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an idea.
Speaker 2: The population of atheists this country is going through.
Speaker 1: The rule, rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If
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Speaker 3: Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness.
Truth Fusian wisdom will come to you that way.
Speaker 1: Assume nothing, question everything, and start thinking. This is the
Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews.
Speaker 3: There is a video version of what you're about to hear.
My interview with doctor Aaron Adair. He wrote a book
called The Star of Bethlehem, a skeptical view. Now he's
a physicist and he has done a lot of research
into the Nativity story, the background of Jesus as a
mythological character. Was there a real Jesus? Well, he's got
a perspective on that. We talk about Matthew versus Luke,
and then the earlier pagan question mark origins of so
many Christmas traditions. I do enjoy walking into the house
of a devout believer and being like not Christian, that's
not Christian. Not Christian. Ooh, definitely not Christian. And I
don't say anything. I'm not that guy, but I do
have those thoughts. I also have this thought since I've
got a few minutes and I just want to vent
I enjoyed the holiday. I don't love Christmas like I
love Halloween. Halloween it's a lot more personality, I think.
And it's not just because it's it it's dark. I
just think there are more layers to it. Right Christmas
to me, you know, we get together with those we
care about in my house, we open gifts and we
enjoy great food, and we say language of love. We
actually have a tradition where we write down our history
for the years, so we talk about some of the
big things that we did or didn't do, want to do,
learn thought, et cetera. And then we sit around in
a big circle and we share those and so you know,
this year I did this, and I was given the
honor of that, and we're going to talk about the
stuff that made twenty twenty five not suck. And then
at the end we all play some games and hug
and everybody goes home. Christmas right. We got a Christmas tree.
It's a little led tree that we got for one
hundred bucks years ago at home depot. It's one of
the it's led, so you just walk by and you
step on the little switch and you can make it white,
you can make it colorful, you can make it static,
you can make it flash or blink or do whatever.
I'm in that's my kind of tree. The thing goes
up in three minutes and it looks amazing. And some
Christmas music I do enjoy, even a few of the
songs that talk about the baby Jesus. Now this makes
some atheist's head explode. I enjoy the song Oh Holy Night.
I know it's about Jesus. I know that, but I
love the melody of it. I will play it sometimes
on the piano. I can separate in my brain the
fact that it's mythology. I just kind of dig how
the song vibes. And some people can't go there, and
that's totally fine. But I'm able to with some of
the tunes separate them. But I do understand the feeling
of cynicism that does creep up when this time of
year hits, because so much of it is just so
damn happy. And I don't mean like a healthy version
of happiness. You're centered, you feel warm in your heart,
you are secure and content, and I don't know whatever
happy is in that sound. I'm talking about those ads
for the retailers who are desperate for us to go
into massive debt to buy shit that people will use
for five minutes before they toss it away and then
the music plays. All of these commercials have the same
kind of music, ding ding ding ding ding ding ding
ding ding dinging. Nothing's that happy. Nothing is that happy
unless you're six years old. That kind of music probably
makes you crazy. The bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells,
so many bells.
Speaker 2: Stop with the bells.
Speaker 3: Stop it. There are perfect looking people with perfect hair
and perfect skin, perfect teeth, wearing all of their perfect
red and green attire, hugging and laughing and womping through
the aisles of Target or Walmart or wherever, or the
jewelry stores. Oh, those commercials are amazing, aren't they. A
guy walks It's always a guy. He walks in and
he picks out the perfect ring or the perfect necklace
for the woman that he loves. It's never a non
hetero couple. It's always a man and a woman. And
he goes in and then he goes home and there's
a special dinner, or they're in front of the fireplace
and he opens up that little box and a bobble
blings and she starts to cry and they hug and
it's so beautiful. And I'm like, that guy just went
into dead at twenty one percent interest to buy a
five thousand dollars rock. I just don't understand it. It's
a rock, it's a shiny rock. It's a rock. How
long by your knockoff for fifty bucks? No one can
tell the difference. I don't think we assess our love.
We don't measure our love for each other based on
how many zeros exist before the decimal point on the risk.
I just don't. But that's so much of what the
holiday is. And then I'm driving down our neighborhood street
and I see Christmas decorations. Now I'm in, I've got
Christmas decorations. There are more winter decorations. We've got the
big deer. I got some big deer. We've had them
for seven years. We put him out, and I've got
red and blue and white lights. I actually make a pond.
There's a river that goes and it creates a pond
with a neon outline, and I cast some blue green
hues upon the rock of the house to make it
look like a winter scene. And it's so pretty, and
I enjoy looking at it. Hell I enjoy displaying it
for everybody else and us. I'm cruising down the road.
We've got a big inflatable snow globe, so pretty, a
big Santa Claus. There's a snowman that looks like he's
made out of giant styrofoam, with the carrot nose and
the coal eyes and the scarf and the little twig hand.
He's adorable. We've got the big toy soldiers from the Nutcracker.
Somebody down the street has one that looks like it's
eight feet tall. I'm like, how fun is that? How
festive is that? And then I see the Nativity scenes?
Is there anything more kitchy on this planet than a
Nativity scene? You know what I'm saying. First of all,
I think about the one that looks like two t
rexes fighting each other. Have you seen that? They're everywhere?
They are ubiquitous, So if you haven't just pay attention.
You're going to go by, and it's supposed to be
Mary and Joseph on each side of the baby, Jesus
looking down, and all of a sudden your brain flips
and you don't see Mary, Joseph and the baby. You
see two tea rexes fighting with each other. And now
whenever I cruise by one of those, that's all I see.
That's all I see. But there are nativities for the mantle,
and there are nativities on wall paintings, and there are
of courseivities in yards everywhere. And I, as a former
evangelical Bible believing Nativity seen believing Christian, now I see
not the miraculous magical birth of the hero of the story.
I'm like God decided to save humanity by knocking up
an unwed teenagers so the baby could spend thirty some
years doing undocumented miracles before becoming a bloody meat pinota
to rescue us from the torture chamber that he himself created.
Because that omniscient, omnipotent deity couldn't properly blueprint his own creation.
Everybody else is doing the Christmas pageant, and they bring
some actual baby in and They've got a Mary and
a Joseph in their role in their little biblical attire.
Some churches bring live animals in Oh, look a camel,
a donkey, a sheep. There are drive through Nativity scenes.
You stay in your car and you weave through on
a road in a parking lot, all of these scenes. Ah.
There's the wise men. Ah, there's herod Ah. There's Bethlehem,
there's the Manger. There's light and happiness and confetti and
probably somebody at the end of the road with a
Bible asking you to drop to your knees to accept
the baby Jesus that you just saw a block before. Kitchie,
I'm just saying it's Kitchie. Now, I will say that
I am all about these anti Ice Nativity displays. These
have become a flashpoint in the United States. Have you
seen them? If you have not, you should Google search
them because wow, and this is legit. There are progressive, egalitarian,
humanistic believers, whether it's an individual Christian or somebody in
a neighborhood, ergy, an entire church, a whole church. They
are protesting these kidnappings off of our streets by Ice.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement otherwise known as the American Gestapo,
and so they're putting nativities out that comment on the
atrocity and injustice it all. Lake Street Church, Evanston, Illinois.
They've got a baby Jesus in the manger. He is
wrapped in a silver emergency blanket and Jesus's wrists are
zip tied. Mary is outside the actual manger building. She's
got a plastic gas mask gone. She's being flanked by
Roman soldiers who are dressed up in ice tactical gear.
I mean, it's powerful stuff. There is another church, Urban
Village Church in Chicago that has a sign at the
manger and it says this quote due to ice activity
in our community. The Holy Family is in Saint Susannah
Parish in Deda, Massachusetts, has a Nativity scene that's empty,
replaced only with a hand painted sign that says ice
was here. Of course, news agencies and Magaville are losing
their minds. The Fox News types are just absolutely soiling themselves. Ironically,
there are some who say that, well, because these churches
are making a political statement, especially in contradiction to the
actions of our government, they should lose their tax exempt status,
which is stupid. It's just so crazy because those same
megachurches have been endorsing political candidates from the stage, from
behind the pulpits on the podiums. They're just literally saying
vote here. Some churches handing out voter guides. Jesus wants
you to vote Republican. Those churches, they get to skate
the churches who are making commentary about how their Jesus
went hard against the money any changers and loved everybody
and would never throw somebody in the back of a
van to have them shipped off to a torture chamber somewhere.
Those people, no, no, they're in the crosshairs because they've
broken our state church separation laws. Just so stupid. But
the actual Nativity scenes, the ones that are playing it
straight to me, they are like a Mentos commercial, a
Fanta commercial. They're just too freaking sweet. Anyway, I do
fight cynicism like I'm two people, fun, amazing, wonderful Christmas
and you've got to be shitting me. This is marketing
and retail and guilt and shame and mythology Christmas and
I tend to pendle them swing back and forth. How
about you today, Let's talk Christmas with a physicist who
has been talking a lot about the cosmology of the
story and there's more to it than you might think.
And then the rest of the myth broken down. So
let's get into that again. There's a video. It is
linked in the description box. That interview happens. Next, let's
talk to a physicist and someone who has d constructed
the Biblical Nativity story. Aaron Adair. Good to see you,
my friend.
Speaker 2: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me over.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about the birth of the baby Jesus. Jesus
is the reason for the season. By the way, the
war on Christmas is that underway. I haven't browsed Fox
News recently, but I know that's an annual mantra them atheist, secular, humanist, etc.
They hate Christmas and they want we were shaming people
who say Merry Christmas. You've heard this story right Eron.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and I think you are right that Fox
who's already has their anti Christmas war or lights out
nor learning Ingram is already talking about the Grinches of
Christmas going around ruining our wonderful holiday with our evil
secular Muslim Buddhist Satanists commination of things. Because that's obviously
what we do we just go around hating Christmas so
much that we mix all religions and none in our
war against people that just woke up on the wrong
side of the bed.
Speaker 3: How do you address the question you're an atheist or
you know, don't believe in a literal baby Jesus came
to save the world, blah blah blah. Why in the
world would you ever celebrate Christmas? Aaron Adare.
Speaker 2: It's fun and is the way that we try to
make one part of the year a little bit nicer.
It's fundamentally traditioned in the same sort of way that
today is Friday. But I don't think of the Norse
god Friga or Freya on this sort of day. It's
just happens to be what we call it, and we
happen to celebrate it because it's the end of the
work week. We have found a way to make this
time of the year interesting. Why not keep on with
the a tradition that's fun.
Speaker 3: So I saw an article, one of many protests by apologists.
This one was on the Gospel Coalition site from a
couple of years ago, and it said, no modern Christmas
tradition can draw a straight line to any clear and
decisive pagan origin. In other words, there are no Pagan
links to the holiday according to this particular Christian site. Aaron,
how would you respond.
Speaker 2: I will say it is complicated, and of course if
they need decisive evidence, that sounds like where you set
the bar to whatever level you need to be in denial. Now,
plenty of traditions around Christmas are probably independent of the
quote unquote pagan world. It's not really well evidenced that
the Christmas tree is ultimately a Pagan origin, though many
have tried for that. On the other hand, the fact
that we have this gift giving and all this merrymaking
at this approximate time of the year, which you also
find in like Roman celebrations like Saturnalia, which included gift giving,
it's hard to say that there is no relationship. And
ultimately how that all worked out is lost. We don't
have that greate a documentation, say in the fourth century,
because well, first off, most people are literate. They're not
writing down today where it's celebrating a new tradition, and
I'm writing this down in Latin that I can't write in.
Speaker 3: Do you believe there was a literal Jesus. I'm not
trying to put you on the hook, but I know
the mythicist historicist debate is always a hot one. Where
do you fall?
Speaker 2: So this is where I would be an outsider that
I do doubt the historicity of Jesus. But I don't
make that a premise in most of my argumentation, because
there's plenty of reasons to be doubtful of the story
even if there was a dude and he was born
and died at approximate of the times that the only
stories about him place him. But I think there's plenty
of reason to doubt if, of course, new evidence or
new augmentation comes up changed my mind. I'm totally for that.
I don't hold to it all that strongly.
Speaker 3: I'm with you like for me, as long as we
can be confident that the god Man didn't exist. The
rest is academic. It's interesting, we can chat about it
over coffee, but I don't get my hooks. Do not
get hung up on that particular snag. Let's talk about
Quirinius and the census, which makes no sense and is
I believe contradicted between Matthew and Luke. Do you get
into the census and Joseph.
Speaker 2: So specifically, if we're talking about in my book The
Star of Bethlehem, a skeptical view always available at Amazon.
I don't talk about the census too much except insofar
as it does not match well the timeline from the
Gospel of Matthew. So just to give the thousand twot
view for everyone else what we're talking about here. In
the Bible, there are only two gospels that give a
story of the birth of Jesus. It's in the beginning
of the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew.
Mark and John don't really talk about the birth of
Jesus in those different stories. The telling is very different.
There's rather little overlap between what Matthew and Luke say
about this, and it's enough reason to make us think
they don't have reliable sources whether or not we can
know anything about an historical Jesus. Among the things that's
really weird is in the Gospel of Matthew. It clearly
puts the birth of Jesus during the time of King
Herod the Great, and we know very well when he ruled.
By several different factors, least of which is that we
have the historian Josephus, who among his sources were the
writings of Herod and his court historian. So if Herod's
court historian doesn't know when Herod ran things, we don't
know anything about the past. Now. Conversely, in the Gospel
of Luke, we don't have anything that really clearly places
Jesus' birth in the time of Herod or which Herod.
To make things all the more complicated, Herod had a
bunch of sons who also were named Herod, so it's
like John having a bunch of John's as children. It's
just to make it confusing for all of us later on. Nonetheless,
the detail that Luke does give us says that the
Holy Family had to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem because
of a census the Romans reporting out, and that this
took place during the governorship or rulering of Quirinius in Syria.
Why is this a problem? We know from also a
multiplicity of sources when that takes place, and there is
no overlap between the reign of King Herod the Great
and the governorship of Quarinus. There's about a decade between
the two, so there's at least a ten year impossibility
of these dates working, and as you can imagine, I
have not been the first person to notice this. Apologists
have been pulling their hair out about this for centuries,
and it's basically a bunch of excusagetics on a good day.
Speaker 3: Excusagetics is a great word. I'm stealing that eron oh, I.
Speaker 2: Think also from Brian Dealt to.
Speaker 3: Not original, Well, you steal it. Everything is borrowed in
this world. Why create mediocrity when you can copy genius?
So I believe it's also true that it wasn't required
to leave your hometown to even register in the census,
and only the male heads of household had to do so.
So this idea that he had to put or pregnant
Mary on the donkey and then go travel somewhere, it
doesn't really hold up. Do you get into that at all, Aaron?
Speaker 2: Like I said, I don't talk too much about that
in my book. I tried to be as focused as
much as possible on the astronomical story. But you are right,
the census is senseless in how it is described. And
I want to tax you on your property. Why would
I send you to a place that only your ancestor
a thousand years earlier supposedly came from. If you want
to know what taxable property I have, where would you
tell me to go if you need to check on
things where I actually live? Right, So, the whole idea
that people are going back to where their ancestors were
for the purposes of taxation makes absolutely no administrative sense.
And the fact that you have people all around the
empire now having to jump around and somehow they know
where their ancestors came from a thousand years ago, and
also kind of a stupid thing because we say your ancestors,
not everyone's ancestors came from the same town. If I
go back a few generations, I have people living in
all sorts of different parts, even just in the state
of Michigan, where I originally come from, let alone coming
back from Europe. Imagine someone in Rome in you know,
four BC, and say you have to go back to
where your ancestors were, Well, you have dozens and dozens
of ancestors at far back. Which hometown do you go to? Again?
It's just stupid And the idea that, of course all
this paperwork is around, that you could even know who
your anceststors were, where they came from, and can point
that out and some guy in Rome even cares enough,
rather than just doing the simple thing, Hey, where did
your gret.
Speaker 4: Great great great gret great greet great greet greet great
grandfather on your father's father's father father father's father father
father father's side come from? You could just ask that
question rather than tell someone. Okay, now go find a
hotel in another country.
Speaker 2: It's just stupid.
Speaker 3: Okay. So doctor Adair, let me ask you about the
virgin birth. I know this is a big, a critical
part of the miracle story, right, I mean, he was
just born to a woman, a big deal. But if
it's a virgin of course we're looking at a mistranslation
from the Hebrew into the Greek. Do you want to
talk the quote unquote virgin birth.
Speaker 2: Yes, the virgin birth is supposedly derived from the prophet
Isaiah that he is supposed to be talking about some
woman conceiving and giving birth to a child. And in
the Greek translation that was really popular at that time.
Noticed the septuagit, the word used for that would suggest virginity.
The Greek word is parthenos. Now, the issue is that
if you go back to the Hebrew it's translating from
it doesn't necessarily have that idea of virginity. In some ways, though,
the Hebrew is even worse than that, because the Hebrew
kind of suggests that Isaiah is at that time pointing
to a woman who has conceived, she already is pregnant.
The Greek has now changed into some sort of future event.
So the Greek doesn't match the Hebrew so well because
someone is trying to make this a prophecy of things
to come, and there are other Greek translations in the
same general timeframe that don't make this woman a parthenos,
So it's only in one Greek translation of that time
and ignoring the original language, ignoring everyone else who went
back to the original language to give better translations. And
then Matthew declaring, or at least someone in the name
of Matthew declaring, oh, this is a fulfillment of prophecy,
a prophecy that was effectively invented in the third century BC,
when the very approximate translation of this book place.
Speaker 3: But you know, let's say she was, you know, she
did immaculately conceive. We're talking about an unwed teenager in
the early first century CE, wouldn't the Bethlehem height be
taking a dim view of that? Or did they lie
and act like Joseph was the baby daddy?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that is going to of course raise some eyebrows,
because yeah, a woman who is pregnant outside of wedlock
is at the very least going to be noticed. One
point of language, though, I do want to note, is
that the immaculate conception is a separate thing from the
virgin birth. The immaculate conception is that Mary was somehow
born without sin, so that way she could be a
pure vessel for the baby Jesus. Though this causes its
own theological problems because if Mary can just you know,
if God can just snap his fingers and say she
doesn't have sin anymore, it seems like Jesus didn't need
to come. God could have just snapped his fingers a
little bit louder and problem solved for the whole world.
But I'll leave that theological problem aside for now. It's
not like we have some other issues to deal with today.
But you're right, there is the contingent issue of how
is it that Mary could be pregnant outside of wedlock
and the town not noticing the best case scenario is
Joseph as quickly as possible puts a ring on it,
or the equivalent of putting a ring on it in
the first century. So that way, by the time Mary
is showing, it's not obvious that this took place before
the wedding. So that is the best case scenario in
this story.
Speaker 3: Erin, did you grow up singing we three kings? There
were three and there were kings?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: The problem is is that kings and three ain't in
the store, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, I definitely knew the song growing up. Fortunately I
did not sing that because I would hurt everyone's ear drums.
That's a problem. I don't want to push onto the world.
We want world peace, and that would not happen if
I sing. Nonetheless, the idea that there are three kings
is much later tradition, the number three popping out primarily
because the wise men or magi depending on your translation,
who come to baby Jesus come with three gifts, so
you go from there. Now, there are other traditions where
there are different numbers of these wise men or a meji.
One of the other traditions is there as many as twelve,
sometimes just an uncountably large number just show up. But
three is our tradition based on the gifts, and calling
them kings is also a later tradition, probably riffing off
of I think it's Isaiah sixty that says kings will
come to your brightness, bringing gifts of gold and frankincense,
and so people make the connection. There's like, oh, Isaiah's
talking about kings, then these guys are also king somehow,
some way to be historically accurate, though, the Greek term
that is being used here by Matthew is magoy or magus,
and this refers to a cast of priests in the
Zoroastrian religion in Persia. So they were important to religion
and government and to kingship in Persia, but they were
not kings themselves. We have stories of them trying to
overthrow kings, but they were not themselves rulers in that way.
Speaker 3: Let's talk physics, since this is your wheelhouse, the star
of bethlahemb They followed the star, and I was a
kid when I was growing up, I just pictured a
pin light and they just followed a pin light. But
if we're talking about a star now, I'm picturing them
following a giant orb of nuclear fusion burning at four
thousand degrees Calvin, that would have essentially incinerated everything on
the planet. Do you get into the star of bethlahemb.
Speaker 2: Oh, Yes, very very much. And yeah, the conception of
star that exists in antiquity, especially for the authors of
this story, can't possibly be our conception. If you have
the idea of, yeah, a nuclear furnace coming down close
enough to point something out on the Earth, first off,
it's just not going to work. It's like taking a
beach ball and trying to point on a feature on
a marble. You're not going to be able to point
to a particular feature. And of course, the idea of
being close enough to even point to anything on Earth
with that would you know, incinerate everyone. So that star
cannot be how we understand things. So what is it
that Matthew is describing? For the vast majority of Christians
for millennia, it was pretty clear this is a miraculous object.
It's either a star being moved around in the heavens
by the will of God, or it's actually some sort
of angelic creature that is able to do its strange motions.
It's only in the late eighteenth early nineteenth century that
you start having people trying to explain things with astronomy
because the worst sorts of people in the world started
emerging in Europe. Dius coming in and saying, hey, all
that miracle stuff, we don't believe that We've got this
thing called physics. Now, especially from Isaac Newton, we see
the universe works really well with them, and these miracle
stories don't. And so there's all these new versions of
excusagenics that are developing at this time trying to combat
that problem and saying, hey, we think the Bible is true,
but we also believe the universe works on Newtonian physics,
because that's the universe that God has shown us and
because of our Lord and savior Isaac Newton, who was
born on December twenty fifth on the old British calendar.
Funny enough, So how do you reconcile the two? Oh,
we just misunderstood the story, or the readers or the
writers of the story kind of misinterpreted for us. And
if we go back and think what really happened consistent
with physics, Oh, it wasn't the case that, for example,
Jesus didn't walk on water What happened was it was
a dark and stormy night. The disciples were being slushed
around on their boat and they were actually beached and
couldn't tell that that had happened. So when Jesus was
walking along the shoreline, they thought, oh, my goodness, our
Lord and Savior is walking on water. Praise be. If
that sounds ridiculous, imagine repeating that thought process for every
single miracle in the Bible, and repeat that, of course
for the birth stories as well. Is it ridiculous? We
think so now, But it was a popular idea until
basically the eighteen twenties.
Speaker 3: We are talking about I'll call it the Dark Ages,
even though it's a thousand years before. But we didn't
know anything about anything. Really. We didn't know what germs were, etc.
And of course we certainly didn't understand our place in
the cosmos. And this was a time where celestial deities
were a thing, right, I mean, we saw in fact,
many people, many mythesists, say that a lot of the
attributes of Jesus Christ to actually come out of previously
established celestial gods. So do you think the star was
part of the I mean, when I ask you, do
you know anything about the Star of Bethlehem. I'm not stupid.
He just held his book up. We've been friends for years.
I'm setting Aaron up to be able to answer the question. Okay,
I'm not lying, but I am doing what a host does.
But let's talk about the celestial deities or that sort
of we'll call it superstition of the day. Was there
an obsession with stars?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was a lot of belief in astrology, whether
it's to say what your fate is or that the
gods are somehow trying to signal things. There are also,
for example, in the magical Papyrity from roughly the same
time as the Gospels are being written, very very roughly,
one of the incantations you could have is you could
basically call down one of the stars and it would
appear in front of you as basically a little god
to do your commands. So you could literally wish on
a star in that kind of way, and you were
given the instructions for how to do that. I haven't
gone out to test that recently to see if I'll
have any luck, but probably the case that the ancient
incantation isn't going to make Venus move around or a
comet to appear and do something ominous. Now, how much
of this ultimately relates to the Jesus story. I want
to note that there is a lot of material out
there on the Internet claiming that Jesus is like a
copy of Mythris or Cyrus or things like that, and
the vast majority of the material is not reliable. Unfortunately,
if you want to take a mithesis position about Jesus,
most of the material you're going to encounter out there
is going to put you in the wrong direction, so
most of it throw it away. But are there quote
unquote pagan connections between the story that we have about
the star and Jesus. I'll give you one interesting example.
There are other guiding stars in grec Go Roman mythology.
Lots of different figures were claimed to have been led
by stars, and perhaps the most important and famous one
in Enius. Indius was supposed to been one of the
survivors of the city of Troy when it was destroyed,
and he and the remaining Trojans fled to Italy and
established the city of Rome and then ultimately the Roman Empire.
According to the most famous rendition of this story was
called the Aeneid by Virgil. This is written during the
reign of Caesar Augustus late first century BCE as far
as it's written, and it talks about a star appearing,
flashing over and helping them point them in the direction
of what their new homeland is going to be. And
our various sources tell us that yes, Venus or Aphrodite
came in the form of a star and led the
Trojans to their new homeland. Venus was also the mother
of Aneas, so literally, divine Mama was the guiding star
according to these stories, and a lot of connections then
between these group of people led by a bright star
from the west to the east to find a new kingdom,
very similar to these magi from the east led by
a star to find their newborn king. Seems like the
connections are pretty clear. And we do know of one
fourth century Christian woman who took the works of Eneas
and actually pretty much like cut them up, rearrange them
to tell the story of Jesus and uses that guiding
star trope as the way of talking about the birth
story of Jesus. So I'm not the only one who's
made that connection.
Speaker 3: It's a good point that we need to be wary
of the Christ and other God's connections. We need to
proceed cautiously. I remember watching Bill Maher's movie Religulous, and
there was the horrors connection that was claimed, and I'm like, whoa, whoa. Well,
you know, a lot of that comes from the film Zeitgeist,
and the Zeitgeist was a problematic documentary. Is this weird
mix of some things that were true, but a lot
of things that were totally unsubstantiated are just wrong. And
yet in the meme verse it's hard to really sort
fact from fiction. I know that their Carrier and some
others have made correlations between Christ and Romulus and Perseus.
You know, Jesus was not the first deity born of
a virgin. He was not the first dying and rising god.
He wasn't even the first god to be crucified. Would
you agree, Jesus nothing new.
Speaker 2: Yes, there is a lot of the Jesus story that
you can see is the same or very similar in
other mythologies. I also do want to note that you
mentioned Zeitgeist and one yeah, yeah, Deeze film is schist.
So that's the German I used to talk about Zeitgeist
and it has its own attempt to also explain the
Star of Bethlehem story. And I mean, not only is
its ancient sourcing about what the alignments they claim means
are not well established, but I also checked with some
planetarium software to be really sure. But it doesn't even
get the astronomy right. It literally shows alignments that are
astronomically impossible. So if you want to know how bad
zeitgeist is, it can't even get physical facts correctly, so
you definitely know it's not going to get mythology all
that great either. Now, conversely, are there stories of miraculous
births of divine heroes? Oh yeah, all over the world,
well before the time of Christianity. Do those stories exist?
Plenty of stories independent of Christianity develop their own stories
of miraculous births. And if you want to say it's
without sex, there are versions of that as well that
kind of imply those sorts of things for the births
of important heroes. I think even Plato it talks about
basically a spirit like wishing in to give birth to him,
rather than the old fashioned methodology of how you bake
people people you know, coming back from the dead. Oh yeah,
plenty common there plenty of examples of that, the records
we have for Romulus, that there are supposed to be
all these poor mortem sightings of him, including on the
Way of Rhodes, and somehow not recognize him at first,
and all of the sudden, oh goodness, I just realized
I bumped into my old buddy Romulus. Here we better
go and be virtuous as he just told us to do,
because he's actually this super ancient god and now is
giving us instructions how to build a great new empire.
If that doesn't sound at least a little bit familiar,
you might want to go double check what your Bible says.
Speaker 3: We've got more to talk about with doctor Aaron Adair,
physicist and author of the book The Star of Bethlehem,
a Skeptical View. Hang on. Thanks for being a supporter
of this broadcast via Patreon. If you like what you
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so much, go to patreon dot com slash Seth Andrews.
Continuing now my conversation with author and scientist and Nativity
story researcher doctor Aaron Adair. We'd like to talk a
lot about that, leaning back into the Old Testament, Noah's ark.
Of course, in a thousand years before the epic of
guild commissions, so many parallels these Samerian myths, so many
of them cousins and happily so it wasn't even plagiarism.
It's just like, well, my religion needs a flood myth,
and so they're sort of borrowed and changed and altered
and manicured to fit whatever deity is in question. I'm
going to give you an open canvas here. What else
about the Nativity story do you find interesting, relevant, alarming?
What do you got?
Speaker 2: I'll start with the alarming. I mentioned that it was
up until like the eighteen twenties that it was popular
in biblical studies to try to rationalize the mythology away,
to say, oh, they just misunderstood what they were seeing,
or we just totally misread this as miraculous. But the
thing is, even though biblical studies pretty much has dropped
this as an approach to studying these things for roughly
two hundred years, it's still been rather popular in more
science or science popularization circles. If you go to a
planetarium this time of year, especially here in the US
of A, you will almost certainly have a show that
tries to describe Oh, here's how astronomy describes the story.
And to be alarming to you, how many of the
people working on that planetarium actually believe they show that
they are putting on And I can tell you it's
actually a minority. Most of them think it's bs and
they show it because it puts butts and seats and
it gives them a chance to talk about some astronomical topics.
I'm like, here are the winter constellations. Here's what it
looks like when planets move about. Here's what retrograde motion is.
Here's what comments are, Here's how they're different than supernov
So you can talk a lot of science topics, but
what are people there for. They're here here to tell
us how science has proven how awesome Jesus is. So
within the planetarium community, so they talk about the Star
of Bethlehem in an interesting way, and I'll show you
by the cover. So I had gotten this book signed
by the Neil deGrasse Tyson some years ago, and he,
of course, you know, does the Hayden Planetarium there in
New York City. But he also pointed out something that
other planetarium operators have done circling soob yeah, that's how
we refer to it within the planetarium community. It's a
son of a bee. That's the add for this. But
yet we keep presenting it over and over again. Papers
still keep coming out claiming, oh, we've figured out how
astronomy explains it this time, and unfortunately know they haven't.
And the proof of that I provide in detail in
this book and other publications I have. Now what's interesting
is there are still things worth pursuing in this By that,
I mean, did the author of the story just you know,
have a fever dream one night and wrote this down
or does he have some sort of previous source about
these kinds of things, and is his source even more
magical or mythological. That's something I'm exploring and working in
publications suggesting the original story is even more supernatural than
the homing GPS beacon of the Star of Bethlhem.
Speaker 3: You're working on a book, what is that?
Speaker 2: So there are a couple of articles right now that
are going through the peer review process as we speak,
touching on certain things, highlighting in particular one of our
earliest interpreters of the Star of Bethlehem story that the
way I read him, he's not actually treating this literally,
even though everyone thought he had for you know, a
long time. And then I realized, oh, if you kind of,
you know, look underneath what he's trying to say, he's
actually talking about this more mythological version of Jesus is
the Star. If you, for example, flip to Revelation, it says, well,
not only it says Jesus in the book where Revelation
says I am the bright morning Star. And I think
some of that ideology is in the background of the
Star Bethlehem story, where it's not a homing beacon to
find Jesus, the star is Jesus.
Speaker 3: You got any final thoughts of punctuation mark for our
conversation about the Christmas holiday.
Speaker 2: When you go and look at a Christmas tree this
time of year, take a look at the topper of
that tree. It's probably either an angel or a star,
representing the Star of Bethlehem. And as much as I
wish that star were something that we could describe with
the tools of science and physics, it's better to understand
this story as created by craftsmanship with words than with
instruments of technology. And if we understand the story that way,
as storytelling rather than history making, You've got to understand
Christmas a lot better and not we so much time
on things that aren't real.
Speaker 3: I'm an atheist who enjoys the Christmas holiday. It's just
what we call the holiday. I'm not threatened by the
myth of Jesus or any of the other things, whether
it's pagan or something else. And I think there are
roughly a little under a dozen different holidays associated with
November three January. Knock yourself out. Christmas is what you
make it or skip it out right? And does that
get weird? When I talk to some people, especially some
of the hardliner atheists out there, they're like, why in
the world would you do anything to commemorate or validate Jesus?
You know that kind of thing. Do you can pushback
from that, Aaron.
Speaker 2: I don't get that too much, but I would say this,
the best way to push back against theocracy or the
use of these tools for more nefarious ends is make
it something part of your own tradition that is not
actually religious. That's secular functionally. In so many ways, Christmas
is already secular, and by you celebrating it in a
secular way, you are actually taking power away from the
theocrats who are trying to use it to bash them
over the head. If you can basically go and say
I'm going to celebrate Christmas without having to sing hymns,
you are the one taking the power. You are powerful
by being a Christmas lover without being a Christian.
Speaker 3: I do enjoy I'm not vocal about it, but I
do enjoy walking through the house of a devout Christian
going non Christian tradition, not obviously pagan. I know that's
not anything to do with I mean, the best stuff
about Christmas has nothing to do with the virgin birth
a super baby come to save the world from the
doom that that God created. Blah blah blah. I mean,
we're talking about gifts, music, and food and family and memories,
connection and you know, I mean, the best stuff about
Christmas has almost nothing to do with christ. I don't
think that's an overreach, Aaron, do you. Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's definitely not. I mean, if you go and
you look at a crash, most of the things in
there aren't even from the Bible, they're from later traditions.
That there is a donkey and an ass. Sorry, there's
a donkey and an ox there that's actually in a
later tradition, and claiming, oh, this was also fulfilled prophecy.
That book also talks about Baby Jesus taming dragons, and
I would love to see dragons as part of a
Nativity scene. Maybe next year. But yeah, it's so much
of what we do these traditions is completely separate from
any religious orthodoxy. And also for the longest time, I
should note I'm in the Boston area. This area used
to ban Christmas because it was too haughty. It was
too much of a drunken festival of people going around
knocking on doors of rich people demanding more food and alcohol.
And if that's not a good winter time tradition, I
don't know.
Speaker 3: It is the faces of Christians when you tell them
that they live in the only nation on earth that
has ever banned Christmas, or at least it was Massachusetts.
I think at least yep, that's what you say, Hey, colony,
get back in the eighteen hundreds, and I just think, eh,
hashtag irony. Doctor Aaron Adair, hold your book up again,
because I'm shameless. The Star of Bethlehem a skeptical view
which I will link in the description box. Always fun
to talk to you. Thanks for helping us navigate through
and occasionally dissect the Nativity story, the activity myth, and
I hope you and yours have a wonderful holiday, my friend, Thank.
Speaker 2: You, and Merry Christmas to everyone. And if you're not
going to celebrate Christmas, be merry no matter what. This
is a good time of year.
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