Seeker2000

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?

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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?

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:
Can anyone with some astronomical knowledge either confirm or refute this?

Boro Nut

Yes. His back passage. Somebody obviously pulled this out of their arse.

Boro Nut

John Kesler

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:

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:

Boro Nut

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.

Boro Nut

Coragyps

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.

goldenroad

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."

aa5874

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.

rjf

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:

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?

goldenroad

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.

Toto

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."