© 1989 Matt Neibaur
© 1989 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
Religion and science have long pondered the questions posed by the Star of Bethlehem. Theories abound. Supernovas comets, planetary conjunctions, and the miraculous have been invoked. Some even question if the event ever occurred, let alone how many wise men.
Of the many proposals, the planetary conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter is by far the most popular. It isn’t new. Johannes Kepler, after discovering the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Pisces a few days before Christmas in 1603, calculated backward and discovered the 7 B.C. event. Kepler was not the first to describe this. In 1977, David H. Clark described a similar assertion in English church annals dating from A.D. 1285. In the early days of planetariums, operators abused their Zeiss projectors by running the machines high-speed backwards to 7 B.C., producing the triple conjunction. This triple conjunction means that the retrograde loops of the two planets overlap. Translated, Jupiter passes Saturn three times over a several month period. The last occurrence of this sort was in 1981.
Until recently, all calculations to explain the star of Bethlehem as a planetary grouping relied on the standard ‘Planetary, Lunar, and Solar Positions’ by Bryant Tuckeman. This two volume work, published by the American Philosophical Society in 1962 and 1964, listed the coordinates of the naked-eye members of our solar system at five and ten day intervals from 601 B.C. to A.D. 1649. Utilizing these volumes, the dates proposed for the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction are as follows: May 27, October 6, and December 1, B.C.7.
In 1976, at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a unique project of special interest to historians was undertaken. JPL scientists, together with the U.S. Naval Observatory, calculated the positions of all major bodies in the solar system throughout a span of forty-four centuries, from 1411 B.C. to A.D. 3002 . This attempt proved singular, since they omitted all previous analytical theories of motion for individual objects. This new method embraced a technique of simultaneous numerical integration on a Univac 1100 / 81, inconceivable just a few decades ago. The task required nine days of computer time resulting in a magnetic output known as the ‘Long Ephemeris Tape’. Jean-Louis Simon and Pierre Bretagnon of Bureau des Longitudes in Paris published this data in ‘Planetary Programs and Tables from 4000 B.C. to 2800 A.D.’ (Willmann-Bell, 1986).
In the ‘Star of Bethlehem’ (Sky and Telescope, December, 1986), Roger W. Sinnott “became keenly interested” in reexamining the proposed dates of planetary grouping in light of this new information. He discovered that the dates listed for the conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter were incorrect. Compared to what earlier writers have deduced using Tuckerman’s tables, the maximum difference is about five days. The newly calculated conjunctions occur on May 29, September 30 , and December 5 .
This insight is hardly dramatic for astronomers, but intriguing for readers of The URANTIA Book. The URANTIA Book was published in 1955. Tuckeman’s tables in 1962, and Bretagnon & Simon’s programs and tables in 1986. In order to appreciate the significance, a passage from the text follows:
“These priests from Mesopotamia had been told sometime before by a strange religious teacher of their country that he had had a dream in which he was informed that ”the light of life“ was about to appear on earth as a babe and among the Jews. And thither went these three teachers looking for this ”light of life". After many weeks of futile search in Jerusalem, they were about to return to Ur when Zacharias met them and disclosed his belief that Jesus was the object of their quest and sent them on to Bethlehem, where they found the babe and left their gifts with Mary, his earth mother. The babe was almost three weeks old at the time of their visit.
These wise men saw no star to guide them to Bethlehem. The beautiful legend of the star of Bethlehem originated in this way: Jesus was born August 21 at noon, 7 B.C. On May 29, 7 B.C., there occurred an extraordinary conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of Pisces. And it is a remarkable astronomic fact that similar conjunctions occurred on September 29 and December 5 of the same year.Upon the basis of these extraordinary but wholly natural events the well-meaning zealots of the succeeding generation constructed the appealing legend of the star of Bethlehem and the adoring Magi… (The URANTIA Book UB 122:8.7)
The tabulated differences in dates follow:
| URANTIA Book (1955) | Tuckerman (1962) | Difference (days) |
|---|---|---|
| May 29 | May 27 | 2 |
| Sept 29 | Oct 6 | 7 |
| Dec 5 | Dec 1 | 4 |
| URANTIA Book(1955) | Bretagnon & Simon (1986) | Difference (days) |
| :— | :— | :— |
| May 29 | May 29 | 0 |
| Sept 29 | Sept 30 | 1 |
| Dec 5 | Dec 5 | 0 |
It is remarkable that the new calculations match so closely with the URANTIA text. The only exception is the calculated date of September 30 and what is listed in the text as September 29. A possible explanation for this discrepancy may be methodological. In ‘Computing the Star of Bethlehem’, Sinnott states:
An important matter, when dealing with ancient astronomical events, is the distinction between Ephemeris and Universal time. The two systems run within a minute of each other throughout the last three centuries, but they diverge in the remote past because of slight changes in the length of the Earth’s day. For the planetary calculations in this article, I’ve adopted the value ET - UT = +177 minutes, as recommended by Bretagnon & Simon. But for the lunar eclipses at Herod’s death, I used +158 minutes in accordance with the introduction to the Meeus-Mucke canon. The actual value is unknown; a recent study by F.R. Stephenson and L.V. Morrison leans toward +166 minutes near 1B.C. (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A, 313,47, 1984).
If changing the time to another value, perhaps +166 minutes as suggested by Stephenson & Morrison, would make-up the one day variance, is unknown. Further investigation is warranted. For now readers of The URANTIA Book may take solace in discovering that science and their text are converging ever closer on the Star of Bethlehem.
Dr. Matt Neibaur M.D.
ADDENDUM: Besides this paper, Dr. Neibaur has published another of great interest to URANTIA Book readers which is concerned with identifying the correct day of the week for a particular day of the week for a particular date during the period when Jesus was here on our planet. The URANTIA Book account of the life of Jesus often makes statements such as “on Wednesday, the 24th March” of a particular year. Imagine the difficulty that any imposter, passing himself off as a revelator, would have had during pre-computer times, to correctly identify the day of the week for a particular date so long ago.
Besides the computational difficulties, changes in the calendar that have since occurred have to be reckoned with. For example, at the time the Gregorian calendar was introduced, there was a discrepancy of about 7 days between the true date and that in actual use.
It is worth noting that the book would have lost nothing if the hypothetical imposter had not attempted the task, a point illustrated by the fact that, for more than 30 years nobody has noticed that such information has been included in The URANTIA Book.
Dr. Neibaur researched this problem thoroughly, then wrote a computer program to check on the correctness of 8 such instances where definite days of the week were associated with a particular date during the life of Jesus. In each case the day given by The URANTIA Book is the correct one.
The probability of achieving this result by guesswork is easily calculated. It is 1 chance in 7 , multiplied by itself 8 times, which comes to 1 chance in 5,764,801. A similar calculation can also be made for getting the results for the Star of Bethlehem. Ignoring the fact that the year of occurrence of the conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter had to be identified correctly, there is 1 chance in 365 of getting the day of the month correct through guesswork. To be correct for the two instances comes to 1 chance in 365 x 365. For the instance where there is a one day difference between The URANTIA Book date and that for the new set of data, the probability that they could be either identical or differ by one day either side through guesswork, is 3 in 365 . Thus the chance for the total result is 1 / 365 x 1 / 365 x 3 / 365, which calculates to 1 chance in 16,209,041.
To calculate the probability for obtaining these two sets of results we simply multiply them together. This tells us that there is only one chance in 93,442 billion of nominating those dates given to us in The URANTIA Book through guesswork alone. Since there was no other way to perform this task in 1955, we are forced to the conclusion that this was a humanly impossible task at the time of publication of The URANTIA Book in 1955.
Readers of this work by Dr. Neibaur must decide for themselves whether they will permit this information to have significance for their own belief structure and, if impressed, whether they will permit the teachings of The URANTIA Book to become significant in their own lives.
Editors note: This is just one of the many interesting articles available through the Brotherhood of Man Library. For further information on this excellent service contact: Ken Glasziou, Stanley River Rd, Maleny, QLD. 4552.