Happy birthday Jesus!
We think...
Hey there holiday shoppers, Julian here for DNews.
If you are one of the estimated 2.2 billion Christians across the planet, then December
25th is a special day for you!
It's celebrated as the day Jesus of Nazareth was born in a little manger in Bethlehem more
than two thousand years ago.
But can we use science to actually determine his exact date of birth?
Ouch, ouch, oof, talking about Jesus on a science channel, playing with fire here.
But hear me out, because I promise I'm not trying to diminish anyone's beliefs; theologians
whose job is to study stuff like this can't agree on the exact year, let alone the month
and day.
Even the last head of the Roman Catholic church, Pope Benedict the XVI, said the date was wrong
and Jesus might have been born earlier than we thought.
Part of the problem is the Bible doesn't name a specific date.
It never explicitly says, "December 25th, 1 AD," or anything like that.
But, the Bible does mention events that happened around the time Jesus was allegedly born,
and scholars have tried to piece it together from that.
It mentions rulers and important people of the time, like Herod the Great.
Historians are pretty sure Herod died in 4 BCE, but even then they're not dealing with
perfect historical records so these human events aren't the most reliable way to go
about it.
But you know what is reliable?
The night sky.
Famously the story goes that when Jesus was born, a new star appeared and guided three
wise men to Bethlehem.
It was only mentioned once, but if we're assuming this new light in the sky was an actual thing,
we might be able to figure out a known astronomical event that corresponds to it.
Luckily, Chinese and Korean astronomers kept records!
One idea is the star was actually a nova.
A nova is what happens when a white dwarf steals nuclear fuel from a companion star
until it triggers a nuclear explosion, getting extremely bright before fading again over
the course of months or years.
They can happen at any time and Chinese astronomers recorded a new star in the spring of 5 BCE,
but the biblical stories implied the star moved, and novas can't do that.
A comet would fit the description of a bright moving object in the sky, and since they're
regular events we can wind back the clock to predict when they would have appeared.
Halley's comet comes close to being visible at the right time, but that was in 12 BCE
which is a little too far back to likely be the "star" in question.
On top of that, comets were considered bad omens.
Planets are bright, move, and were called "wandering stars" by ancient people.
Perhaps multiple planets came really close to each other in the night sky in a conjunction
-- creating what appeared to the naked eye to be one brighter object.
The same way we can rewind the movement of the comets to calculate when they passed by
the earth, we can turn back the motion of the planets.
When we do, we see that around the time of Jesus's possible birth there were actually
multiple conjunctions.
Venus and Jupiter came together on June 17 in 2 BCE.
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn came pretty close in February of 6 BCE.
And Jupiter and Saturn crossed paths THREE times from late May to early December in 7
BCE, and did so in a different spot in the sky each time.
With all this astronomical data, perhaps there did appear to be a new star in the sky around
when Jesus was supposed to be born, but we're still no closer to knowing the exact date.
That doesn't mean it's time to take down the tree and return the gifts.
Even if we've been getting Jesus' birthday wrong all this time, I hear he's a pretty
forgiving guy.
So we don't really know exactly when Jesus was born, and there's some questions about
what he might have looked like.
If you want to know more about that, check out this video up here.
Alright guys, how are you spending December 25th?
Let us know in the comments, subscribe for more and I'll see you all next time on DNews.
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