:48Sitchin in the 1970s wrote this book called the 12th Planet arguing that based on the Sumerian

45:54idea, there's a Sumerian creation account where there are a few different creation accounts but

45:59where the gods are creating humans initially as slaves and then they get sick of them,

46:03they're keeping them up at night. So they try to kill them all but one of the gods saved some of them.

46:08But Zechariah's Sitchin was like the Anunnaki are aliens, they came to earth seeking resources,

46:15they needed gold because gold is things they get to hang in the atmosphere to try to reflect a lot

46:22of the harmful rays from the sun. And so they were basically exploiting the resources on earth and

46:29enslaving or they used DNA manipulation to create humans and blah, blah, blah. And so then they

46:36bring in the story from Genesis six of the Benelahine, the children of God having relations with the

46:42daughters of humanity to create this, you know, kind of this abominable race of giants and Nephilim

46:49and all this kind of stuff. And talk to me into it. You can tell I believe you, I believe you. It's

46:55tough. It's the newsletter. The newsletter is on the way. But but yeah, this you see this stuff

47:01all over social media and they bring in Christmas, they bring in the resurrection, they bring in

47:09both Atlantis has a role in in the way some people are reconstructing all of this. But it's a

47:17way you got to get Lemuria. I'm I'm almost positive I have seen that come up in one of these in one

47:25of these arguments. But but yeah, what what this is I think is an attempt to say we have it's like

47:31secret knowledge stuff. There's this big conspiracy, everything's a cover up, but we've cracked the

47:36code. We've unlocked this. And now you and I share this secret knowledge and we're smarter than

47:42everybody else and everybody else is clueless and just wandering around there. They're in the matrix.

47:46So you better be careful because the next thing you know, we're errands going to tell us that the

47:52earth is actually a sphere and well, and all belong. I will tell you that because of the spin.

47:59I will tell you that at least Lemuria was originally an actual scientific hypothesis. There was an

48:06absolute hypothetical continent to explain how basically old world monkeys and new world monkeys

48:12were able to like get across the world by this path. And how did the lemurs get there through

48:16Lemuria. So and then that continent sank. This was before plate tectonics. And so it's yeah,

48:22pre modern in that sense. But at least it had a scientific pension for at least five minutes.

48:27And I am I'm 100% positive somebody brought up Lemuria. No, no, Lemuria was with their idea

48:35of that shoot. The earliest maps of the earth included this land that that it went all the way

48:47down. Oh, oh, they're looking at the pyrese map and they look how big Antarctica was and

48:52connected to South America. But then that but you go up to the North Pole and you get the four.

48:58There was also this idea. There was some big rock up at the North Pole. And one of the maps shows

49:03it divided into four and they were like those are the four rivers from the Garden of Eden and

49:07the original Garden of Eden was at the North Pole. And this big conspiracy in the earth.

49:11Adam and Santa Claus. I figured it out. Well, there was a there was a and and this this overlaps

49:17with Latter-day Saints stuff. There was an idea that the Lost Ten Tribes it says they went to the

49:23North. And and one idea was that yeah, one idea was that there was that the North Pole was actually

49:31inhabited by the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel and early Mormons actually suggested that there was

49:39a big wall that hid this lush green fertile land at the North Pole where the 10 Lost Ten Tribes

49:49of Israel were comfortably living out there. Now we're getting into some Game of Thrones stuff.

49:54Anyway, Aaron, let's get back to Aaron. We have a guest here. I don't know. Do you have some

50:02favorite pet stories that somebody's come up with some some favorite ideas that they've used to

50:09explain things that just knocked your socks off or that were particularly goofy or fun.

50:16Ooh, ooh. So I do remember some it was a YouTube channel. I don't know how active it is now called

50:24Spirit Science and also connecting Atlantis and Martians and and I think the Jews were originally

50:31from space as well and they all lived on earth in Atlantis before that things crashed and we went

50:36from like 12 dimensional beings to lower dimensional three dimensional beings and we're trying to

50:40get enlightened back up to those higher levels and then deflect comets with our minds and things

50:44like that. It's like pretty much like the smorgasborg of everything in the new age and then with a

50:49little more acid that I think is descriptive there. But maybe perhaps it's better to point to the

50:58things that blow my socks off and are real and stuff that we can actually see scientifically that,

51:03hey, not only are we able to predict where the planets are going to be in thousands of years,

51:08but we can project back what the universe looked like 13 billion years ago because we can look at

51:14the afterglow of that early hot and expansion point and use our telescopes to actually learn

51:21about the earliest formations and distributions and from that from looking at that picture of the

51:27earliest light that we can detect, we can actually figure out what is the ultimate structure of the

51:33universe. What is it primarily made of? And it's origins, not just as origins, I should say, it's

51:38projected future into the billions and trillions of years. The power that we actually have from

51:43the sciences, that is what will blow my socks off on any given day. I love that. I love, well, okay,

51:49so you know, one thing that I realized we haven't done and I don't want to end on a downer, but I

51:54do want to go through what we've done is you've given us a whole bunch of potential theories,

52:01comets, you know, you know, conjunctions, all of these things. What we and what we did was we

52:07assumed that those don't work, but we didn't talk about why. So, so let's, as quickly as we can,

52:14let's just dispel some of these. Why couldn't it be common? Why couldn't it be a comment?

52:18Okay. So main reasons are almost always comments are seen as evil signs. No one ever looked at a

52:24comment and said, Oh yeah, totally means King of the Jews is going to be born.

52:28Secondly, comets don't pinpoint particular locations on Earth. If you try to navigate by

52:33comet, you will be lost for a long time. If we go by supernovae, you've got pretty much the same

52:40problems. One is that it's hard to know if an inches would have actually even distinguished

52:45between the two necessarily. Sometimes the records go back and forth in description of what's a

52:49comet or a nova, excluding a star again. Sure. If you go by any of the conjunction hypotheses,

52:54you actually have a multiplicity of problems. One is no, it can't point out a particular place,

52:58it can't lead you anywhere, it can't go in a direction. And also, how do you interpret those

53:03various motions of the planets? Depends on which astrology you ask at what time of day

53:07and what part of the horoscope they're in. Quite literally, we actually have like predictions

53:11from an astrologer and you can see that they are reading it and saying everything and it's

53:15opposite in the same horoscope and same person, same horoscope. You see the same horoscope being

53:20interpreted like a few years apart and realize, Oh, they forgot to incorporate Venus into their

53:24interpretations. And that's why the king got killed. You find out basically, what does a horoscope

53:28mean? Whatever you wanted to mean, we've actually been tested this with modern astrologers. So,

53:35now it probably won't be a big surprise, but astrology is not actual science.

53:38What's when it is tested in astrologer can't predict things with a horoscope any better than

53:47chance. But what was even more surprising was that if you give a group of astrologers a list of

53:53personalities and a bunch of horoscope charts and they say match them together, not only do they

53:57not match them correctly any better than chance, but their agreement between each other is barely

54:02any better than chance. So in other words, what does it actually mean? Literally anything you want

54:07because even the astrologers can't agree on how to correctly interpret. So are we going to say,

54:12this is how they definitely would have interpreted this conjunction of planets? Unfortunately, no,

54:16I looked through the manuals and people say, well, here's how they would have interpreted this

54:20sign. I can find the exact same horoscope and it says the exact opposite if I flip through the exact

54:24same astrology manuals you use. Oh, and let's also throw out another interesting problem. The

54:30major, the wise bend, this term kind of gets confused in antiquity where the original word

54:37magoi is coming from a cast of priests in modern day Iran, ancient Persia. It becomes a bit broader

54:44to basically mean any sort of magician or charlatan in the West. But since Matthew is specifying,

54:49these are wise men magi from the east, he seems to be saying, okay, these are Persian magi. This

54:54has a few problems. One, why would Zoroastrian priests care about a Jewish king? They got their

55:00own king that they worry about. They have their own future savior. They literally believe their

55:04savior is going to be born coming out of a lake. His sperm is in a lake right now in Iran. They're

55:11not going to go to Jerusalem to find a Jewish Messiah. And also what we can tell the Persian

55:18priests at this time were, if anything, anti astrology. They thought that the planets were actually

55:23decrepit versions of stars that they had all been affected by the Zoroastrian equivalent of Satan

55:30Arahaman. So if they saw a moving star, they wouldn't have said, oh, let's go follow that. They

55:34would have said, oh, no, the evil one is here. So that's a bit of a problem. And also, there

55:40wouldn't have been this really nice, you know, friendly chat between the wise men coming in

55:44and talking with Herod, because they're coming from another nation that Herod literally fought

55:50to get his king ship. And also, this is a Roman territory. So not only would these wise men be

55:55coming in and saying, who's the new king? Not only would they be usurping King Herod, they'd be usurping

56:01Caesar Augustus. And what do you think the Roman response would be? I give the equivalent in my

56:06book of saying this would be like if the Soviet Union didn't just go to Cuba, but they went to

56:11Puerto Rico to establish a new governor. And what would Washington DC's response to be nothing

56:16is like, no, no, we shouldn't expect it at least to be in the newspapers, if not a straight out war.

56:21And what do we actually see? Absolute radio silence. It's almost like the story didn't happen.

56:27Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just a few problems. Just a few, just a few minor things. So, so let's,

56:36let's get to what we started with, which is the poetry of the thing. Let's, let's get to a nicer

56:43way of looking at this. Yeah. Yeah. So we have to remember that the person who wrote this book

56:50was a writer. They were trained to read and write in Greek. They would have had an education

56:57where they probably would have had to have known major Greek works. And of course, being in the

57:02Roman Empire, they would have known, if not read, important works about Greek myths, stories,

57:07and all the more so if it's literally part of the political fabric. If you have literally a cult

57:13to Julius Caesar with its temples around the empires, like, you know, you might just actually

57:17notice the symbols that they use there. And as I mentioned earlier, in like the story of Aeneas,

57:22the found like a founding figure of Rome, he was guided by a star. There are actually many other

57:27Greek stories of people led by stars. It's a very common thing for sailors to say that they were

57:32specifically guided by Castor and Pollux, the divine twins and sons of Zeus, that they would

57:38come and help guide sailors in stormy weather. So guiding stars like that, a fairly common trope

57:43in Greek and Roman literature, it has a particular penchant in Roman stories because of Aeneas and

57:49because of Julius Caesar, but also in the context of Judaism, the fact that Matthew very much wants

57:56to let you know he's got everything coming from the Hebrew Bible. There is this very famous prophecy

58:02in Numbers 24, Numbers 24 17, it's usually called the star prophecy. Originally, it looks like it

58:09was trying to point to King David, but it was commonly then interpreted as a general prediction

58:15of the coming of the Messiah. This thing says, I see him now, but coming a star will rise out of

58:20Jacob and a scepter out of Israel. And this was commonly used for predicting some sort of heavenly

58:28conqueror coming from God Almighty. You see it in the Dead Sea Scrolls. You see it, of course,

58:33being cited by the Christians when going back to the story, the very famous rebel leader of the

58:39last major Jewish revolt, Simon Bach Hawkeba, his name literally meaning like son of the star,

58:44basically like trying to like scream, I am the prophesied one. And this, apparently this

58:49propaganda work, we even have found like inscriptions of like his name, like in a star,

58:53like inside caves and that. So it's like, clearly, this was part of the propaganda. We see it in

58:57his coinage. Everyone was using this prophecy to talk about the Messiah. So it kind of makes

59:02sense that someone would use the rising of a star to talk about the coming of the Messiah.

59:07I think an additional thing to note, if I may, what I've always found interesting, particularly

59:13about the involvement of the Magi is the idea that the author does not have a ton of information

59:19about what's going on in the world of Iran in this time period. But the idea that the birth of

59:25Jesus would be so thoroughly inscribed upon the natural world that even someone from another

59:31nation would be able to recognize what's going on here. I think is a very poetic part in my mind

59:37that the author is saying, this is so interwoven into the fabric of the universe that even they

59:45can recognize it. And even our king who's supposed to be Jewish was like, Oh, what are you talking about?

59:50I don't know what you're talking about. So it's kind of working well to the,

59:54it attached so well to the poetry, because in many ways, the beginning and end of the story are

59:59trying to mirror each other. People have pointed out, Hey, at the beginning of the story, you have

60:04this rising star at the end of Jesus's life. You have the star or the sun going dark. You have,

60:09at the very end of the story, the great commission also to go up to the Gentiles who were the first

60:13people to come and worship Jesus literal Gentiles. And of course, at very early on, you have established

60:19who are the enemies of Jesus in the story. It's the Jewish authorities, Herod and the scribes and

60:24Pharisees and who becomes the enemies later on. Oh, the scribes and Pharisees later on as well.

60:29So it seems like Matthew is very consciously trying to connect the beginning and the end

60:34in ways that can only be done by being a creative and good writer. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well,

60:41Aaron Adair, thank you so much for joining us. If people want to find your book,

60:44where can they go to to check you out? Amazon is probably the best way to get the book itself

60:50to find me more generally. I'm on the social medias. I have a website, Dr. Aaron Adair.com

60:55that will be a bit of a link farm for things. I have a YouTube channel, but it's mostly covered

61:00in cobwebs. So it's probably not an active place to go. In fact, the last video I did on there was

61:05to also steal Dan's style of tiktokking. So it's not even original in many ways. So stick with Dan's

61:11work there. No, people can go and still see your videos. I'm sure they'll be interested.

61:17And you, the star of Bethlehem, a skeptical view that was published about 10 years ago, right?

61:22Yeah, yeah, 2013. So, and I think it came out in August. So trying to think, would that make

61:29it a Gemini? And what's that is a Leo book, my friend, that is a Leo book. And what you

61:37depends on which astrological system, but that's another story. And what is your new one?

61:41The new one is called aliens and religion were two worlds collide. I will also not only boast that

61:48this is an interesting combination of science religion, but as far as I know, it is the only

61:52theology book that solves differential equations to come to conclusions. All right. I'll get you

61:57that one. Yeah. All right. So get out there and read Aaron's book, everybody. Thank you so much

62:04for joining us, Aaron. Friends at home, if you would like to become a part of making this show go,

62:11get early access to an ad free version of every show, and maybe even hear someone like Aaron come

62:16on and talk more alien stuff with our patrons only content, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma.

62:25If you want to write anything to us, please feel free to do so. The address is contact

62:31at dataoverdogmapod.com. And we will see you again next week. Bye everybody.

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