What Was the Star that Guided the Magi? - The BAS Library

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Endnotes

1.

Review of discussion in Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (New York: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 170–173 also Ernest L. Martin, The Birth of Christ Recalculated (Pasadena, CA: Foundation for Biblical Research, 1980), pp. 4–25.

2.

St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew 6:3.

3.

Plato, in fact, contended that the entire cosmos is a living creature, see Timaeus 30B; so too the Stoics. Aristotle’s thinking on the subject of stars is inconsistent from text to text. “On the question of whether the stars themselves are empsucha [ensouled] he seems to have found it difficult to make up his mind” (W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy: VI. Aristotle: An Encounter [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981], p. 256, n. 1).

4.

Philo, De Plantatione

5.

Philo, De Somniis 1.135; see also De Opificio Mundi 73.

6.

Cf. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973), p. 70.

7.

Daniel 8:10; . 1 Enoch 43:1–4, 86:1–6, 90:20–7; Pseudo-Philo, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 32:15; Joseph and Aseneth 14; Revelation 1:20, 9:21, 12:4; Testament of Solomon 20:14–7; 2 Enoch 29; and Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 43a–b. Particularly interesting is 3 Enoch 46, according to which stars have spirits and wings and sing God’s praises.

8.

Cf. 1 Enoch 1–36; Testament of Levi 2–5; Revelation; Testament of Abraham 10–15; 3 Baruch; 2 Enoch; Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah 6–11; etc.

9.

Life of Adam and Eve 9:1, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols., ed. James H. Charlesworth (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983–1985), vol. 2; Testament of Job 3:1, 4:1, 5:2, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1.

10.

1QS 3:20 1QM 13:9–10.

11.

Joseph and Aseneth, chap. 14, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol 2, pp. 224–225.

12.

1 Enoch 86:1ff. offers the same picture. In Isaiah 14:12 we read: “How you are fallen from heaven, Day Star [= Latin Lucifer], son of Dawn!”

13.

Origen, see esp. On First Principles 1.7; cf. Contra Celsum 5.11; Jerome, Epistle to Avitus 4.

14.

Cf. Jerome, To Pammachius against John of Jerusalem 17; Justinian, Epistle to Mannam—Mansi 9.513.