FOR THE CUM GRANO SALIS FILE:

FOLLOWING THE WISE MEN (New York Post)

By JOHN J. MILLER

December 23, 2003 -- FOR a few minutes on Christmas, children may set down their new toys from the man in the red suit and listen to transmissions from a machine on the red planet. On Thursday, the European Space Agency is scheduled to guide a British probe called the Beagle II onto the surface of Mars in what should become the first successful landing there since NASA's Mars Pathfinder in 1997.

But while Mars grabs all the extraterrestrial attention this holiday ("The Beagle has landed!"), normally Christmas is the season of Jupiter, because there's a very good chance that the biggest planet in our solar system was the Star of Bethlehem.

That's the theory of Michael Molnar, a former Rutgers University astronomer who proposed this surprising idea several years ago. Ever since, he's been gaining converts - including many people of faith who don't often look to science for confirmation of their religious beliefs.

Oddly enough, the story begins with an ancient bronze coin about the size of a quarter. When Molnar isn't gazing through a telescope, he collects old coins. In 1990, he bought one minted in Antioch for $50. It featured an image of Aries the ram and a star.

Molnar did some research and learned that Aries was a symbol of Judea. What's more, the planet Jupiter often signaled the birth of kings. Working on a computer, Molnar discovered that on the morning of April 17, 6 B.C., Jupiter rose in the east, in the sign of Aries. Joining it there were the sun, the moon and Saturn - each one a meaningful portent.

If that sounds like a bunch of astrological gobbledygook, then you're thinking too much like someone in the 21st century. Today, there's a big difference between astronomers who work at universities and astrologers who dispense dating advice. Two thousand years ago, there was no distinction. Early scientists studied the movements of the stars and planets because they wanted to divine hidden meanings in the night sky.

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I'm skeptical. The meanings of astrological events and phenomena are notoriously mutifacted and inconsistent. Aries, Jupiter, etc. meant a lot of different things and once one finds an interesting astronomical confluence like this one in 6 B.C.E. it wouldn't be too hard also to find pretty much whatever meaning one is looking for. Astrology works, insofar as it does, because it is flexible enough to make some sense out of any situation it is applied to. You can read more about the theory at Dr. Molnar's web page. He is a reputable astronomer but he doesn't seem to have any training in ancient history or numismatics, which makes me nervous. There have been a great many theories that have tried to find a historical/astronomical basis for the star of Bethlehem and none of them have convinced many people. The web page quotes a bunch of reviews, but it's not clear that anyone quoted is an expert on ancient Palestine in the first century. Has anyone seen any reviews in serious journals in the fields of biblical studies and ancient Judaism? It would be great fun if he actually made a convincing case but, I repeat, I'm skeptical.