Happy Epiphany!
I’ve always wondered what exactly the Wise Men saw in the sky on that first Epiphany.
Walter Russell Mead, in a series of fascinating posts on the Christmas season, gives a helpful account of star-gazing in the ancient world that gives the technical meaning of “in the east” and “stood over”:
Matthew’s Gospel refers to a star “in the east.” His better-educated Greek readers might have recognized this as a reference to the technical term, en te anatole, for a planet that appears on the eastern horizon moments before dawn. Modern astronomers refer to this event as a heliacal rising. Greeks thought that Jupiter’s heliacal rising was particularly portentous. The date of 6 BC for the birth of Jesus is compelling partly because Jupiter was a heliacal riser in that year.
The recent so-called “Great Conjunction” between Jupiter and Saturn points to another possibility. As the planets move through the skies, they sometimes come so close together that they appear to merge, or almost merge, into a single orb. Astrologers attribute special cosmic significance to these conjunctions; it may have been an event of this kind that set the Wise Men off on their journey.
While it is impossible at this distance to be certain about what happened next, it would appear that Jupiter stopped moving in the heavens as the Wise Men reached Bethlehem. “Stood over” is another technical term from Greek astronomy and refers to the moment when a planet appears to stop in the night sky and then reverse course. Taking this as a sign that they had reached their goal, the Wise Men looked around Bethlehem and found Jesus.
Illustration via Picryl, Public Domain
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