Excerpt from What Was the Star of Bethlehem?

Early paintings in European cathedrals depict the Lord in the act of hanging out the sun, moon and stars upon the sky with his own hands and this was the literal belief of the time.* In this naive stage of thought the miracles connected with the Star. Of Bethlehem were naturally accepted without question. But when the rise of modern science put an end to the age of signs and wonders in the heavens and established the omnipresent and omni-temporal reign of natural law, supernatural explanations ceased to be acceptable to the progressive intelligence of the race. Numerous attempts were then made to place the Star of Bethlehem upon a purely rational basis. The supernatural was discarded in favor of some natural but unusual phenomenon occurring only at the time of the Nativity or recurring only after a long or irregular interval. The star becamea comet, meteor, meteor shower, northern lights, a planet in some conspicuous position, con junction of planets, a dream of the magijl Any one of these phenom ena and numerous other conspicuous celestial apparitions might have occurred at or near the required time, but it is not certain that they did occur then and if they did no satisfactory evidence connects them with the Star of Bethlehem. Again if they did occur there should have been no difficulty in describing them definitely.

The truth is that the seed whence grew the Star of Bethlehem was planted away back in prehistoric times in the soil of the first primitive attempts to determine a date by means of the celestial clock upon the face of which the stars served as hands. To understand the nature of the fruit therefore, we must study its growth from the beginning, paying attention first to primitive time measures, then to their development into the elaborate systems in vogue in the countriw in and around Palestine near the beginning of the Christian era. We 'should then compare certain features of these systems with certain elements of the Star of Bethlehem story in order to determine whether or not the latter may be traced back to a common origin and significance.

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