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Old 12-30-2006, 04:05 PM   #1
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Question Darkened Sky at Crucifixion & Star of Bethlehem

On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_a...Death_of_Jesus I read that "in the biblical narrative, following the death the sky is 'darkened for 3 hours', from the sixth to the ninth hour (noon to mid-afternoon), but if this claim concerns anything more than a local phenomenon, it is backed up by no Roman historian, though apologists claim that a highly disputed passage claiming to be by Tacitus alludes to this."

Does anyone know which passage of Tacitus is meant here?

----

Another issue: On http://www.bethlehemstar.net/dance/dance.htm#stop I read that "Jupiter was ahead of the Magi as they traveled south from Jerusalem to Bethlehem" and that Jupiter even stopped over Bethlehem. The stopping is explained through retrograde motion:
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An astronomer tracking the movement of planets through the star field watches not so much on the scale of minutes, but on the longer scale of days, weeks and months. On this scale of time, Jupiter did stop. On December 25 of 2 BC as it entered retrograde, Jupiter reached full stop in its travel through the fixed stars. Magi viewing from Jerusalem would have seen it stopped in the sky above the little town of Bethlehem.
Can anyone confirm this date of Dec 25 BC?

Wikipedia also talks about a retrograde motion theory, but mentions a link that mentions events from 6 BC. Looking through some of the other references I finally found this one: http://askelm.com/star/star004.htm

EDIT: If anyone wants to know, this is the link to the TOC: http://askelm.com/star/

It's from the book The Star of Bethlehem: The Star That Astonished the World (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Ernest L. Martin. A quote about the issue:
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Let us now look at what happened at the end of 2 B.C. Jupiter arrived at its ordinary time for retrogression and it became stationary among the stars. But this time something unusual happened. In 2 B.C.E. as viewed from Jerusalem, Jupiter came to its normal stationary position directly over Bethlehem on December 25th. That’s right! Just before dawn (the regular time the Magi would have begun their normal observations of the heavens), Jupiter came to a “stopped” position on December 25th directly over Bethlehem as witnessed from Jerusalem. Not only that, the planet assumed its stationary position while in the middle of the constellation of Virgo, the Virgin. What a remarkable circumstance this was.
Can anyone with some astronomical knowledge either confirm or refute this?
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Old 12-30-2006, 05:31 PM   #2
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I read that "in the biblical narrative, following the death the sky is 'darkened for 3 hours', from the sixth to the ninth hour..... Does anyone know which passage of Tacitus is meant here?
Yes. His back passage. Somebody obviously pulled this out of their arse.

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Old 12-30-2006, 05:39 PM   #3
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Originally Posted by Seeker2000 View Post
On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_a...Death_of_Jesus I read that "in the biblical narrative, following the death the sky is 'darkened for 3 hours', from the sixth to the ninth hour (noon to mid-afternoon), but if this claim concerns anything more than a local phenomenon, it is backed up by no Roman historian, though apologists claim that a highly disputed passage claiming to be by Tacitus alludes to this." Does anyone know which passage of Tacitus is meant here?
I'd be willing to bet that Thallus, not Tacitus, is intended. At any rate, the whole darkness at death is probably fabrication. Pliny reports that darkness occured after the death of Julius Caesar:

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XXX. Portentous and protracted eclipses of the sun occur, such as the one after the murder of Caesar the dictator and during the Antonine war which caused almost a whole year's continuous gloom.
Also compare the NT account to Amos 8:9, which speaks of darkness at noon occuring during God's judgment of Israel, an appropriate motif from the gospel authors' perspective:

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Amos 8:9
9 On that day, says the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight.

Mark 15:33
33 When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.
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Old 12-30-2006, 05:40 PM   #4
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Another issue: On http://www.bethlehemstar.net/dance/dance.htm#stop I read that "Jupiter was ahead of the Magi as they traveled south from Jerusalem to Bethlehem" and that Jupiter even stopped over Bethlehem. The stopping is explained through retrograde motion:
Can anyone confirm this date of Dec 25 BC?
What? Retrograde motion and the world stopped turning? Don't bother confirming the date. A bright planet is like a bright star. Rises in the east and sets in the west. Sorry. What do they think it's orbital period is - 4 minutes? The only thing you'd notice is a slightly different position than the night before. Where do they get this drivel? If Edwin Hubble was alive today he'd be turning in his grave.

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Old 12-30-2006, 06:12 PM   #5
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Jupiter came to a “stopped” position on December 25th directly over Bethlehem as witnessed from Jerusalem.
Well, Bethlehem appears to lie south-southwest of Jerusalem. That tells this pretty fair backyard astronomer that Jupiter will pass directly over Bethlehem once each and every day of each and every year as observed from Jerusalem. Now only about half of those passages will be in a dark sky and so be observable to naked-eye Magi, but we still lose a bit of the breathless wonder of Martin's tale.

The little planetarium out at our college isn't well-enough equipped to reconstruct the sky events of 2BC, though. So I can't say if Martin's specific circumstances are accurate. Virgo would, though, be at least near his spot just before dawn in late December.
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Old 12-30-2006, 08:56 PM   #6
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We don't actually have any writings from Thallus but we do have the writings of Julius Africanus from 221 A.D. "Thallus in the third book of his histories, explains away the darkness as an eclipse of the sun-unreasonably, as it seems to me."

Phlegon, a Greek author, wrote a chronology around 137 A.D. He said in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad (33 A.D) there was "the greatest eclipse of the sun" and that "it became night in the sixth hour of the day (noon) so that stars even appeared in the heavens. There was a great earthquake in Bithynia, and many things were overturned in Nicaea."
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Old 12-30-2006, 09:34 PM   #7
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We don't actually have any writings from Thallus but we do have the writings of Julius Africanus from 221 A.D. "Thallus in the third book of his histories, explains away the darkness as an eclipse of the sun-unreasonably, as it seems to me."
An eclipse of the sun has never lasted 3 hours, for the last 2000 years, looking from the same location, and in any event, you really don't have to explain any anamoly, just say God did it and that's it.
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Old 12-30-2006, 09:43 PM   #8
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Well, I had a nice post before IE decided to shut down all open windows to fix a problem with Windows Media Player.

The gist of what I had was as follows:

Jupiter did, in fact, begin retrograde on December 27, 2BCE. So what? It also retrograded: 7-17-7 BCE, 8-22-6 BCE, 9-25-5 BCE, 10-27-4BCE, 11-27-3 BCE, 1-26-1 CE, and so forth. Notice the predictable pattern--it takes about 13 months from the start of one retrograde phase to the start of the next. This was known to many ancient cultures. Several Greeks figured it out. The Arabs noted it. The Mayans noted it. It's predictable, and one cannot therefore justify identifying it with a 'miraculous' phenomenom--I might as well claim that I am the son of God because on the day that I was born, a bright ball of fire rose in the east.

On the other hand, if it was not a predictable occurance (and it cannot be--remember, it has to be miraculous or it is meaningless), then someone other than the wise men must have noticed it. But there is no record of any such celestial phenomenom. We have absolutely no reason to believe that any unique celestial occurance took place. We are therefore stuck in a kind of fork--if the Star of Bethelehem was Jupiter, then it was nothing special, and if it was not, someone other than the Magi should have noticed it. No one did (or, if someone did, e is being very conspicuous by es silence).

In addition, Herod's alleged execution of every boy under two suggests that some time had passed between Jesus' birth and the arrival of the Magi, further complicating the Jupiter theory. Jupiter's 'statis' would last only a couple of days, so it could not have led the Magi anywhere--their net travel would be more or less south (think of following the sun--in the morning you go east, in the evening you go west, and at the end of the day you are south), so unless they started in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, eh. A planetary conjunction does not solve the problem either, for the same reasons. It would be slow in coming and very predictable, and so would take no one by surprise; it would also last no more than a couple of days and would therefore be useless as a guide (not to mention the the planets involved would then proceed at different paces--good luck following that)(I cannot find a comprehensive list of known historical planetary conjunctions, though a great many websites refer to on somewhere between 7 and 2 BCE and do not quote their sources. Now I know how my professors felt. Grrrr.).

The links provided in the OP go directly to the book mentioned in the OP, whose purpose is to prove that the Star was real and meant exactly what the Bible says. Take with a grain of salt.

As far as the 'darkness covering the land' bit goes, I always thought (when I was a Christian and believed it had happened) that the darkness was simply a storm. Those who have lived in the Denver area during late spring or autumn will understand just how easily a distant thunderstorm can blacken the sky so that it literally appears as night. When I lived there, we'd get at least two such storms per year, so that was never particularly difficult for me to believe. Also, the Amos quote given by JK states that the sun would actually set at noon, not merely that things would get dark, so I wonder if the two were ever meant to be associated. The Amos passage is about a famine and drought of the words of the Lord, so I would guess that the sun setting would be part of the metaphor, rather than a description of an actual event. I don't think Mark would have tried to extracontextualize and literalize this passage so--it seems a bit much, even for him, to tell people that an event which they don't remember happening was prophesied in a way that they couldn't understand.

I know nothing of Thallus and little of Tacitus, so I'll leave that to the pros. I will only ask this:

Quote:
Phlegon, a Greek author, wrote a chronology around 137 A.D. He said in the fourth year of the 202nd Olympiad (33 A.D) there was "the greatest eclipse of the sun" and that "it became night in the sixth hour of the day (noon) so that stars even appeared in the heavens. There was a great earthquake in Bithynia, and many things were overturned in Nicaea."
Wasn't Phlegon one of the sun's horses?

Wait, no. What I meant to ask is, did Phlegon report this as history or was he quoting someone else?
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Old 12-30-2006, 10:13 PM   #9
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Phlegon may have been quoting someone, that is unknown but ti would be accurate to say his account was most likely accurate, consider if i say the declaration of independence was signed in 1776 on July 4th, we can obviously go check recorrds and say that that is correct, Phlegon most likely did the same thing.
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Old 12-30-2006, 10:20 PM   #10
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Everything you need to know about Thallus is here in an essay "Thallus" by RIchard Carrier in the II Library

Scroll down to "The Curious Case of Phlegon of Tralles."
Quote:
This quotation shows that Phlegon did not mention Jesus in this context at all (he may still have mentioned him in some other obscure context, if we believe Origen). Rather, Phlegon merely recorded a great earthquake in Bithynia, which is on the coast of the Black Sea, more than 500 miles away from Jerusalem--so there is no way this quake would have been felt near the crucifixion--and a magnificent noontime eclipse, whose location is not clear. If the eclipse was also in Bithynia, as the Phlegon quote implies but does not entail, it also could not have been seen in Jerusalem, any more than partially, since the track of a total eclipse spans only 100 miles and runs from west to east (Jerusalem is due south).
In fact, the only coincidence with the gospel story is the year (although some modern scholars calculate the eclipse in question to have actually occurred in 29 AD) and time: it began at the sixth hour. Prigent suspects this last detail is a corruption by another scribe drawing from the gospel stories, although a noon eclipse is particularly startling and might get special mention (although the total eclipse would only occur at noon in one location--are we to suppose it was in Nicaea?). What is most important, however, is that Phlegon says nothing about the eclipse occuring during a full moon or lasting three hours (both physical impossibilities), yet these details are attributed to him in the lines added to Africanus. Clearly the quote has been altered over time.
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