Study Proposes an Explanation for Star of Bethlehem

I read somewhere that it was possibly the planet Jupiter exhibiting retrograde motion while in the constellation Leo, perhaps occulting Regulus twice - the heart of the king.

The book of Matthew is actually an older book, written around 100 years after Jesus' death, and Luke was written shortly after Jesus' death, within 30 years later. Basically, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are presented in the Bible in reverse chronological order to when they were written. Matthew being furthest away from Jesus' death and John being fairly close to after Jesus' death. Also, aside from the glitch at 1:51, there's another glitch at about 14:22, where audio drops out for a few seconds.

Something odd is happening to this video at 1:51. It keeps rebooting my TV at that point. I've played it several times and it keeps happening at the same time each time.

Star of Bethlehem was a high velocity star. it shot past us and looked like it was standing still. but we were the ones standing still and as it sped on down the road We watched it fade, That star looked over its sunglasses into his rearview mirror and said take care of my boy!

Recalled reading "The Star" by Arthur C Clarke, '55, Hugo Award '56 Jesuit priest onboard a scientific space craft, explores the tension (or rift) between science and faith. They discover the remains of an ancient super nova. A still in existence planet that was burned away (implausible). The society left behind an archive showing they were a society much like humanity's and discovered their star was going to nuke them. Priest agonizes as he calculates their super nova was the Star of Bethlehem. Amazing stories from the past, not all of which had a firm grasp of how these events actually take place. Interesting, but much like Asimov's Foundation the literary license requires having bad science Thanks for this one, Anton - and for all the others, past and future

There's a little glitch in the video at about 1:50. There's a video titled "Was Jesus BORN on September 11th? with Michael Heiser..." on Youtube which provides some suggestions of what astronomical events the Magi would be interested in. This video doesn't attempt explain the star being motionless over Bethlehem (chapter 2, verses 9 & 10), but it explains why the Magi would have travelled to Jerusalem in the first place (verses 1-6). Note that they initially went to *Jerusalem*, and it was the chief priests at Jerusalem who *told* the Magi that the messiah should be born in Bethlehem. They were already heading towards Bethlehem by verses 9&10. This is a long-ish video, and the first 38 minutes is where Michael Heiser covers several topics, some of which are totally religious, and some that might seem unrelated to Christmas. But Michael does also cover a lot of the actual astronomy of that period, and what the significance of various events in the sky would be for the Magi.