Marek Kukula

Following yonder star

But the astronomer Marek Kukula wonders whether Colin Nicholl’s exhaustive treatment of ‘the Great Christ Comet’ may miss the whole point of the gospel story

It’s hard to imagine Christmas without stars. They perch at the top of fir trees, glitter from greeting cards and dangle festively over shopping precincts. This year, even the John Lewis advert and Selfridges’ Oxford Street window display — two of the holiest icons of our modern, commercialised Christmas —both have astronomical themes. The origin of this celestial obsession is of course the Star of Bethlehem, whose apparition, according to the Gospel of Matthew, first alerted the Three Wise Men to the birth of Jesus, then guided them across the desert to pay homage to the new-born Messiah. For centuries scholars have speculated as to whether this founding tale of Christianity might have some basis in historical fact but, in an age in which religion and science are often caricatured as standing in stark opposition to one another, what are we to make of a book that uses science to investigate one of the Bible’s best-loved stories? The title of The Great Christ Comet may give the impression that this is some sort of fire-and-brimstone religious tract. On the contrary, it is for the most part a sober, detailed and accessible account of both scripture and science — and perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the Star of Bethlehem story to date. Over the centuries many different types of astronomical phenomena have been invoked to explain the Star, and Colin Nicholl describes and assesses them all. The science of comets, supernovae and planetary conjunctions is explained, and their relative merits as objects that might have driven Babylonian astrologers to cross the deserts of the Middle East are clearly laid out. Since he is a Biblical scholar by training, Nicholl’s grasp of the essential astronomy and astrophysics is all the more impressive. But his cool and even-handed treatment of the science sits somewhat uneasily with the book’s fundamental assumption that the story of the Biblical star must have some basis in historical events, rather than being a shrewd (perhaps even expected) embellishment to the founding myth of a new religion.

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