Follow That Star!

So what you’re saying is, if a disciple shows up in your room, don’t get medical attention, just believe whatever he says.

I think you should at least get out some milk and cookies. He’s at least 2000 years old at this point. Arthritis is through the roof. Get him some help.

Yeah.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

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

Let’s not get too, too in the weeds of that, that trouble.

Listen, listen, it’s, it’s. It tis the season, man. And, and that’s, that’s the theme of the show today is, is sort of the Christmas season and. All right, so I, I figure that’s what we need to be talking about.

That sounds reasonable, which is unusual for us, but we have a. We have a guest with us today. I want to go ahead and introduce a good friend of mine, Aaron Adair. He is a research affiliate in physics education at MIT and also makes some filthy lucre on the side working for a defense contractor. Welcome to the show, Aaron.

Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me, Dan.

And Dan, well, thank you for being here. Welcome to the show. We appreciate your time. Aaron is the author of a book entitled The Star of Bethlehem. A Skeptical. Oh, shoot, I don’t have a copy in front of me. A skeptical approach.

Skeptical view.

A skeptical view. Now, Aaron, as a PhD in, in physics, is approaching the Star of Bethlehem from the perspective of a critical physicist trying to better understand what’s going on with this tradition.

Well, I mean, that’s awesome, because as anyone who is like me, who, like me as a child, thought, hey, you know, went out and looked up at the sky and thought, wait, how do you follow one of these to a house? I don’t know how to do that. I’m, I, I’m very glad to have a, a physicist on to help answer our questions.

Yeah, it does. It doesn’t seem like it’s a very complicated thing. It seems like it just doesn’t work. But we have someone with a PhD here who can help us figure this out. We’re going to be talking about ideas associated with Christmas, associated with astrology, associated with UFOs and aliens and all these things that pop up around Christmas time. But I wanted to start with the book. Aaron, could you give us a little breakdown of what you’re trying to do with the book.

Yeah, just to give it a bit of intro with my history with it, that I first discovered this when I started college and I was able to get a job at the university planetarium as a show presenter. And Christmas showtime comes around and I learn of basically a tradition that’s been going on in American planetaria since literally the early 1930s. And I’m sitting in there, you know, watching the show because eventually I’m going to have to also present the show later.

But this is how a Psych episode starts, doesn’t it?

Perhaps. So, yeah, I’m sorry, continue. But yeah, I’m watching the show and I am blown away with the way of how the story of the Star of Bethlehem coming from the Gospel of Matthew is being explained in completely scientific terms. At this time, I. I was calling myself a Catholic deist. That was my religious categorization. So I’m like, hey, using the laws of nature to get this exact result. That is exactly what the Master of the Universe would do. He has the power. Sorry, different reference there.

That’s a different power. That’s the power of the babe. I think you’re referring to… or… Grayskull. One of the two.

Yeah, I was going to say.

I was going Grayskull in this case.

Grayskull. Okay.

Yeah, so I see this. I’m floored that this awesome presentation works. And I remember going home, either that holiday or a later holiday, and seeing, oh, on TV, they also have a TV special about it, and they were giving a hypothesis and it wasn’t the one from our show. And I’m like, huh? And then I also found out, hey, the one in our show requires basically redating the reign of important kings and things like that. I realized, okay, there’s a mess here. Let me start looking this up. And I realized, oh, crud. There’s about as many hypotheses as there are people making up hypotheses. And like, okay, let’s try to get to what’s actually going on here. Maybe there are these people who study this Bible thing, have a thing or two to say about this. And lo and behold, I learned all this history of interpretation, how it’s also extremely recent and that ultimately, if you take the text for what it says, it doesn’t work. If you don’t take the text for what it says, you still have a whole lot of conundrums both in terms of interpretation and just general historicity of the tale.

And I think this is fascinating background because as with so many people I know who right now take a rather skeptical approach toward religion and claims in the Bible, your understanding that you have today is not rooted in a desire to tear anything down, is not rooted in a desire to destroy, but is rooted in honest, sincere confusion and curiosity about what’s going on here and seeking answers. And it sounds like initially in a bit of a context of faith, but ultimately deciding I cannot be intellectually honest about this and make it work, which is how this works for so many folks.

Oh, spoiler alert, Dan.

Well, I thought we knew. We already knew this about you, Dan. Well, yeah, yeah, sure. But I just want to make note that for a lot of people out there who think folks who write a book and take a skeptical view, that this is not because they set out to tear something down, but because they set out to honestly understand.

Yeah. And it is worth noting that as much as, of course, I’m going to, you know, ultimately go against the actuality of the story, let alone of being scientifically verified, I would still say, hey, once you understand how the story was put together, you can actually see the beauty and the poetry behind it, and that’s a whole lot better to me. It’d be like I could just imagine somebody going in and saying, well, I’m going to debunk Lord of the Rings. It’s like you’re kind of missing the point. Only insofar as there are Lord of the Ringers out there who are looking for Middle Earth, do you need to debunk them? And then the rest of the time, it’s like saying, well, look at how the imagery is based on the life and times and mythologies that Tolkien knew. To me, that is the more appropriate approach. And the whole either literalist or scientific rationalist approach misses the point. And unfortunately, when I say missing the point, this was a point made almost 200 years ago by David Friedrich Strauss. I am in some ways only repeating what one guy said in German 200 years ago.

Well, let’s start with, before we get to the sort of the poetry of the thing, let’s start with some of those ideas that you encountered for how to explain this. And, and maybe, you know, there may be some people who don’t even know what story we’re talking about. So we’re on three Wise Men, not three. I caught myself the first time I realized that it doesn’t say three. It blew my. My mind. But, yeah, we’re on Wise Men from the East. The Magi. Yes. Coming in to see Jesus and there’s this thing of a star. Talk about that, talk about what’s problematic about it. And, and, and let’s get to some of these, these theories about how it could work.

Yeah, yeah. So the story of the wise guys, as we get from the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew story, is basically, first, give us some setting that this is during the time of King Herod the Great, or if you were one of his subjects, may not feel he’s so great because he was pretty notoriously, let’s put it very, very kindly, a mean dude, especially if you were in his family. Holy crud. But the wise men are coming in saying, hey, where is the newborn king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star. Translations will differ at this point, but more commonly say at its rising, the traditional one is in the East. So we’ve seen the star, we saw it rise. Where do stars rise normally? In the East. That’s why there’s that confusion. And so they say, and now we’re here to worship him. Herod, of course, is like, wait, you’re coming for the newborn king of the Jews? I’m the king of the Jews. Oh, this is a problem. So you can just imagine, it’s like, all right, let’s bring them in. Let’s, you know, at least, you know, ask some questions, find out what’s going on there. And Herod gets some information from them, then gets some information from the Jewish scribes in Jerusalem to find out what is supposed to be going on.

And basically tells the wise men to, okay, go search out diligently for him and when you find him, report back to me. So I too may come and worship him. And every time I think of him saying that, I imagine him twirling his mustache in the most early 20th century cinema mustache possible.

One does question the wisdom of these wise men to go to this guy and say this to him specifically. Yeah, but that’s okay. That’s not the point of what we’re talking about.

Yeah. And then the wise men go out and lo, again, they see the star that they had seen earlier. And this says the star went before them until it arrived and came over the place where the young child was. The wise men are filled with great joy, enter the house that they are in, and of course, note that it’s a house rather than, say, a cave or anything in the other later traditions, enter the house, give gifts, and then they’re told in a dream, hey, get out of here. And then, of course, later, Mary and Joseph are get told in another dream, hey, get out of here. And then eventually Herod finds out he’s been bamboozled. Goes, sends an army to slaughter all the babies, at least male babies in Bethlehem, all two years and younger. But of course our hero escapes, Herod eventually dies, the Holy Family comes back at some unknown date. And then after that we hop into as, what was it Paul Harvey said, the rest of the story.

Yeah, exactly. So, but for our purposes, the most interesting part of that story seems to be a star that goes ahead of guys and guides them to a specific. Not like we’re talking GPS coordinates here, we’re talking like straight to a house. That is not like any star I’ve ever met.

And you would be correct if you were reading it in that very direct way. Most astronomers are trying to read it in a multiplicity of different possible ways. One might be that when the wise men were leaving Jerusalem, going towards Bethlehem, and Bethlehem is pretty much south of Jerusalem, they’re looking and they’re seeing the star in the direction they are going. And when they are saying it was over the house, it was either it was over the house when they were looking or when they got to there, it was basically at zenith, the highest point in the sky. That is how they might try to interpret that bit of text. Though it does lead to an interesting logistics question. When the wise men arrive to Bethlehem, how do they know which house to go to? Do they literally knock on the door each one and say, got any virgin births in there?

Right.

It’s a little bit hard to know. Like at the very least there is nothing in there demonstrating any sort of searching and finding besides the star hanging over the right place. And if you want to see what sorts of problems that can produce. The excellent documentary The Life of Brian starts off showing what happens when the wise men show up at the wrong manger. And the mother there is just very happy to accept the gifts on the part of the baby. Right.

Yeah. First of all, I do want to ask, so you mentioned the, you know, the star being at zenith right over Bethlehem, would it not seem pretty much zenith also at Jerusalem? Like, like how, how, how close to a thing can you be? And a star no longer be at a zenith over something.

It all depends on how accurate your measuring equipment is. And at the time this was going on, they definitely weren’t traveling around with a radio telescope array to get like milliarcsecond measurements of things in the sky.

How dare you? How do you know? It doesn’t mention.

Actually, what we know about astronomy and astrology. For these guys is going to be another problem, but I’ll save that for a little bit later. But nonetheless, most likely all they would have is their eyes for doing any sort of measurement. And yeah, the difference in how high up a star is in Jerusalem versus Bethlehem is pretty minuscule. There’s also the issue, the fact I mentioned that they’re going south. And the problem is for the star to be going before them, to be going in that direction, that would mean the star is traveling southward. But the rotation of the night sky has everything going from east to west. So quite literally, the star would have to be moving perpendicular to the normal motion of all the stars and planets. The only way that could even be possible is for something to like move backwards at the same rate as the sky. And nothing in the nighttime sky does that. Unless again, there were some sort of really weird GPS satellite that somehow time traveled to 4 BCE to do this special little thing. Of course, now I’m getting into the aliens, aren’t I?

Yeah, yeah.

Don’t want to get out ahead of our skis quite yet. There’s. I know that from the perspective of the study of early Judaism, a lot of my colleagues would say they probably conceptualized this star as an angel because the stars were divine beings. They were considered to be in this time period, most closely linked with angels. And so this could be. They. They speak of it as a star, but it’s really an angel flying through the sky. But I, I had a question about this idea of the star at the, at its rising. When, when I hear from people who are hip deep in astrology, they’ll talk about the rising of the stars. All I can think of is Pisces Virgo. Rising is a very good sign, strong and kind. And the little boy is mine. That’s all I know about rising stars. But, but does— Do you think the rising here has to do with constellations and the different signs, or do you think that’s reading something into it?

I think it’s reading in. But I do want to, of course, give the fuller story here because this phrase has been probably the most contentious part of translation, of interpretation. Like if I look at KJV vs NIV vs other ones, this is probably the point you’ll see the greatest diversity and discussion. So the Greek there itself, there’s ambiguity because the underlying word anatole can mean either east or rising. It comes from the verb anatello. But where do things rise? Well, they rise in the east. So that’s why there’s that kind of complexity there. And depending on who’s interpreting this phrase, they might be thinking the wise men who were from the east were in the east when they saw the star. That’s one way some people have tried to interpret. But like I say, the much more common version now is to interpret this as the actual rising. And yeah, as you mentioned, rising of stars is often an important part of any sort of given horoscope. In a horoscope, literally the rising point is one of the cardinal points in a given horoscope. So if you go have someone write up a horoscope for you, first off, why are you wasting your money? But secondly, one of the things they’re going to care about is your exact date and location of birth.

So they can put four different coordinate points on your zodiac and then figure out what was rising, setting, what was at the high point of the sky, etc. And some have also argued that the phrase being used by Matthew is even a more specific term for something called a heliacal rising. And this would be specifically something rising just before sunrise. So the very first rising of a star just barely outside the glare of the sun. And that is even more precise. And if true— And of course, if you’re getting such precise wording in there, then you might be saying, hey, is this some sort of at least artifact of an astronomical or astrological background? The problem is we know what sorts of terms are used that are more specific. We literally actually have school textbooks that explain the difference between anatole and the word that is actually the technical term for heliacal rising, epitole. So it’s like if Matthew was trying to use the scientific term, he decided not to.

Oops.

But the idea that there’s nothing else but rising is interesting to me. And one thing I’ve been exploring beyond what I’ve done earlier, because the idea of an early rising star, a star rising, especially, you know, a little bit before sunrise, that would make it a morning star. Which is, for example, one of the titles for Jesus in Revelation and 2 Peter. The Morning Star seems to have some other interesting connotations that I’ve seen in some other Jewish literature that I’ve actually written an article up on. I’m hoping it’ll finally get published in the not too distant future, but we’ll see what happens there. Key thing then is if this is also a morning star, this actually gives us another avenue of seeing what sort of imagery was the author going at. There’s in particular another magical guiding star in Roman mythology that is perhaps a precursor to the story; we find hints of it in the Roman epic the Aeneid, which is basically the story of Aeneas, one of the last survivors of Troy, who then with him and his surviving Trojans are basically divinely mandated to travel from Turkey to their new homeland in Italy and then become the Romans.

Right.

And in chapter two or scroll two of the Aeneid, you actually have this other magical star that’s supposed to guide them from Mount Ida to their new home. And the imagery, this has been adjusted to match also a different magical star, the one for the glorious ascension of Julius Caesar that he turned into a comet and flew up into heaven according to various sources, literally became part of the cult of Caesar. But we have some other comments saying the older version of this myth of Aeneas being guided by a star was specifically by Aeneas’s mama Aphrodite, or Venus, and specifically Venus in her morning rising. So the texts that actually say specifically this was Lucifer as their guide and not that Lucifer, the kinder, brighter Lucifer.

Which obviously related to Isaiah where we have the sarcastic reference to the king of Babylon as Helel ben Shachar, which is just shining one, son of the dawn, a reference to Venus later translated as Heosphoros and then Lucifer in the Latin. Oh, it’s a, it’s a big tangled mess, isn’t it?

Oh yeah.

Well, I wanna, I wanna untangle a little bit and go back to. Because, Dan, you know, you’ve given us a good, like for a believer. The, the explanation that it was just that it was an angel is a wonderful explanation for a physicist. It doesn’t do us any good at all.

Oh no.

So I want to get back to some physicist-related explanations for what, what this could mean. I want to know what the planetarium thought. I want to know, I want to know some of these, some of these physicist physics-based ideas of what this could possibly be.

Yeah, yeah. So the most common explanations you will see coming out of the more scientific literature is a combination of either a comet, a supernova, which is an exploding star, or it’s some sort of combination of the planets, especially in what something is called a conjunction. The technical definition of a conjunction is when two planets are basically on the same line of latitude on the celestial grid. But more commonly, just to say when two planets are very close together. There have been a few conjunctions of note that are pretty interesting. In fact, it was back in 2020 that people were saying, oh, this is a recreation of the Christmas star. It was an extremely close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, where they became very close, almost close enough that the two would kind of blend into each other and then it would look like one big bright star.

I remember that I went out to see that. I went up on a mountain to look at it and they were not that close. I’m just gonna say they weren’t even touching.

Wasn’t it just the light on the sewer treatment plant?

That’s right.

Maybe with a little extra glare then it became that way. Yes, there was a much, there was even a closer one back in early 1 BCE, if I remember correctly, where the two were close enough that, yeah, it would have actually been hard to distinguish the two. And they would say, oh, this extremely close conjunction, that must have been the start of this, you know, extreme brightening. And you will also now get that not just in planetaria. There was a BBC four-part miniseries of the Nativity Story from 2010, if I remember correctly. And they also use that sort of explanation. I actually even had a little bit of conversation with the director by email saying that, yeah, they like purposely try to make it sound like when the planets are moving you hear like all this like mechanical noise. Like it’s a giant mechanical clock for the mechanical universe making everything perfectly aligned just as God ordained effectively from the beginning of time.

Yeah.

Which again was young Aaron’s view of how the universe worked.

So a big old Antikythera, a big Antikythera mechanism going tick, tick, tick, tick.

Yes, yes, pretty much, yeah. I mean the view for that is if that sort of thing is true, especially the planetarium ones, is that we can know the locations of the planets with extremely high precision thousands of years ago. So if we can say, hey, here’s what the Bible’s describing, if this is what Matthew’s describing, we can use that to basically run the clock back and find out the date of either Jesus’s birth or the arrival of the wise men. Some aspect of the story that we can now like pinpoint and of course deal with some of the other problems like everyone has been noting for a long time, hey, the Matthean story and the Lucan story about when things happened aren’t really directly reconcilable. If we could have any sort of better information to get this down and if we can use the power of science, then then we are in much better shape. And a lot of this effort has been to exactly pinpoint when Jesus came into the world. And also a big chunk of it has been literally to push back against skeptics and atheists and deists—the earliest versions of Star of Bethlehem theories I could see are literal, direct responses to English deists.

Well, and then thence came an entire sort of cottage industry of trying to explain difficult biblical conundrums using the powers of science.

Very diplomatic there, Dan.

Yes. Yeah. I’ve actually also been surprised how relatively recent it is. Actually completely switched over to the scientific side. So there were some Bible scholars in the late 18th, early 19th century pushing this idea in the rationalist school of interpreting. So all the various myths of the Bible, Old and New Testament, these were all naturalistic things, misunderstood. The key example that’s often given is a guy by the name of Heinrich Paulus writing in the 1820s and he’s pretty much the epitome of this sort of thing. He’s collected like the last like 30, 40, 50 years of this sort of stuff and every single miracle story of Jesus, just slightly misunderstood story. So Jesus walking on water. It was a dark and stormy night. The disciples had completely lost their sense of direction, being tossed around and didn’t even realize that they had actually crash landed on the beach. So when Jesus was walking along the seashore, it looked like Jesus walking on water. Complete total accident that they thought that he was literally walking on water. Repeat that thought process for every single miracle story, including the resurrection.

Well, that seems like a pretty natural outgrowth of the debate that was going on between the ideas of rational religion and revealed religion in, in this time period, particularly with deism, that you’re going to have people saying, oh, this is all reconcilable with what we are now learning about the natural world around us. And then you have the pushback. And then in the 19th century we have evolution, we have the origin of African peoples, we have slavery, we have all these things kind of bringing this all to a head. And we’re still experiencing a lot of the fallout of this kind of stuff.

Oh yeah, aren’t we?

Exactly, yeah. And while later in the 19th century there are occasional attempts by some Bible scholars, the last hurrah within anything like within biblical studies that I could find was in the early 20th century. And you could see the debate being summarized and actually being interestingly pooh-poohed by. Oh goodness, why does name escape me all of a sudden? Quest for the historical Jesus author name just escaped me—Friedrich… Schweitzer.

Schweitzer.

Albert Schweitzer, Yes. In the second edition of that, which is less read, there’s an extra appendix where he talks about the summary of things that happened since then and the thing that’s actually interesting to compare is his treatment of the last few people who are trying to like, find these rational explanations for the star of Bethlehem and the Jesus mythicists. And he seems to give more credence that the debate that Jesus mythicists are actually having is more worthwhile. And while the star of Bethlehem people are like, dude, it’s been 100 years. We understand how this works now. Okay, just stop that debate. So you can see that sort of attitude. And Schweitzer was no mythicist. But if you can see, like saying he’ll at least give the mythicist argument the time of day, this one is like, no, I don’t even want to see it. Just stop, stop. That was the condition basically early 20th century. It’s basically gone. And it only really, really picks up in the scientific literature because of an article written in Nature in 1977. And as you can imagine, when something is written in the journal Nature, probably the most prestigious science journal, it gets a lot of attention and that has kind of re-

exploded a lot of the research by more science-minded people. Which also means people who are completely divorced from the conversation that happens in biblical studies. The people who don’t go to seminary, who can’t read the underlying language or know the underlying myths, well, they can.

They can go to social media and they can find plenty of representatives of all of those kinds of arguments. I’m surprised by how frequently 19th-century, like hobbyist literature gets cited by folks when it comes to things like the Star of Bethlehem trying to naturalize miracles. You get a lot of people citing a lot of things that were published in the mid-19th century, not even aware that there might be an issue with the fact that nobody brought this argument up in the last 175 years.

Oh yeah, yeah.

So, Aaron, if you were Ken Ham trying to do his Star of Bethlehem scientific apologetic attraction theme park, what would be your go-to scientific explanation? What, what do you think is the strongest one for someone to, to try to use?

Okay, you probably would have the best way of doing that with some sort of planetary conjunction hypothesis, because one, we will know exactly where the planets are. And we do know that this was something that was important to many people in antiquity. The motions and positions of planets was sometimes a little too important to the Romans. Occasionally the Roman government would like ban all the astrologers to make sure that they can’t be there to write bad horoscopes about the emperor. But of course, the emperor himself would keep his astrologer or astrologers, so we know there’s importance. And the fact that we can very precisely calculate what’s there with comets, if it’s not recorded, we won’t know it was there. And we probably know very little about the exact orbital parameters of the comet, unless we had like lots and lots of records, which we probably wouldn’t have anyways. And conversely, we also know that 9 times out of 10 comets were interpreted very negatively. The very few times that they are, somebody has to come along and fix that.

Supernovae, the exploding stars. Again, without an actual record, we probably can’t find that. Though I will note that if you have the right sources, maybe a comet could work. Because I, in digging for any examples of people interpreting comets in antiquity or in the Middle Ages as something positive, I found an interesting one from the Byzantine Emperor under the time of Alexios the First, the emperor who was also the one who started the whole Crusade business or helped start the Crusade business. Apparently he was having plenty of wars with the Franks, basically people from Western Europe and there was a comet in the sky and his astrologer was supposed to try to figure out what this meant. Astrologer is having a hard time. He goes to bed, he’s up in a locked room, and in the middle of the night he wakes up and lo and behold, in his room is John the Evangelist, not a vision. The John the Evangelist is in the room there to help explain to him what the comet is actually supposed to mean and how it’s actually bad news for for the invading armies, not the Byzantine army. Not the Byzantine army. So if an actual disciple enters your room and can explain things, that is probably the best way to figure out what the real star of Bethlehem was.

Okay, that’s a useful tool. So what you’re saying is if a disciple shows up in your room, don’t get medical attention, just believe whatever he says.

I think you should at least get out some milk and cookies. He’s at least 2000 years old at this point. Arthritis is through the roof. Get him some help.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, from. Okay, from the scientific. I know that you also looked at some potentially wackier ideas. I’ve. I heard the word aliens mentioned before. Give us some, some. Let’s get in, let’s have some fun here. Let’s explain this thing.

Well, here’s the thing. Amongst the actual scientific hypotheses, the ones that don’t require miracles, and the alien one actually would fit the data the best. Can an alien spaceship look like a star? Sure. Can it move in these sorts of motions that are described. Yeah. Can it hover over a particular location? That’s what they do in the movies. So at least conceptually, can it fit all the description points? Yes, it might be a little bit weird to refer to an alien spaceship as a star rather than as a boat or some other bit of verbiage, but we could just accept that little bit of saying, well, it was so shiny. It was shiny like a star. Fine. The problem, of course then is you have to posit not just the mere existence of aliens, but super advanced aliens, super willing to travel the hundreds, if not thousands of light years to go here just to what, mess with a few shepherds, a couple guys in Persia? It seems a little bit disproportionate. They’ve traveled all this way just to act like a little blinking GPS satellite for potentially a few people, maybe three, maybe 300.

We don’t know, of course. The thing is, though, I’m not making this sort of thing up. The earliest versions I’ve seen of the UFO hypothesis come from the 1960s, and again, it was against like this wave of seemingly growing atheism and secularism in the west and attempts to push back against that. And so take all the miracles of the Bible, aliens done it. Well, there, problem solved. No, no miracles needed. And everything is completely scientifically kosher.

And thus the History Channel was born.

And yes, unfortunately, the hypothesis I’ve seen multiple times on Ancient Aliens is the UFO explanation of this. I know it’s been on there twice, it could have been there three times. But I have the problem that I can’t keep watching Ancient Aliens. It’s too expensive because every time it’s on I end up throwing things at the TV and have to buy a new one. It’s just too expensive to keep watching for me.

So there are all kinds of different ideas that are out there on social media related to Christmas and things like astrology, things like aliens, aliens, the Anunnaki, things like that. Let’s get into some of the more interesting ones because I know you’ve been. You’ve got another book out that is discussing some theories of. Of aliens and UFOs and religion. But let’s talk about some of those ideas that intersect with. With Christmas. Are there. What do you think is one of the cooler ones that you’ve come across?

Oh, specifically with aliens or just pseudo scholarship in general in Christmas?

Pseudo scholarship in general on Christmas, but bonus points for having aliens.

I know one of the things you’ve gone at a couple times in your TikTok channel is the various claims that come especially from Zeitgeist about, oh, the star in the east was actually Spica and the constellation Virgo, which is the virgin. And so this is also about the virgin birth.

And Virgo is carrying grain, which means bread. And it’s the house of bread that’s Bethlehem all the time.

And the three stars of Orion’s belt pointing to that on Christmas Day, the three stars being the three kings. And just about everything is wrong, including the science of it. Actually, you ruined it.

I was getting into it. This is going great. You guys were making fun, but I was there.

In my early YouTube career, I tried doing a video debunking of this where I took one of the images from Zeitgeist and showed, well, they’re claiming on December 25th, there’s three stars of Orion point to the…

Is it the rising sun?

Yes, the rising sun.

Yeah.

And the problem is the direction that they point where the sun will rise never happens. You can check that. Like, that’s not even where the path of the sun would even go. So when will this happen? Somewhere between never and ever, ever. So it’s like, wow, the basic astronomy is wrong. And of course, I’m not the first person to notice this. I literally found in the comment section of a late 19th century engineering journal, there’s like, back and forth between people arguing about this. One of them was an actual, like, amateur astronomer, Edwin Maunder, who’s actually famous for this book called The Astronomy of the Bible from like the early 20th century. And also if you ever heard of the Maunder minimum related to sunspot activity in the sun, it’s named after him and his wife doing sunspot research. But literally, I see in this comment section, like, in this back and forth, like, editor notes to the editor section of this engineering journal from the late 19th century, basically someone coming in, making the Zeitgeist-like claim about that pointing and Maunder coming and saying, hey, astronomer here, that doesn’t happen. And the person comes back, what do you know about… And I’m like, God damn it, I just found 19th century Reddit.

But this shows just how debunked this is. It’s like, no astronomers have known this was wrong before my grandparents were born. So my goodness, this should have not been seeing the light of day in modern YouTube days.

One of the ones that I’ve seen a lot, particularly this year and a little bit last year, but I see it even more this year is this idea that, well, December 25th is… is not the actual winter solstice. But the claim is that the sun is in the grave for three days, and then the 25th is the day when it rises from the grave, and then it rises on the Southern Cross. So Jesus is dying on the cross. And maybe you know this better than I do, but from what I can tell, the Southern Cross, because of the precession of the equinoxes, was not even visible to anybody in this part of the world anywhere near any potential birth of Jesus. But additionally, the sun is constantly moving. It is not holding still for three days between the winter solstice and the 25th. These are. These are things that are being read into or being made up and asserted for this period. Similar to the Zeitgeist stuff.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So just also for the whole audience to know when we’re talking about precession of the equinoxes, this is an effect that not only is the Earth rotating on its axis, but the axis itself has its own rotations. And this is the precessional period, which is on the order of tens of thousands of years. We have actual ancient knowledge of this. This was first discovered by Hipparchus in the second century BC and his estimate, this was about 1 degree per century. So the cycle would be about 36,000 years. Modern estimates put it closer to 27,000, which still, I have to say, an effect that takes tens of thousands of years to complete. Being noticed and being within any appreciable accuracy is still. Wow.

Yeah.

But to also do those measurements, they also knew, like, say, the limitations of their equipment. And from what I could tell, like, Hipparchus was like, well, I’m going to measure the length of the year from, not from like solstice to solstice, because it’s kind of hard to tell when is the sun at its lowest. And even when the sun is at its lowest, it’s not just hanging there in the sky. It’s still moving from east to west all the time. It never stops, especially not in, like, the stops, like it did for the Joshua-stops sort of story? It’s. It stops in one direction while still moving the other way. It’s like, okay, yeah, it stopped turning its wheel. But can you really notice that in such a timeframe, not without much more sophisticated tools, that the ancients even said, hey, we can’t measure this accurately enough. So we’re going to use not the solstices, but the equinoxes to measure the length of the solar year. And it was very careful measurements of that that allowed Hipparchus to do his observational work and realize, hey, there seems to be an additional motion that. So there’s a difference between a solar day and a sidereal day that differs a tiny amount. And there’s difference also then because of the precession of the Earth.

So amazing work that these guys did. And none of that is known or understood by. So much of the other stuff is out there or other claims about precession of the equinoxes. So what is it? Hamlet’s Mill projecting the idea that the precession of the equinoxes was known by all ancient peoples for thousands and thousands of years. Even though again, this is something that you can’t see with the naked eye. It took extremely precise measurements separated out by a couple of centuries to get just close enough to say within like 50% accuracy of what the actual measurement is. It’s like no, you can’t just look and say oh look, there’s precession going on. You can’t see that.

Will you explain what precession is? I don’t know what that is.

It’s. It’s literally if you have like a spinning top that’s spinning on its axis, but also it’s doing that wobble. Okay, that wobble is the precession.

I see.

And also if you want to impress people, there’s also a bit of up and down of the axis itself that’s called nutation. And a top will go through all three things. And if you take all three forms of rotation, then you’ve completely described the rotational motion of any given three dimensional body.

But the effect is that the constellations that might be just above the horizon, they go down and up. And so the Southern Cross was actually below the horizon and invisible to people in that part of the world for several centuries. In fact, I think it doesn’t pop up again until like the 1400s or 1500s C.E.

Not to mention the fact that if we’re talking about Jesus dying and like three days resurrection, the cross, that would make it Easter, not Christmas, that would not be about the birth, that’s about the death of a guy.

Right.

So maybe we should be talking about Easter is the 25th of December.

Well, the idea, the argument is that this is the inspiration for the story. This is the mythicist account that they made up the story of Jesus based on

Oh wow.

This. And so the idea that so the. They’re reading this back into ancient history saying they thought the sun died for three days and then rose on a cross. And so obviously Jesus was just taken from that ancient tradition. Although again, the data don’t remotely support the notion that. That any such idea existed anciently. Yeah, yeah, because you can science as, as the great poet said, science. Oh. So do you have any, do you have any fun alien ones that are associated with Christmas or most of the alien ones, another time of year when it’s a little more seasonable for them to be out and about?

Well, it sure seems like it’s the most connected to Christmas to help explain. Yeah, the light in the sky, the original UFO story. So, I mean, it has that somewhat obvious connection. But like I say, when. If you’re trying to explain all the miracle stories with aliens, then, yeah, they have to show up and so they must be hovering over Jesus. So again, how is he walking on water? It was because of the teleportation beam or tractor beams that the aliens’ mothership would use. And of course, in a sense you have actually seen the alien version of the resurrection of Jesus if you have seen the original The Day the Earth Stood Still. Because Klaatu is basically coming from the heavens, giving a message of needed peace and otherwise destruction. If, you know, people don’t get with things, he is killed, brought back to life, and then ascends to heaven again after giving a final message of an apocalyptic end. So it was basically as close to the Jesus story as 1950s America would allow in cinema.

Wow.

If you’re looking for aliens and Jesus, there you go.

It occurs to me that there, that there is a sort of progression here, that the, that the, the bringing in of aliens as a, as a sort of, as a replacement for divine, for want of a better word, magic is, is just a progression along the same line. It still doesn’t, you know, it has some explanatory power in terms of figuring out how something might have actually happened. And yet is there any evidence behind any of it? Or is it just speculative in the way that we would, that ancient peoples would talk about miracles?

It’s ultimately, yeah, just like a lot of, like armchair speculation, but in a way that makes it. So all of a sudden the story goes from unbelievable to believable again. And that’s really a lot of the purpose there. It’s kind of the same way of how people will reinterpret predictions of the end of the world or the second coming of Jesus and that. And of course it doesn’t happen as expected. And so something has to come along to reinterpret it. So that way it could still have that sort of theological or political force, same sort of thing, and sometimes even explicit, like saying by explaining this story in terms of the natural instead of the supernatural, then we make it so the entire story is believable again. And, oh, it’s you crazy atheists that are trying to take this all hyper literally and make it look ridiculous. I actually remember reading that in the apologist J. Gresham Machen, early 20th century apologist out of Princeton. He writes this giant book about the virgin birth and says how it’s like totally real. And then he’s trying to, of course, you know, look at anything else in the Bethlehem or the birth story to try to make sure his bases are covered.

And he’s like, well, if you, you know, interpret the Bethlehem star story as, you know, this hyper literal thing, you’re just, you know, trying to make it look dumb on purpose, even though he also goes on and says it’s totally believable as a miracle as well. So he’s not even totally consistent, but just enough to say it’s like, hey, stop making fun of this. It’s totally real. It’s also exactly as the fundamentalists think it is.

Yeah, this is part of the pattern of, of kind of the apologetic approach which is primarily designed to perform for the folks who want to believe you are coming up with, with new ways to try to make it meaningful and useful and, and ginning up things that are not necessarily probable, not necessarily even plausible, but just something that you can claim is not impossible. Well, if you imagine this scenario over here and then this scenario over here, and then if this also happened right at the same time period, but right after this, and you’re making up all of these scenarios, but because none of them are literally impossible, you’ve ginned up a tiny little sliver of not impossible. And that’s enough room for the folks who really want to believe to operate, to feel comfortable in this all working out. But it sounds like once the 60s come around and you’ve got this UFO fever that suddenly this becomes the new, the new hip explanation. And now we’ve got the Anunnaki that a lot of people for some reason are, are appealing to because it serves their own ideas about, you know, DNA manipulation and, and alien life forms and.

Yeah, and all of this.

I don’t know what that is. What’s. What is the Anunnaki? I don’t know what that is.

Dan, I think you’ll be able to say better than I.

Ah, so Anunnaki is this idea that Anunnaki is a, is a word. Originally it comes from Sumerian, Anunnakkene. It gets transliterated into Akkadian as Anunnaki. And it’s just a generic class of deity. There are the Igigi and the Anunnaki in some of the later literature, two different classes of deity. But there are a lot of folks out there who want to treat the Sumerian literature as kind of the original Bible and the biblical text as kind of a later kind of not perversion, but extension of what’s going on. And so it treats it all as one story and so tries to interpret everything that’s going on in the Bible through the lens of these Sumerian ideas. And this is really. Zecharia Sitchin in the 1970s wrote this book called the Twelfth Planet, arguing that based on the Sumerian idea, there’s a Sumerian creation account where there are a few different creation accounts, but where the gods are creating humans initially as slaves, and then they get sick of them.

They’re keeping them up at night, so they try to kill them all, but one of the gods saves some of them. And. But Zecharia Sitchin was like, the Anunnaki are aliens. They came to Earth seeking resources. They needed gold because gold is things they get to hang in the atmosphere to try to reflect a lot of the harmful rays from the sun. And so they were basically exploiting the resources on Earth and enslaving or they used DNA manipulation to create humans and blah, blah, blah. And so then they bring in the story from Genesis 6 of the Bene Elohim, the children of God having relations with the daughters of humanity to create this, you know, kind of these, this abominable race of, of giants and Nephilim and all this kind of stuff. And.

All right, you talked me into it. I. You can. Yeah, I believe you. I believe you. It’s.

I have the newsletter, the newsletter is on the way. But, but yeah, this, you see this stuff all over social media and they, they bring in Christmas, they bring in the resurrection, they bring in Thoth. Atlantis has a role in, in the way some people are reconstructing all of this. But it’s a way.

You got to get Lemuria.

I’m, I’m almost positive I have seen that come up in one of these, in one of these arguments. But, but yeah, what this is, I think is an attempt to say we have, it’s like secret knowledge stuff. There’s this big conspiracy, everything’s a cover up, but we’ve cracked the code, we’ve unlocked this, and now you and I share this secret knowledge and we’re smarter than everybody else. And everybody else is clueless and just wandering around. They’re in the Matrix.

So, yeah, you better be careful because the next thing you know, Aaron’s going to tell us that the Earth is actually a sphere and not, well, flat, an oblong one.

I will tell you that because of the spin.

But I will tell you that at least Lemuria was originally an actual scientific hypothesis. There was a hypothetical continent to explain how basically Old World monkeys and New World monkeys were able to like, get across the world by this path. And how did the lemurs get there through Lemuria. So. And then that continent sank. This was before plate tectonics. And so it’s. Yeah, pre-modern in that sense, but at least it had a scientific traction for at least five minutes.

And I am. I’m 100 positive somebody brought up Lemuria. No, no. Lemuria was. With their idea of that. Shoot. The earliest maps of the Earth included this land that. That it went all the way down.

And oh, oh, were they looking at the Piri Reis map and thinking like, oh, look how big Antarctica was. And it connected to. To South America.

But then that. But you go up to the North Pole and you get the four. There was also this idea there was some big rock up at the North Pole. And one of the maps shows it divided into four. And they were like, those are the four rivers from the Garden of Eden. And the original Garden of Eden was at the North Pole. And this big conspiracy in the early.

Adam is Santa Claus. I figured it out.

Well, there was a. There was a. And. And this, this overlaps with Latter-day Saint stuff.

Stuff.

There was an idea that the lost ten tribes, it says they went to the north. And, and one idea. Yeah, one idea was that there was that the North Pole was actually inhabited by the lost ten tribes of Israel. And early Mormons actually suggested that there was a big wall that hid this lush, green, fertile land at the North Pole where the lost ten tribes of Israel were comfortably living out.

Now. Now we’re getting into some Game of Thrones stuff. Anyway, Aaron, let’s get back to Aaron. We have a guest here. I don’t know, do you have some favorite pet stories that somebody’s come up with? Some favorite ideas that they’ve used to explain things that just knocked your socks off or that were particularly goofy or fun.

So I do remember some. It was a YouTube channel, I don’t know how active it is now, called Spirit Science. And also connecting Atlantis and Martians. And I think the Jews were originally from space as well, and they all lived on Earth in Atlantis before the things crashed. And we went from like 12-dimensional beings to lower dimensional, three-dimensional beings. And we’re trying to get enlightened back up to those higher levels and then deflect comets with our minds and things like that. It’s like pretty much like the smorgasbord of everything in the New Age and then with a little more acid that I think is descriptive there. But maybe, perhaps it’s better to point to the things that blow my socks off and are real, the stuff that we can actually see scientifically that, hey, not only are we able to predict where the planets are going to be in thousands of years, but we can project back what the Universe looked like 13 billion years ago because we can look at the afterglow of that early hot expansion point and use our telescopes to actually learn about the earliest formations and distributions.

And from that, from looking at that picture of the earliest light that we can detect, we can actually figure out what is the ultimate structure of the universe, what is it primarily made of. And its origins are not just as origins, I should say its projected future into the billions and trillions of years. The power that we actually have from the sciences, that is what will blow my socks off on any given day.

I love that. I love. Well, okay, so, you know, one of one thing that I realized we haven’t done, and I don’t want to end on a downer, but I do want to go through what we’ve done is you’ve, you’ve given us a whole bunch of potential theories, comets, all, you know, you know, conjunctions, all of these things. What we, and what we did was we assumed that those don’t work, but we didn’t talk about why. So, so let’s, as quickly as we can, let’s just dispel some of these. Why couldn’t it be comet? Why couldn’t it be a comet?

So main reasons are almost always comets are seen as evil signs. No one ever looked at a comet and said, oh yeah, totally means king of the Jews is going to be born. Secondly, comets don’t pinpoint particular locations on Earth. If you try to navigate by comet, you will be lost for a long time. If we go by supernovae, you’ve got pretty much the same problems. One is that it’s hard to know if ancients would have actually even distinguished between the two necessarily. Sometimes the records go back and forth in description of what’s a comet or a nova. Exploding star again?

Sure.

If you go by any of the conjunction hypotheses, you actually have a multiplicity of problems. One is, no, it can’t point out a particular place, it can’t lead you anywhere, it can’t go direction. And also, how do you interpret those various motions of the planets depends on which astrologer you ask at what time of day and what part of the horoscope they’re in. Quite literally, we actually have like predictions from an astrologer and you can see that they are reading it and saying everything and its opposite. In the same horoscope, same person, same horoscope. You see the same horoscope being interpreted like a few years apart and realize, oh, they forgot to incorporate Venus into their interpretations and that’s why the king got killed. You find out basically, what does a horoscope mean? Whatever you want it to mean. We’ve actually even tested this with modern astrologers. Now, it probably won’t be a big surprise, but astrology is not actual science. When it is tested.

How dare you.

When it is tested, an astrologer can’t predict things with a horoscope any better than chance. But what was even more surprising was that if you give a group of astrologers a list of personalities and a bunch of horoscope charts and they say match them together, not only do they not match them correctly any better than chance, but their agreement between each other is barely any better than chance. So in other words, what does it actually mean? Literally anything you want. Because even the astrologers can’t agree on how to correctly interpret. So are we going to say this is how they definitely would have interpreted this conjunction of planets? Unfortunately, no. I look through the manuals and people say, well, here’s how they would have interpreted this sign. I say, I can find the exact same horoscope and it says the exact opposite. If I flip through the exact same astrology manuals you use. Oh, and let’s also throw out another interesting problem. The magi, the wise men. This term kind of gets confused in antiquity, where the original word magoi is coming from a caste of priests in modern day Iran, ancient Persia, it becomes a bit broader to basically mean any sort of magician or charlatan in the West.

But since Matthew is specifying these are wise men, magi from the east, he seems to be saying, okay, these are Persian magi. This has a few problems. One, why would Zoroastrian priests care about a Jewish king? They got their own king that they worry about. They have their own future savior. They literally believe their savior is going to be born coming out of a lake. His sperm is in a lake right now in Iran. They’re not going to go to Jerusalem to find a Jewish messiah. And also what we can tell the Persian priests at this time were if anything anti-astrology. They thought that the planets were actually decrepit versions of stars, that they had all been affected by the Zoroastrian equivalent of Satan, Ahriman. So if they saw a moving star, they wouldn’t have said, oh, let’s go follow that. They would have said, oh no, the evil one is here. So that’s a bit of a problem. And also there wouldn’t have been this really nice friendly chat between the wise men coming in and talking with Herod because they’re coming from another nation that Herod literally fought to get his kingship.

And also this is a Roman territory. So not only would these wise men be coming in and saying who’s the new king? Not only would they be usurping King Herod, they’d be usurping Caesar Augustus. And what do you think the Roman response would be? I give the equivalent in my book of saying this would be like if the Soviet Union didn’t just go to Cuba, but they went to Puerto Rico to establish a new governor. And what would Washington DC’s response be? Nothing. It’s like, no, no, we shouldn’t expect it at least to be in the newspapers if not a straight-out war. And what do we actually see? Absolute radio silence. It’s almost like the story didn’t happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Just a few problems.

Just, just a few, just a few minor things. So, so let’s, let’s get to what we started with, which is the, the poetry of the thing. Let’s get to a nicer way of looking at this.

Yeah, yeah. So we have to remember that the person who wrote this book was a writer. They were trained to read and write in Greek. They would have had an education where they probably would have had to have known major Greek works. And of course being in the Roman Empire they would have known, if not read, important works about Greek myths, stories and all the more so if it’s literally part of the political fabric. If you have literally a cult to Julius Caesar with its temples around the empire, it’s like, you know, you might just actually notice the symbols that they use there. And as I mentioned earlier in like the story of Aeneas, the founder, like a founding figure of Rome, he was guided by a star. There are actually many other Greek stories of people led by stars. It’s a very common thing for sailors to say that they were specifically guided by Castor and Pollux, the divine twins and sons of Zeus, that they would come and help guide sailors in stormy weather. So guiding stars like that, a fairly common trope in Greek and Roman literature. It has a particular penchant in Roman stories because of Aeneas and because of Julius Caesar.

But also in the context of Judaism, the fact that Matthew very much wants to let you know he’s got everything coming from the Hebrew Bible, there is this very famous prophecy in Numbers 24 , Numbers 24:17 . It’s usually called the Star Prophecy. Originally, it looks like it was trying to point to King David, but it was commonly then interpreted as a general prediction of the coming of the Messiah. This thing says, I see him not now, but coming. A star will rise out of Jacob and a scepter out of Israel. And this was commonly used for predicting some sort of heavenly conqueror coming from God Almighty. You see it in the Dead Sea Scrolls. You see it, of course, being cited by the Christians. When going back to the story, the very famous rebel leader of the last major Jewish revolt, Simon bar Kokhba, his name literally meaning, like, son of the star, basically, like, trying to, like, scream, I am the prophesied one. And this pro. And this, apparently, this propaganda work, we even have found, like, inscriptions of, like, his name, like, in a star, like, inside caves and that.

So it’s like, clearly this was part of the propaganda. We see it in its coinage. Everyone was using this prophecy to talk about the Messiah. So it kind of makes sense that someone would use the rising of a star to talk about the coming of the Messiah.

I think an additional thing to note if. If I may, what I’ve always found interesting, particularly about the involvement of the Magi, is the idea that the author does not have a ton of information about what’s going on in the world of Iran in this time period. But the idea that the. The birth of Jesus would be so thoroughly inscribed upon the natural world that even someone from another nation would be able to recognize what’s going on here, I think is. Is a very poetic part in my. In my mind that the author is saying this is so interwoven into the fabric of the universe that even they can recognize it. And even our king, who’s supposed to be Jewish, was like, what are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about. So it’s kind of mocking.

Well, to the. It attaches so well to the poetry because in many ways the beginning and end of the story are trying to mirror each other. People have pointed out, hey, at the beginning of the story you have this rising star. At the end of Jesus’s life you have the star, the sun going dark. You have at the very end of the story, the Great Commission also to go out to the Gentiles, who are the first people to come and worship Jesus. Literal Gentiles. And of course, at very early on you have established who are the enemies of Jesus in the story. It’s the Jewish authorities, Herod and the scribes and Pharisees. And who becomes the enemies later on? Oh, the scribes and Pharisees later on as well. So it seems like Matthew is very consciously trying to connect the beginning and the end in ways that can only be done by being a creative and good writer.

Yeah, yep, absolutely. Well, Aaron Adair, thank you so much for joining us. If people want to find your book, where can they go to to check you out?

Amazon is probably the best way to get the book itself to find me. More generally, I’m on the social medias. I have a website, draronadair.com that will be a bit of a link farm for things. I have a YouTube channel, but it’s mostly covered in cobwebs, so it’s probably not an active place to go. In fact, the last video I did on there was to also steal Dan’s style of tiktoking. So it’s not even original in many ways. So stick with Dan’s work there.

No people can go and still see your videos. I’m sure they’ll be interested.

And your “The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View.” That was published about 10 years ago, right?

Yeah, yeah, 2013. And I think it came out in August. So trying to think, would that make it a Gemini?

And what’s that? That is a Leo book, my friend. That is a Leo book.

Actually depends on which astrological system. But that’s another story.

And what is your new one?

The new one is called Aliens and Religion. Where Two Worlds Collide. I will also not only boast that this is an interesting combination of science and religion, but as far as I know, it is the only theology book that solves differential equations to come to conclusions.

All right, I’ll give you that one. Yeah.

All right, so get out there and read Aaron’s book, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. Aaron, friends at home, if you would like to become a part of making this show, go get early access to an ad-free version of every show and maybe even hear someone like Aaron come on and talk more alien stuff with our patron-only content. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma if you want to write anything to us, please feel free to do so. The address is contact@dataoverdogma.com and we will see you again next week.

Bye everybody.