ncramer@bbn.com (Nichael Cramer) (09/04/89)
In article <Sep.1.02.50.08.1989.18378@athos.rutgers.edu> rock@sun.com (Bill Petro) writes: >muttiah@cs.purdue.edu (Ranjan Samuel Muttiah) writes: >>Where did the three kings on Jesus' birth come from ? ... > [Amid an otherwise interesting article] ... Some >confusion naturally arises over how they could have seen the star in >the East and arrived in Jerusalem, unless they had started in the >Mediterranean! Matthew 2:2 reads, "We saw his star in the east, and >have come to worship him". The ambiguity can be cleared up by >understanding the sense as "We saw his star when we were in the east >and have come from the east to worship him". Unfortunately, an appeal to this sense of the words only works for the phrasing peculiar to this particular translation. Other translations make it clear that the star itself was in the east (e.g. Philips: "For we saw his star in the east and we have come..." or the Albright/Mann translation from the Anchor Bible series: "For we have seen his star at its rising..."). Since your example above (as well as Matt 2:1) makes clear that the Magi themselves came from the east, the best way to interpret this, I believe, is that the Magi were not actually *following* the star. In the first place, the idea of following a given star to a specific location on earth is meaningless[*]. In the second, this is not what Matthew says anyway. Paraphrasing, the second half of Matt 2:2 says only [1]"We saw a star" and [2]"We have come to worship him". In the third place, later on (Matt 2:5ff) the Magi explain that they have come to Bethlehem because for OT *prophetic* reasons (i.e. not because of the star). [*] Certainly, as in a case such as this, where there is not a good deal of secondary technical navagational information. So what seems to be happening is that after the Magi[**] saw the star --which they interpretted only as a *sign* of the birth-- they set out, on their own, specifically for Bethlehem. [**] Or, significantly, "astrologers" as some translations --e.g. Philips-- give it. > Bill Petro {decwrl,hplabs,ucbvax}!sun!Eng!rock >"UNIX for the sake of the kingdom of heaven" Matthew 19:12 NICHAEL "...it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the C." Matt 18:6 [The translations I have seen agree with yours: the star was in the east. TEV says "we saw his star when it came up in the east". However you say that they weren't following the star. Mat 2:9 certainly suggests that they were. It moved from the east, went before them, and came to rest over Bethlehem. I leave it to others to make astronomical sense out of this. --clh]