The Great Christ Comet (77 page)

112
 Jenniskens,
Meteor Showers
, 423–427.

113
 Schmude,
Comets and How to Observe Them
, 17.

114
 Ibid., 17–18.

115
 Schaaf,
Comet of the Century
, 71.

116
 See Sagan and Druyan,
Comet
, 96.

117
 Carolyn Sumners and Carlton Allen,
Cosmic Pinball: The Science of Comets, Meteors, and Asteroids
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), 3.

118
 So Jenniskens,
Meteor Showers
, 130–132; Victor Clube and Bill Napier,
Cosmic Winter
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 148.

119
 See Jenniskens,
Meteor Showers
, 133, on 2P/Encke.

120
 David Levy,
Comets: Creators and Destroyers
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 29; Yeomans,
Comets
, 353; Crovisier and Encrenaz,
Comet Science
, 67.

121
 Yeomans defines an asteroid (minor planet) as “an interplanetary body that formed without appreciable ice content and thus never had, or can have, cometary activity” (Yeomans,
Comets
, 352).

122
 Stephen J. Edberg and David H. Levy,
Observing Comets, Asteroids, Meteors, and the Zodiacal Light
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29.

123
 Brian G. Marsden and Zdenek Sekanina, “Comets and Nongravitational Forces. VI. Periodic Comet Encke 1786–1971,”
Astronomical Journal
79 (1974): 418; Fred L. Whipple and S. E. Hamid, “A Search for Encke's Comet in Ancient Chinese Records: A Progress Report,” in
The Motion, Evolution of Orbits, and Origin of Comets
, ed. Gleb Aleksandrovich Chebotarev, E. I. Kazimirchak-Polonskaia, and B. G. Marsden (Dordrecht
,
Netherlands
:
Reidel, 1972), 152–154.

124
 Steel,
Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets
, 27–28; D. J. Asher and S. V. M. Clube, “An Extraterrestrial Influence during the Current Glacial-Interglacial,”
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society
34 (1993): 489.

125
 Jenniskens,
Meteor Showers
, 126.

126
 See Brandt and Chapman,
Introduction to Comets
, 67; and Crovisier and Encrenaz,
Comet Science
, 17. Imagine a tablet computer laptop with a swivel screen and an oval piece of paper placed over the screen, affixed to it at one point in the center of the bottom of the screen. The keyboard is resting on the horizontal level, which represents the ecliptic plane on which Earth orbits the Sun. When you open the laptop and lift the screen to a certain angle, whether 45 degrees, 90 degrees, or 135 degrees, you are changing the screen's
inclination
. When you then turn the swivel screen around, it represents the changing of the
longitude of the ascending node
. Now twist the picture affixed to the screen around on its pivot—this represents changing the
argument of perihelion
. Now, suspending reality for a moment, imagine that the screen is monstrous, extending long in every direction, and that the similarly massive picture affixed to the screen is a giant oval. The longer the oval, the higher the
eccentricity
is; the more circular it is, the lower the eccentricity. The pivot point stands for the Sun. The point of the oval that is closest to the pivot represents perihelion, and the distance between them corresponds to the
perihelion distance
. Finally, if you run your finger along the edge of the oval, the moment when your finger (symbolizing the comet) is nearest the pivot (signifying the Sun) denotes the
time of perihelion
.

127
 Starry Night
®
Pro 6.4.3.

128
 Redshift 7, United Soft Media Verlag GmbH, Thomas-Wimmer-Ring 11, D-80539 Munich, Germany,
http://
www
.redshift
-live
.com.

129
 Project Pluto, Guide 9.0, 168 Ridge Road, Bowdoinham, ME 04008,
http://
www
.projectpluto
.com.

130
 Schmude,
Comets and How to Observe Them
, 8.

131
 Cf. Seargent,
Comets: Vagabonds of Space
, 85.

132
 Data from NASA's JPL Small-Body Database Browser,
http://
ssd
.jpl
.nasa
.gov
/sbdb.cgi
?sstr
=
Hale
-Bopp
(accessed May 3, 2014). Hale-Bopp passed within 0.77 AU of Jupiter in April 1996, and this altered its path.

133
 Whipple,
Mystery of Comets
, 149.

134
 Schmude,
Comets and How to Observe Them
, 25–26. On other nongravitational factors, see Donald K. Yeomans and Paul W. Chodas, “Predicting Close Approaches of Asteroids and Comets to Earth,” in
Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids
, ed. T. Gehrels (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 241.

135
 Jenniskens,
Meteor Showers
, 378; cf. Clube and Napier,
Cosmic Winter
, 140.

136
 Jenniskens,
Meteor Showers
, 29.

137
 See Brandt and Chapman,
Introduction to Comets
, 331.

138
 See Jenniskens,
Meteor Showers
, 81–86, 172–200; Esko Lyytinen and Peter Jenniskens, “Meteor Outbursts from Long-Period Comet Dust Trails,”
Icarus
162 (2003): 443–452.

139
 David Hughes as cited by Burnham,
Great Comets
, 51 (see also Burnham's comments on p. 70); John. E. Bortle, “Great Comets in History,”
Sky and Telescope
93.1 (1997): 44; Seargent,
Greatest Comets
, vii, 78; Donald K. Yeomans, “Cometary Astronomy,” in
History of Astronomy: An Encyclopedia
, ed. John Lankford (New York: Routledge, 1996), 159 (and “Great Comets in History,”
http://
ssd
.jpl
.nasa
.gov/?great
_comets
[posted April 2007]).

140
 Mobberley,
Hunting and Imaging Comets
, 46.

141
 Isaac Asimov,
Asimov's Guide to Halley's Comet: The Awesome Story of Comets
(New York: Walker, 1985), 56.

142
 Hermann Hunger, F. Richard Stephenson, C. B. F. Walker, and K. K. C. Yau,
Halley's Comet in History
(London: British Museum, 1985), 10.

143
 F. Richard Stephenson, “The Ancient History of Halley's Comet,” in
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
, ed. Norman Thrower (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 243, who mentions private correspondence with Hermann Hunger on this issue.

144
 Ibid., 245–248; Hunger et al.,
Halley's Comet in History
, 18–40.

145
 Stephenson, “Ancient History of Halley's Comet,” 244.

146
 Hunger et al.,
Halley's Comet in History
, 10.

147
 Information concerning each of these cometary observations from Babylon can be found in Kronk,
Cometography
, 1:7–18. On the 164 BC and 87 BC comets (Halley's Comet), see Hunger et al.,
Halley's Comet in History
, 18–40.

148
 Stephenson, “Ancient History of Halley's Comet,” 244.

149
 Ibid.

150
 Ibid.

151
 Ibid.

152
 Hunger et al.,
Halley's Comet in History
, 18.

153
 Ibid., 53.

154
 The
Han shu
, or
The History of the Former Han Dynasty
, was composed in the late first and early second century AD and completed in AD 111.

155
 See David W. Hughes, “The Magnitude Distribution, Perihelion Distribution, and Flux of Long-Period Comets,”
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
326 (2001): 515–516. Also Thomas John York, “The Reliability of Early East Asian Astronomical Records” (PhD thesis, Durham University, 2003), 64, 67–68, 78, 121; available online at
http://
etheses
.dur
.ac
.uk
/3080/.
See my appendix 1 on the Chinese records.

156
 John T. Ramsey and A. Lewis Licht,
The Comet of 44 B.C. and Caesar's Funeral Games
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 109.

157
 Ibid., 116, also 73, 109; A. Lewis Licht, “The Rate of Naked-Eye Comets from 101 BC to 1970 AD,”
Icarus
137 (1999): 355–356.

158
 Ramsey and Licht,
Comet of 44 B.C.
, 116.

159
 David W. Hughes, “Early Long-Period Comets: Their Discovery and Flux,”
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
339 (2003): 1103–1110. He notes that while no single nation's astronomers ever actually recorded quite this many, the combined records of astronomers in the Far East, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe between AD 1335 and 1600 totaled about 75 per century (pp. 1103, 1109). Between AD 1 and 1600 the total number of comet records per century increased from 37 (AD 100–810) to 53 (AD 810–1355) to 75 (AD 1355–1600) (pp. 1106–1107). Hughes concludes that the relatively low number of cometary records per century before AD 500 is evidence that the data that survives from that early period is incomplete (1108).

160
 Ramsey and Licht,
Comet of 44 B.C.
, 111–112.

161
 
Meteorologica
, esp. parts 4–7.

162
 My translation.

163
 Translation from Suetonius,
The Lives of the Twelve Caesars
, vol. 2, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe, rev. ed., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 151.

164
 My translation.

165
 Ptolemy,
Tetrabiblos: Or Quadripartite
, trans. Frank Egleston Robbins, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 193, 195:

We must observe . . . for the prediction of general conditions, the comets which appear either at the time of the eclipse or at any time whatever; for instance, the so-called “beams,” “trumpets,” “jars,” and the like, for these naturally produce the effects peculiar to Mars and to Mercury—wars, hot weather, disturbed conditions, and the accompaniments of these; and they show, through the parts of the zodiac in which their heads appear and through the directions in which the shapes of their tails point, the regions upon which the misfortunes impend. Through the formations, as it were, of their heads, they indicate the kind of the event and the class upon which the misfortune will take effect; through the time which they last, the duration of the events; and through their position relative to the sun likewise their beginning; for in general their appearance in the orient [the east] betokens rapidly approaching events and in the occident [west] those that approach more slowly.

See Yeomans,
Comets
, 14–16, on Ptolemy's view of comets.

166
 Sara Schechner Genuth,
Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 55, speaking of seventeenth-century Western astrologers, comments that “There was a lot of latitude in the iconographic technique, and the astrologer could put a positive spin on his predictions if he was so inclined.” Her statement applies equally to ancient astrologers.

1
 One prominent recent advocate of the comet hypothesis is the host of the BBC series
Wonders of the Solar System
and
Wonders of the Universe
and author of the accompanying books, Brian Cox. His opinion on the matter was given in the documentary “Star of Bethlehem: Behind the Myth,” produced by Atlantic Productions in London and shown on the BBC in the UK in 2008 and on ABC in Australia in 2009. I am grateful to Atlantic for generously sending me a complimentary DVD copy of the production.

2
 My translation of the Greek text in Emile de Strycker,
La forme la plus ancienne du Protevangile de Jacques
(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961), 168–170.

3
 Roberta J. M. Olson and Jay M. Pasachoff, “New Information on Comet Halley as Depicted by Giotto Di Bondone and Other Western Artists,” in
20th ESLAB Symposium on the Exploration of Halley's Comet: Proceedings of the International Symposium
,
Heidelberg, Germany, 27–31 October
, vol. 3
(Noordwijk, Netherlands: European Space Agency, 1986), C207.

4
 The standard rendering of English translations (e.g., Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe,
The Ante-Nicene Fathers Vol. IV: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325
[New York: Scribner, 1926], 422; Henry Chadwick,
Origen: Contra Celsum
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965], 53–54) at this point, “meteors,” is clearly inappropriate. After all, Origen makes it clear in the subsequent context that he is speaking only of comets, and it is well known and established that cometary apparitions may take a multitude of forms—see Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan,
Comet
(New York: Pocket Books, 1986), 157–187. “Beam [of wood]” here (the most common meaning of the Greek term and of its Latin rendering) is evidently a type of comet—one with a long, straight tail. Meteors do not have anything like the same multiplicity of forms.

5
 My translation of the Greek text. The fourth-century theologian Ephrem the Syrian wrote concerning the Star of Bethlehem (Ephraem Syrus,
Opera Syriaca
[Rome: Vatican, 1740], 4), “A star shone forth suddenly with preternatural light, less than the sun and greater than the sun. It was less than the sun in manifest light; it was greater than it in secret strength by reason of its mystery. A star in the east darted its rays into the house of darkness” (as cited by J. B. Lightfoot,
Apostolic Fathers, Pt. II. S. Ignatius. S. Polycarp. Revised texts, with Introductions, Notes, Dissertations, and Translations
[London: Macmillan, 1885], 82). In addition, the Byzantine scholar John of Damascus (
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith
, book 2, chapter 7) wrote, “It often happens . . . that comets arise. . . . They are not of the stars that were made in the beginning, but are formed at the same time [as they arise] by divine command and again dissolved. And so not even the star which the Magi saw at the birth of the Friend and Saviour of Man, our Lord, who became flesh for our sake, is of the number of those that were made in the beginning” (John of Damascus,
Exposition of the Orthodox Faith
, trans. S. D. F. Salmond, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Volume 9 [Oxford: J. Parker, 1899], 24).

6
 David W. Hughes, Kevin K. C. Yau, and F. Richard Stephenson, “Giotto's Comet—Was It the Comet of 1304 and Not Comet Halley?,”
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society
34 (1993): 21–32, argue that the inspiration was closer to the time that Giotto painted the scene—1304. They suggest that it was the naked-eye comet C/1304 C1, which appeared for 74 days, from February 3 to April 18, and had a shorter tail than Halley's Comet in 1301. Of course, it is also possible that no particular comet was in Giotto's mind.

7
 David Ritchie,
Comets: Swords of Heaven
(New York: New American Library, 1985), 11, notes that many philosophers in the time of Giotto and earlier regarded the Star as a comet (including the Genoese historian and theologian Jacobus de Veragine, author of
The Golden Legend
).

8
 J. Edgar Bruns, “The Magi Episode in Matthew 2,”
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
23 (1961): 54; Robert S. Richardson, “The Star of Bethlehem—Fact or Myth?,”
The Griffith Observer
22 (December 1958): 163–164; Arthur Stenzel,
Jesus Christus und sein Stern
(Hamburg: Verlag der Astronomischen Korrespondenz, 1913), 73; Jerry Vardaman, “Jesus' Life: A New Chronology,” in
Chronos, Kairos, Christos
, ed. Jerry Vardaman and E. M. Yamauchi (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1989), 66, 78 table 4; H. W. Montefiore, “Josephus and the New Testament,”
Novum Testamentum
4 (1960): 140–146; Nikos Kokkinos, “Crucifixion in A.D. 36,” in Vardaman and Yamauchi,
Chronos, Kairos, Christos
, 158; A. I. Reznikov, “La comète de Halley: une démystification de la légende de Noël?,”
Recherches d'astronomie historique
18 (1986): 65–68; James Fleming in
The Advertiser
(December 21, 1985), as referenced by P. A. H. Seymour,
The Birth of Christ: Exploding the Myth
(London: Virgin, 1998), 102; William Phipps, “The Magi and Halley's Comet,”
Theology Today
43 (1986–1987): 88–92.

9
 Colin J. Humphreys, “The Star of Bethlehem—A Comet in 5 B.C.—And the Date of the Birth of Christ,”
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society
32 (1991): 389–407; idem, “The Star of Bethlehem, a Comet in 5 B.C., and the Date of the Christ's Birth,”
Tyndale Bulletin
43 (1992): 31–56; idem, “The Star of Bethlehem,”
Science and Christian Belief
5 (1995): 83–101; Duncan Steel,
Eclipse
(London: Headline, 1999), 20–21. The 5 BC comet hypothesis gets a mention by Gary W. Kronk in his monumental work,
Cometography: A Catalog of Comets
, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–),
1:26.

10
 E.g., Raymond Brown,
The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke
, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 171–172; Donald A. Carson, “Matthew,” in
Expositor's Bible Commentary
, rev. ed., ed. Tremper Longman III and David E. Garland, vol. 9 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 111; Simo Parpola, “The Magi and the Star: Babylonian Astronomy Dates Jesus' Birth,” in
The First Christmas: The Story of Jesus' Birth in History and Tradition
, ed. Sara Murphy (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2009), 15.

11
 Ho Peng-Yoke, “Ancient and Mediaeval Observations of Comets and Novae in Chinese Sources,”
Vistas in Astronomy
5 (1962): 127–225, catalog number 61; Donald K. Yeomans,
Comets: A Chronological History of Observation, Science, Myth, and Folklore
(New York: John Wiley, 1991), 367. Some believe that this apparition of Halley's Comet is also mentioned by Cassius Dio as presaging the death of the Roman General Agrippa (54.29): “The star known as comet hung (
ai
ō
r
ē
theis
) for many days over (
huper
) the City [of Rome] and finally was broken up into torches” (my translation) (so, for example, Kronk,
Cometography
, 1:25). However, the comet described by Cassius Dio is unlikely to have been Halley's Comet. A number of comets have famously split and/or disintegrated: Aristotle's Comet of 373–372 BC (Ephorus as cited by Seneca,
Natural Questions
7.16.2); Comet Biela in the mid-nineteenth century; the Great September Comet of 1882; and Comet West in 1976 (cf. James C. Watson,
A Popular Treatise on Comets
[Philadelphia: James Challen & Son, 1861], 81). The fact that Dio's comet was observed to split suggests that it was visible for a long time. Moreover, the extraordinary performance of the comet—hanging over Rome—is partly explained because fragmenting comets typically release extraordinary quantities of dust and therefore become brighter, larger, and longer. It is not uncommon for bright long-period comets to appear around the time of the return of Halley's Comet (e.g., 1910) (see F. Richard Stephenson, “The Ancient History of Halley's Comet,” in
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
, ed. Norman Thrower [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 234; David Hughes, “Apian's Woodcut and Halley's Comet,”
International Halleywatch Newsletter
5 [1984]: 24–25).

12
 Mark Littmann and Donald K. Yeomans,
Comet Halley: Once in a Lifetime
(Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 1985), 10–11.

13
 James Fleming, as cited by Seymour,
Birth of Christ: Exploding the Myth
,
102.

14
 Kokkinos, “Crucifixion in A.D. 36,” 162.

15
 Vardaman, “Jesus' Life,” 78 table 4.

16
 The Greek text can be rendered either way. Those dating Jesus's birth to 12 BC cannot make sense of either translation.

17
 Some scholars, such as Brown,
Birth of the Messiah
, 172, believe that the 12 BC Halley's Comet apparition may have played a key role in the development of the Magi narrative: “It is possible that the appearance of Halley's comet in 12 B.C. and the coming of foreign ambassadors two years later to hail King Herod on the occasion of the completion of Caesarea Maritima have been combined in Matthew's story of the star and the magi from the East.” That is a rather far-fetched and naive proposal. Inexplicably, Brown fails to devote any attention to the particulars of the apparition of Halley's Comet in 12 BC to discover the extent to which it was consistent with Matthew's striking portrayal of the Star.

18
 Humphreys, “Star of Bethlehem—A Comet in 5 B.C.,”
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society
, 389–407; idem, “Star of Bethlehem, a Comet in 5 B.C.,”
Tyndale Bulletin
, 31–56; idem, “Star of Bethlehem,”
Science and Christian Belief
, 83–101. It should be appreciated that this position has a history that goes back centuries before Humphreys. One prominent cometary astronomer who has argued for this view is Duncan Steel in his
Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar
(New York: John Wiley, 2000), 324–332.

19
 Humphreys, “Star of Bethlehem, a Comet in 5 B.C.,”
Tyndale Bulletin
, 42–44; Ho, “Ancient and Mediaeval Observations,” catalog number 63.

20
 Translation adapted from David H. Clark, John H. Parkinson, and F. Richard Stephenson, “An Astronomical Re-Appraisal of the Star of Bethlehem—A Nova in 5 BC,”
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society
18 (1977): 444; and David W. Pankenier, Zhentao Xu, and Yaotiao Jiang,
Archaeoastronomy in East Asia
(Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2008), 23–24.

21
 Humphreys, “Star of Bethlehem, a Comet in 5 B.C.,”
Tyndale Bulletin
, 42.

22
 Ibid., 45–47; cf. Montefiore, “Josephus,” 140–146; Jack Finegan,
Handbook of Biblical Chronology
(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998), 313–319 §§537–549; Steel,
Eclipse
, 20–21.

23
 Humphreys, “Star of Bethlehem, a Comet in 5 B.C.,”
Tyndale Bulletin
, 46.

24
 Ibid., 47.

25
 Ibid., 45–47.

26
 Ibid., 36.

27
 Ibid., 48, proposes that the Magi informed Herod of the triple conjunction in 7 BC, the planetary massing of 6 BC, and the comet “about one month previously.”

28
 Clark, Parkinson, and Stephenson, “Astronomical Re-Appraisal,” 444.

29
 Ibid.

30
 Ibid.

31
 Gary W. Kronk, in a personal email message to the author (October 23, 2011), wrote, “Although many Chinese records contain an incredible amount of detail as to a comet's motion, many can be found where only the location of the discovery is given, sometimes being a direction and sometimes a Chinese constellation. . . . The initial location was very important to these astrologers/astronomers.”

32
 See, for example, Ho, “Ancient and Mediaeval Observations,” catalog numbers 44, 49, 59, 61, 68, 73, 76, 81, 82, 83, 86.

33
 See, for example, ibid., number 65.

34
 See, for example, ibid., numbers 48, 55, 69.

35
 This has naturally caused some scholars to wonder if this really was a comet (see Clark, Parkinson, and Stephenson, “Astronomical Re-Appraisal,” 443; Kokkinos, “Crucifixion in A.D. 36,” 160n92).

36
 On the nomenclature, see Yeomans,
Comets
, 361.

37
 Cf. Werner Keller,
The Bible as History
, rev. ed. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1980), 360.

38
 When the Bab­ylo­nians and other ancients spoke of a comet's heliacal rising or setting, they had in mind first and foremost its coma or head.