Category: Apologetics

Recently, Gretchen Passantino-Coburn posted an interesting piece on whether Jesus was trying to avoid the Cross when he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The piece very correctly points out that Jesus knew it was his Father’s will for him to die on the Cross and that he lived his life in complete submission to the Father’s will (thus also setting an example for us).

As a result, there was never any conflict between his will and the Father’s, properly speaking.

What are we to make, then, of his prayer, “Not my will by yours be done”?

The article makes a striking proposal:

[W]e argue below that it was not death on the cross that Christ was longing to avoid, but death in the Garden before the cross; and that Christ’s will was not different than the Father’s will, but in harmony with the Fathers’ will. We argue below that Christ, in danger of expiring in the Garden, cried out to the Father for the necessary power either to remain alive through his Garden experience, or, if he expired in the Garden, to be revived by the Father so that he would be alive for his coming crucifixion.

I have a different understanding of this passage, and Gretchen has very graciously invited me to do a follow-up piece for purposes of discussion.

 

The First Question

The first question we need to address is whether Jesus was about to expire in the garden of Gethsemane. According to the article,

Jesus was in danger of dying in the Garden. Luke says, “And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Matthew and Mark affirm, “he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me” (Matt. 26:37-38, cf. Mark 14:33-34).

[Theologian J. Oliver] Buswell notes that profuse perspiration is a medical sign of life-threatening shock, when the body is so traumatized that it cannot control basic life sustaining functions and instead “shuts down” preparatory to death.

What should we make of this argument?

 

“I Could Die”

The statement that he is sorrowful “to the point of death” is generally understood as hyperbole (exaggeration to make a point). This is a common mode of expression in the Bible and one that Jesus uses in the Gospels.

We even have similar sayings in English where the possibility of death is raised without it being meant literally (e.g., “I’m so embarrassed I could die”).

The possibility (probability) of hyperbole is so significant in this case that Jesus’ statement about being sorrowful “to the point of death” can’t be relied upon as proof he was literally about to die in the garden.

The argument for the claim thus depends critically on Jesus’ sweat becoming like blood and this being an indication of imminent death.

 

Is the Text Original?

The statement that his sweat became like blood is found only in Luke 22:44. It is not in Matthew, Mark, or John.

However, there are significant reasons to question whether this material was originally in the text of Luke. Most modern Bibles will carry a footnote on verses 43 and 44, like this one from the New American Bible:

These verses, though very ancient, were probably not part of the original text of Luke. They are absent from the oldest papyrus manuscripts of Luke and from manuscripts of wide geographical distribution.

It is risky to make a dramatic interpretive claim (Jesus was about to die in the garden barring divine intervention) concerning an event found in all three of the Synoptics if the key detail is found only in one Gospel and there is strong reason to think it was not in the original.

 

Is Bloody Sweat a Sign of Imminent Death?

If we assume that the statement was in the original, there is still a problem, because Buswell appears to have been mistaken about the nature of this phenomenon.

While rare, bloody sweat is a known medical condition. Referred to as hematidrosis (Greek, “blood-sweat”), it is caused when the capillaries rupture into the sweat glands.

When it does occur, hematidrosis frequently is the result of anxiety, and it has been successfully treated with beta-blockers such as propranolol, which are used (among other things) to treat anxiety.

However, it does not appear that hematidrosis is “a medical sign of life-threatening shock, when the body is so traumatized that it cannot control basic life sustaining functions and instead ‘shuts down’ preparatory to death.”

The condition is not on that order of magnitude. While often produced by anxiety, the condition is a dermatological one that involves the capillaries leaking into the sweat glands, not a sign of overall systemic shutdown.

I did a quick review of online medical literature and turned up many cases where hematidrosis was not a sign of impending death. (See, for example, here, where patients are noted to have had repeated instances of hematidrosis.)

Buswell, writing in the early 1960s, may have had less access to medical information about hematidrosis. In fact, the condition is rare enough that it had not been studied as much then as it has been now. As a result, it could be understandable for Buswell to draw inaccurate conclusions.

 

A Clearer Indication? An Explanation?

It also strikes me that, if the Evangelists meant us to understand that Jesus was about to die on the spot, in contravention of God’s plan for him to die on the Cross, they would have signaled this to the readers in a clearer way.

They also likely would have provided some explanation for why this last-minute crisis was occurring.

For example, was it a final attempt by Satan to foil God’s plan?

If so, how do we explain the Gospels’ insistence that it was Satan who prompted Judas to betray Jesus? Furthermore, Jesus himself describes his arrest (not the agony in the garden) as “the hour of darkness” (Luke 22:53), suggesting that Satan was behind it.

But if it wasn’t the devil that tried to bring about Jesus’ death in the garden, what did? It wasn’t the Father’s plan for him to die there, and so it wouldn’t have been the Father.

That would leave us with either an accident that seems to threaten God’s Providence or Jesus simply having a panic attack so severe that it threatened his life.

Personally, I’d be inclined to resist either of those suggestions.

 

An Alternative Theory

As an alternative theory of the event, I would propose that Jesus knew in advance that he would die on the Cross and that he was resolute toward this goal. However, it is one thing when death is remote and another when it is staring one in the face.

Thus Christ was able to deal serenely with the prospect of Lazarus’s death—and even remark on how it would bring glory to God—when he was still in Galilee (John 11:1-4), but he nevertheless wept when he was standing at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11:35-36).

This response is rooted in the death aversion that is part of human nature. Being in proximity to death causes aversive feelings in humans (fear, sorrow, revulsion), and that’s a good thing. It is part of God’s plan, and it leads us to try to preserve life.

By virtue of his human nature, Jesus had death aversion also, and—as with the rest of us—it manifested with particular intensity when the hour of his death drew close.

Nevertheless, he was resolute to go through with the climax of his mission.

 

“Not My Will But Yours Be Done”

Jesus statement “Not my will but yours be done” does not indicate an actual opposition of wills. Indeed, it indicates the opposite—that he is completely submissive to the Father’s will.

The paradoxical nature of this statement is to be understood along the lines of similar paradoxical statements that Jesus’ makes—e.g., “He who saves his life will lose it,” “The first will be last.”

These statements rely on ambiguity of language for their solution (i.e., they rely on the fact that terms like “saving” and “losing” and “first” and “last” can be taken in different senses).

In this case, the term that is subject to ambiguity is “will.” This can indicate a determination, decision, or choice—or it can indicate a wish, preference, desire, or similar emotional rather than volitional state.

One can even recognize that one’s wish is not going to be fulfilled, but still give voice to it as a way of expressing one’s feelings.

That ambiguity seems to be in play here. By making his statement, Jesus is expressing his fundamental submission to the Father’s will while giving voice to the fact that he is experiencing death aversion. His statement could be paraphrased, less paradoxically, as “Not what I might wish, but may what you determine be done.”

 

Feelings vs. Resolve

This does not imply that Jesus’ will is not united to the Father’s. Indeed, he indicates that it is united to the Father’s.

Rather, it implies that Jesus is feeling something different than what he wills. What he wills is to do what the Father has determined, but he is experiencing the feelings of aversion that are normal for human beings in the presence of their own, imminent demise.

His giving voice to those feelings allows him to achieve an emotional release—just as when he wept or when he cried out in anguish—but his will is still in submission to the Father’s.

This incident thus highlights the dynamics of Jesus’ experience as a man. We also find ourselves in situations, particularly when we are suffering or preparing to die, where we need to say what we’re feeling as part of dealing with our emotions—even though we are resolved in our wills to a particular course of action.

By way of conclusion, I’d like to thank Gretchen and Bob Passantino for defending the fact that Jesus was always resolved to do the Father’s will, and I’d like to thank Gretchen for her gracious invitation to do this post.

The four Gospels all mention the empty tomb of Christ, which has become a mainstay of modern apologetics.

But some argue that the idea of the empty tomb was a late development in early Christianity—that it only arose decades after the Crucifixion, and that early Christians thought Jesus had been “spiritually” raised from the dead, not literally.

It was only with the passage of time that this spiritual resurrection was interpreted as a literal one, leading to the idea of the empty tomb.

In arguing for this view, advocates of this view might ask why earlier documents of the New Testament don’t mention the empty tomb.

This is, in fact, something that Philip Jenkins is wondering about . . .

 

Jenkins on the Empty Tomb

Over at his blog, Dr. Jenkins writes:

Let me pose the problem. From the time of Mark’s gospel, around 70, the empty tomb became central to the Resurrection narrative, so central in fact that Jews evolve rival stories to account for the absence of Jesus’s body (Matt. 28. 11-15). The story evidently mattered in religious polemic. Over the next thirty years or so, the story is repeated in various forms in three other gospels. Yet even Luke, who knows the story, makes no use of it in Acts. Before the 90s, moreover, (the time of Matthew and Luke), the one account that we do have of the empty tomb does not refer to visions of a bodily risen Jesus at or near the site.

Where is the empty tomb story before 70?

Suppose I face an atheist critic, who makes the following argument. Yes, he says, early Christians believed that they encountered the risen Jesus, that they had visions, but these visions had no objective reality. They just arose from the hopes and expectations of superstitious disciples. Even then, Christians saw that Resurrection in spiritual, pneumatic, terms. Only after a lengthy period, some forty years in fact, did the church invent stories to give a material, bodily basis to that phenomenon, and the empty tomb was the best known example.

How can I respond? Help me.

Some have already responded in his combox, but I’d like to provide a fuller response, so let’s go.

 

Challenging a Premise

My first response to an atheist critic would be that I don’t accept one of the premises—that the Gospels were written at such late dates.

The book of Acts suddenly stops, without resolving the story of Paul’s trial and imprisonment, in A.D. 60. Whether Paul was exonerated or executed, either would have been a fitting ending to Acts, and the best explanation for why Luke stopped writing without finishing the story is that those events simply had not happened yet. In other words, Acts was written in A.D. 60.

Since Acts is the sequel to the Gospel of Luke, that means Luke was written no later than A.D. 60 and possibly quite a bit earlier.

Depending on your theory of the order in which the Gospels were composed, either Matthew or Mark (or both) were written before Luke, and that would push them into at least the A.D. 50s, which is the same period that most of Paul’s epistles were being written.

Indeed, in 2 Corinthians 8:18, written in the mid A.D. 50s, Paul tells the readers that he is sending them “the brother whose praise is in the Gospel.” This may be a reference to either Mark or Luke, both sometime travelling companions of Paul and both authors of Gospels.

Even John shows signs of being written in the A.D. 60s. He refers to things in Jerusalem as still standing that would have been devastated in A.D. 70 (cf. John 5:2), and in the literal Greek of John 21:19 he speaks of Peter’s death—which took place in A.D. 67—as still in the future (“This he said to show by what death he [Peter] will glorify God”—future tense in the Greek). (There’s also the fact that John expressly claims to be written by an eyewitness of the empty tomb itself.)

So, despite the dates you commonly hear assigned to the Gospels, the evidence is that they were actually written quite a bit earlier, and their composition overlapped the period in which the epistles were written (see John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament for more).

 

Challenging a Second Premise

KEEP READING.

In Galatians, St. Paul says at one point:

But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.

For before certain men came from James, he ate with the Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party.

And with him the rest of the Jews acted insincerely, so that even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity.

But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” [Gal. 2:11-14].

What are we to make of this?

Some among the Church Fathers thought that this was a fake disagreement that Paul and Peter engaged in for teaching purposes.

For example, in his Commentary on Galatians, St. Jerome states:

Now, if anyone thinks that Paul really opposed Peter and fearlessly insulted his predecessor in defense of evangelical truth, he will not be moved by the fact that Paul acted as a Jew among fellow Jews in order to win them for Christ. What is more, Paul would have been guilty of the same kind of dissimulation on other occasions, such as when he shared his head in Cenchrea, when he made an offering in Jerusalem after doing this, when he circumcised Timothy and went barefoot-all of which are clearly aspects of Jewish religious ritual.

Later, he writes:

Just as people who walk normally but pretend to limp do not have a problem with their feet, though there is a reason why they [pretend to] limp, so also Peter, aware that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters but only keeping the commandments of God, ate beforehand with Gentiles but for a time withdrew from them to avoid alienating the Jews from their faith in Christ. Paul likewise employed the same pretense as Peter and confronted him and spoke in front of everyone, not so much to rebuke Peter as to correct those for whose sake Peter had engaged in simulation. Now, if anyone is not convinced by this interpretation, that Peter was not in error and Paul did not rashly rebuke his elder, he must account for why Paul criticized another for doing the same thing he had done.

St. John Chrysostom has the same interpretation here, and Jerome reports that Origen held it as well, though it does not appear in his surviving writings.

The Church Fathers were far from unanimous in this opinion, however, and it seems that Jerome and the others were in the minority.

The majority view, represented by St. Augustine, was that the two apostles had a real difference of opinion about the appropriateness of Peter’s actions. St. Augustine, in particular, points out that Jerome’s theory would involve the two apostles in lying.

A while back, I was reading one of Pope Benedict XVI’s audiences, where he weighed in on the subject:

Here the other epicenter of Mosaic observance emerges: the distinction between clean and unclean foods which deeply separated practicing Jews from Gentiles. At the outset Cephas, Peter, shared meals with both; but with the arrival of certain Christians associated with James, “the Lord’s brother” (Gal 1: 19), Peter began to avoid contact with Gentiles at table in order not to shock those who were continuing to observe the laws governing the cleanliness of food and his decision was shared by Barnabas.

This decision profoundly divided the Christians who had come from circumcision and the Christians who came from paganism.

This behavior, that was a real threat to the unity and freedom of the Church, provoked a passionate reaction in Paul who even accused Peter and the others of hypocrisy: “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” (Gal 2: 14).

In fact, the thought of Paul on the one hand, and of Peter and Barnabas on the other, were different: for the latter the separation from the Gentiles was a way to safeguard and not to shock believers who came from Judaism; on the contrary, for Paul it constituted the danger of a misunderstanding of the universal salvation in Christ, offered both to Gentiles and Jews.

If justification is only achieved by virtue of faith in Christ, of conformity with him, regardless of any effect of the Law, what is the point of continuing to observe the cleanliness of foods at shared meals? In all likelihood the approaches of Peter and Paul were different: the former did not want to lose the Jews who had adhered to the Gospel, and the latter did not want to diminish the saving value of Christ’s death for all believers.

It has been noted that the fact that, after describing his rebuke of Peter, Paul does not immediately say, “And I won, and Peter agreed with me!” is a sign that he actually lost the argument.

If so, it may have given him cause for further reflection, which may have led him to consider situations in which some accommodation to Jewish practices was warranted–even if the situation in Antioch was not one of them. Pope Benedict noted:

It is strange to say but in writing to the Christians of Rome a few years later (in about the middle of the 50s A.D.), Paul was to find himself facing a similar situation and asked the strong not to eat unclean foods in order not to lose or scandalize the weak: “it is right not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that makes your brother stumble” (Rm 14: 21).

The incident at Antioch thus proved to be as much of a lesson for Peter as it was for Paul.

Only sincere dialogue, open to the truth of the Gospel, could guide the Church on her journey: “For the kingdom of God does not mean food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rm 14: 17).

It is a lesson that we too must learn: with the different charisms entrusted to Peter and to Paul, let us all allow ourselves to be guided by the Spirit, seeking to live in the freedom that is guided by faith in Christ and expressed in service to the brethren [General Audience, Oct. 1, 2008].

Thus Paul might have regarded Peter as wrong in the Antioch incident but have been led to more closely consider situations in which accommodating Jewish practices was permissible and even needed.

That could explain Jerome’s question about Paul later did similar things himself.

It’s obvious that the four Gospels agree on the main facts about Jesus’ life:

• He lived in first century Palestine.
• He travelled through Galilee and Judea.
• He worked miracles.
• He taught.
• He was crucified in Jerusalem at the time of Passover during the administration of Pontius Pilate.
• He rose from the dead.
• And so on.

All that’s obvious.

 

Contradictions Among the Gospels?

Critics of the Gospels therefore tend to focus on lesser matters—various differences among the Gospels on matters of detail.

The charges of contradictions among the Gospels tend to vanish, however, if one reads the texts carefully and if one understands the way ancient narrative texts worked and the freedom that authors had in how they presented their material.

They were, for example, free to paraphrase, they were free to place events in non-chronological order for literary effect, they were permitted to simplify and streamline events to just the main facts, and they were free to draw out different implications.

 

Rehearsed Witnesses?

Defenders of the Gospels sometimes point out that these kinds of differences are what we would expect of Gospels written by eyewitnesses or based on eyewitness testimony.

After all, in a courtroom you expect eyewitnesses to see things from different perspectives, to not all say exactly the same things, to paraphrase, and to alternately overlap and omit detail.

If the witnesses have too much harmony in their testimony—if they all say exactly the same things in exactly the same words, with no variation of detail—then it’s a sign that the witnesses have been rehearsed and their testimony becomes suspect.

They may be colluding with each other instead of telling what they really experienced.

 

Signs of Credibility

When evaluating testimony, lawyers (and juries!) look for signs of credibility in the testimony of the witnesses.

One sign of credibility is when tiny details do line up, but they’re the kind of details that the witnesses would not have thought to conspire about.

At first, these details don’t leap out at you. They’re hidden until you do a closer study of the testimony.

But when they harmonize, they give added evidence that you’re hearing the truth.

Are there such hidden harmonies among the Gospels?

Yes!

 

A Question for Philip

Here’s a hidden harmony between the material recorded in John’s Gospel and Luke’s Gospel.

KEEP READING.

Among skeptics, Dr. Aaron Adair is sometimes hailed as the “go to” guy on the Star of Bethlehem.

He’s even written a book arguing that the Star didn’t exist.

Recently, he engaged a post I wrote about the Star of Bethlehem.

Here is my reply . . .

 

First Things First

First, you can read our previous interaction in the comments box on this post.

I want to thank Dr. Adair for striving to maintain a positive tone, both in the combox and in his book, The Star of Bethlehem: A Skeptical View.

Although he has occasional lapses (who doesn’t?), it’s clear that he is striving to avoid the kind of snark and venom that are often found in works by some skeptics.

As a non-fan of snark and venom (including when it is used by Catholics), I appreciate that.

 

Various Proposals

In his book, Adair rightly argues against a number of interpretations of what the Star was, and this is to be expected.

The Star can’t have been all of the different things that have been proposed, and some of the proposals are easier to rule out than others.

Sometimes part of his argument is based on the erroneous (but popular) idea that Jesus was born sometime before 4 B.C.

I’ve argued why that was not the case before, on grounds completely unrelated to the Star (see here, here, and here).

Because he uses the more popular dating, Adair too quickly discounts some possible understandings of the Star, but even in these cases, he has an argument to fall back on.

 

Adair’s Ultimate Argument

For Adair, the ultimate argument against any understanding of the Star as a natural (but providential) phenomenon, is based on the alleged motion of the Star as described by Matthew.

This argument is found in chapter 7 of his book, “           Failure of All Natural Hypotheses,” and it is regularly presented as the “clincher” for why any particular view of the Star as a natural phenomenon cannot be true.

Adair summarizes the argument this way:

Matthew talks about a Star that travels south towards a particular destination, leading on eastern sages, until it comes to its destination, stops and hangs over a particular hovel in the small town of Bethlehem. No object in the sky can do such a thing, not by a long shot.

Although I had not read Adair’s book when I wrote my original post, this was precisely the view I was arguing against.

The text of Matthew does not, in fact, require the star to move in an abnormal manner.

So in the combox, I asked Adair how he would respond, and he provided a brief response.

Since he has more length to argue his view in his book, however, I will reply to what is found there.

 

Going Greek

In my original post, I did not discuss the Greek text of Matthew because I try to keep my blog posts as accessible as possible and because 95%+ of the time, there is no need to appeal to the original language (or, at least, no reason to get into the details).

Adair, however, does rely on the Greek text, and so I’ll need to discuss that here.

Upon reading Adair’s argument concerning the Greek, it became apparent that this was not an area he had full command of. Indeed, the Acknowledgements of his book state:

In order to engage in the texts, I needed to learn the Greek language, in which Carl Anderson and William Blake Tyrell have helped me, though I dare not claim proficiency as they can.

Adair is to be credited for making this admission, and he’s trying to do the best he can with the knowledge of Greek he has.

But it is clear that his handling of the Greek is problematic.

 

Some Examples

To put it briefly, Adair uses incorrect grammatical terminology, does not understand the way a major Greek verb tense works, and overtaxes the language to support his conclusion, not recognizing the degree of flexibility it contains.

As an example of the first (incorrect grammatical terminology), he at one point refers to Greek prepositions taking certain “declinations.” He also identifies the genitive as a “declination.”

This is inaccurate. Greek prepositions do not take “declinations.”

They take “cases” (e.g., genitive, dative, accusative), and the genitive is a case. (This will be familiar if you’ve had Latin, German, or other languages that use cases.)

This is a small matter, though. These could just be slips of the tongue, and we all have those.

What is more serious is his misunderstanding of the way a major Greek verb tense works.

 

In an Instant?

A key part of Adair’s argument depends on a Greek tense known as the “aorist.”

We don’t have this tense in English, but it is the single most common tense in the Greek New Testament.

It is even more frequently used than the present tense, and so understanding it correctly is very important.

Adair notes that two Greek verbs used for the Star (erchomai = “come/go” and histami = “stand”) are both in the aorist tense.

He claims that the aorist tense means that the Star, in an instant, came and stopped its motion in the sky.

Here’s what Adair argues:

As the verb [erchomai] is here conjugated (as a participle), it means that in an instant (the aorist tense) it came to its destination. . . .

The verb [histami] is again conjugated like erchomai to indicate that the Star came to a standstill in an instant using the aorist tense.

This is false.

 

The Abused Aorist

Adair is simply wrong about the meaning of the aorist tense. Greek does not have a tense devoted to things that happen instantaneously. Neither does English. Neither does any language I am aware of.

In English, if you want to signify that something happened instantly, you need to modify the verb with an adverb, like “instantly” or “immediately.”

The same thing is true in Greek. You need to use an adverb like euthus (“immediately,” “at once,” “straight away,” “directly”). In fact, the Gospel of Mark is renown for using euthus regularly just for dramatic effect.

The aorist means something else.

In fact, it tells you very little about the event it is describing.

 

What This Tense Means

The aorist tense is usually (though not always) used to refer to an event in the past, but it tells you very little about that event.

In particular, it does not tell you whether the event was finished or ongoing at the time you are speaking of.

It leaves this matter undefined, which is why it is called the “aorist” tense.

“Undefined” is what the word “aorist” means (this is a case where word origins do point to the meaning of a word).

For example, suppose I was speaking of a particular time last night and I said, “Bob built a fire.”

If I used the aorist tense to say this, you would not be able to tell whether Bob had finished building the fire at the time I was speaking of or whether he was still building it then.

The aorist leaves those matters undefined, and if you want to know the answer to them, you have to look to something other than the verb tense.

Thus William Mounce summarizes the aorist this way:

The aorist indicates an undefined action normally occurring in the past [p. 194].

(For introductory-level presentations of what the aorist does and doesn’t mean, see William Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek and D. A. Carson’s Exegetical Fallacies. For more advanced discussions, see Daniel Wallace’s         Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics and Frank Stagg’s classic article The Abused Aorist).

 

The Bottom Line

The bottom line for our purposes is that the aorist tense is not devoted to actions that happen in an instant, and so Adair is wrong to infer from its use in Matthew that the Star “instantly” came and stood at a particular place in the sky.

It is true that the Star came to stand above the house where Jesus was, but the use of the aorist does not tell us that this happened through a sudden, instantaneous arresting of its motion.

It may have moved in an entirely normal manner to arrive above the house for the magi to see.

This leads to another question . . .

 

A Question of Leadership

Another key part of Adair’s argument concerns another verb that Matthew uses.

Adair states:

The word that describes how the Star “went before” the Magi is the verb proago, which means to lead forward.

But in the context of Matthew, it is even more specific because the verb takes a direction object—that which the verb is acting on—and that direct object is clearly the Magi.

As such, the Star was leading the Magi, bringing them forth to their destination; the Star is doing more than standing in a certain direction or even moving about, but it is actually leading the Magi on.

Here we have another incorrect use of grammatical terminology. Verbs do not “take a direction object.” They can have a direct object. That’s normal with any verb that is being used transitively.

Adair is correct that the verb proago can mean “lead,” when it is used transitively, and let’s suppose that this is the meaning here.

Does this imply an unusual motion on the part of the star?

No.

 

Overtaxing the Language

Suppose I am speaking about a camping trip in which I and my companions got lost at night.

Fortunately for us, we realized that the moon was in the southern sky that night, and so we were able to determine our directions. It also provided light for us as we walked south for a few miles until we got back to our camp.

If I said, “The moon led us back to camp,” am I implying that the moon moved in an unusual way?

Of course not.

The moon moved entirely in the expected way, arcing from east to west at a rate of about 15 degrees per hour, but still staying ahead of us in the southern sky as we walked the short distance back to camp.

Nothing unusual about its motion at all.

Of course the moon is not an intelligent being and so, literally speaking, it does not lead anybody. But we still speak in this way in English, and Greek has the same flexibility.

I could say the same thing about a star that was in the sky in front of us and moved normally.

As a result, Adair is overtaxing the language—trying to get more out of it than one fairly can.

And that’s even granting his preferred translation of proago as “lead.”

 

Even More Flexibility

Most words have more than one meaning, and proago is no exception.

One of the most prestigious Greek dictionaries is the Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. It’s so famous that people just call it “Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich-Danker” or even “BAGD.”

In addition to listing the transitive use of proago and noting that it means “to take or lead from one position to another by taking charge, lead forward, lead, or bring out”, BAGD notes that proago also has an intransitive usage.

It gives the meaning of the intransitive usage as “to move ahead or in front of, go before, lead the way, precede.”

BAGD gives two examples of this usage, both of them from Matthew.

One is Matthew 21:9, where the crowds go before Jesus during the Triumphal Entry. They obviously are not leading Jesus. He is going into Jerusalem any way, but the crowds precede him on his journey.

The second instance is Matthew 2:9, where the star precedes the magi. The situation is the same: They are going to Bethlehem anyway (based on what they learned in Herod’s court). The star just happens to precede them on their journey.

The recognition of other meanings for proago is not unique to BAGD but will be found in any standard Greek dictionary.

This means there is even more flexibility to the language than mentioned in the previous section of this post, and so Adair is overtaxing the language to an even greater degree.

 

Therefore . . .

We see that Adair’s argument from the Greek is flawed and does not prove what he wishes it to.

Whether you take proago to mean “lead” or simply “go before,” we do not have any indication that the star moved in an unusual way.

Neither does the use of the aorist tense indicate that a rapidly moving star instantly came to a stop.

Given the fact that we are told it is a star implies that we should first seek to understand it as moving in the normal way that stars do, and only if this effort fails should we resort to another hypothesis.

 

It Doesn’t Fail

The trip to Bethlehem likely took between one and four hours (depending on things like whether they were mounted, the darkness, and the unevenness of the terrain), so the star would have moved between 15 and 60 degrees in the night sky.

If that much. They might have left before it got dark, so the actual motion may have been even less.

There is no reason why the star could not have been in the southern sky, moved in a normal east-west arc, remaining in the same basic part of the sky as they journeyed.

Then, when they approached the house—from whatever angle they approached it—they noted that the star was in the part of the sky above the house.

Nothing in the text of Matthew—in English or in Greek—requires the star to move in an abnormal way.

I’d like to thank Dr. Adair for engaging in the comments box on this issue, and I look forward to any further response he would like to make.

The Star of Bethlehem is endlessly fascinating. All kinds of theories about what it was have been proposed.

Based on the way Matthew describes it, some have thought it was a supernatural manifestation that led the magi around.

Some have even suggested it was a flying saucer.

Some have said it was a myth and never really existed.

All of these views are based on the idea that the star didn’t move the way a normal star would.

Is this correct?

Here are 8 things to know and share . . .

 

1) Why would people think the star’s motion was unusual?

There is a popular impression that the magi began following the star in their eastern homeland and that it led them to Jerusalem. This is taken to mean that the star moved from east to west.

From Jerusalem, they go to Bethlehem, which is south of Jerusalem.

Then, according to this impression, the star stops and hovers over the house where Jesus was residing.

The star is thus taken to move from east to west, turn south, and then hover.

That makes it sound like a light in the sky that isn’t a normal star but something else.

However, this account is mistaken.

 

2) Why is it mistaken?

This view goes wrong because of the assumption that the magi were following the star.

That’s not what Matthew says.

Let’s look at what he does say:

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying,  “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him” [Matthew 2:1-2].

The phrase “in the East” is ambiguous. It might mean that they were in the East when they saw it (they were from the East, after all), or it may mean that they saw it when it rose over the eastern horizon.

Except for the stars that never set, stars rise over the eastern horizon and set below the western horizon, just like the sun does.

Either way, this does not tell us much, because the event occurred between one and two years earlier, based on the time they tell Herod (Matthew 2:16).

The apparent position of the star would have changed radically over that time, as almost all stars do as the earth orbits the sun.

In any event, Matthew does not say that the magi were following the star. He does not say that it led them to Jerusalem.

Instead, he says something that suggests something else.

 

3) What does he say that suggests they weren’t just following the star?

It’s the fact that they ask where the King of the Jews has been born.

If the star were leading them around by the nose, as it were, then they wouldn’t have had to ask this question. They would have just waited until nightfall and then continued following the star until it led them to the newborn king.

Thus, we have no indication that they followed the star from their homeland in the East to Jerusalem.

Instead, they saw the star from their homeland, realized that it implied the birth of a new king for the Jews, and then went to the royal palace in Jerusalem, where you might expect to find the newborn king.

After a consultation, Herod tells them that the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem, and they set out again.

But even here, Matthew does not say they were following the star.

 

4) What does he say?

He states:

When they had heard the king they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy [Matthew 2:9-10].

So after they leave King Herod, they see the star again. Matthew introduces this by saying “lo” (i.e., “behold!”), indicating something surprising or remarkable.

The fact that they “rejoiced exceedingly with great joy” also suggests that they weren’t following the star. It was a remarkable and joyous (and providential) coincidence that the star was in front of them when this happened.

So it wasn’t that they were following the star. They had stopped to ask where they should go, they were told Bethlehem, and then as they were going to Bethlehem they were surprised and joyous to see the same star in front of them.

This was a providential coincidence, but they would have gone to Bethlehem even if they had not seen the star in front of them.

 

5) Does the fact that the star “went before them” indicate unusual motion on the star’s part?

No. It simply means that the star remained in front of them during the short trip to Bethlehem.

Bethlehem is only six miles from Jerusalem, and since the star was in front of them when they began the six mile walk (or ride), it remained in the same general part of the sky during the short trip.

 

6) Does the fact that the star “came to rest over the place where the child was” indicate unusual motion?

No, but the English translation here (the RSV) is a misleading one.

Saying that it “came to rest” suggests that it stopped moving and started resting. That could suggest unusual motion for a star.

But what the Greek says would be better translated “until it came and stood” or “until it came to stand” over the place.

This just means that, when they drew near at the house, the magi observed that this star appeared to be above the house in the sky—as numerous other stars would have been as well.

This does not mean that this star or the others above the house froze in their motions, only that this was where they were as the magi approached.

It’s another providential coincidence, but it does not indicate unusual motion (or lack of motion) on the part of the star.

 

7) So we don’t have an indication that the star moved in an abnormal manner?

No. The magi were not following it as it zigged and zagged in the sky. In fact, it did not zig and zag in the sky.

So far as we know, the star moved in the entirely normal way that stars do.

It was simply a providential coincidence that, as the magi were on their way to Bethlehem they saw the star in front of them, that it stayed generally in front of them as they journeyed the six miles, and—when they neared the house—was in the part of the sky that was over the house where Jesus was.

 

8) After noting that it was before them when they began their journey, and that it continued to remain before them as they went, could they have used the star to indicate which house in Bethlehem they should check?

This is possible, but they also could have asked if any local families of the line of David had a child of the right age and then noted, upon going to that house, that the star was above it.