This verse has never made sense. It seems to describe a star behaving as a flying light like a UFO that can hover over an identifiable spot on the ground.In Matthew 2:9, the author of Matthew wrote:After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.
It shouldn’t take any modern astrophysics to know that this wouldn’t work with any normal star. An ancient writer might suppose that a special star could move separately from the others, standing still in the sky while all the others moved past, but ancient people who lived under starry skies without city lights should only have known better than modern people that you can’t pick out a single house as lying directly under a star. They’re too far away. The same star will appear straight overhead from everywhere within many miles.
So it seems to me that this writer must either never have looked much at stars, or else have assumed that stars were all just little lights in the sky and so a special one might fly much lower. As Chap says, though, no such low-flying lights are going to correspond to any astronomical events. So the guidance star of Matthew 2:9 can’t be used to date Jesus’s birth from astronomy even if it somehow did happen.
One might decide that Matthew garbled the Bethlehem guidance star, at least getting it wrong when he said it was the same star that had signaled the birth of the king of the Jews, but that ancient astrologers really did travel to Jerusalem in response to an astronomical event that we can try to identify. Or at least that something had happened in the sky at close enough to the right time that Matthew’s story of the Magi would have seemed plausible enough to write more than thirty years later.
It’s still pretty speculative, when the text in Matthew really just doesn’t fit any possible astronomical scenario. If the text is accurate then the “star” was a miraculous flying light that modern astronomers won’t be able to date; if the text has to be read loosely, on the other hand, then it becomes hard to make it pin down anything precisely enough to date the event.
