Was the "Star of Bethlehem" really a star?

Just curious because if you follow a star, it never gets any closer...you can't really follow an actual star to a place on the ground. So what was it?

Was the "Star of Bethlehem" really a star?
It was actually a UFO.
Reply:that star was God-lead.
Reply:I read on the encyclopedia that it was recorded by chinese astronomers 5 B.C as a comet that stays there for 70 days in the eastern part !!!!
Reply:An Astronomy professor once told me that it was a retro-grade orbit of a planet. Retro-grade orbits are when a planet is in a point in its orbit that we are moving in different directions, so that it appears to be moving backwards in the sky. "Following the star" according to him, meant traveling until the orbits re-alligned so that the planet seemed to be moving in the right direction again. For Persians, who were Zorastrists and therefore expert astronomers, such a orbital shift would have been able to have been foreseen as coming, because it is as sure as clockwork and mathmatics.
Reply:Doubtful. It's much more likely that... if it happened at all... it was a comet. And even then, that's highly unlikely. Much larger chance that... if any of it happened, it was simply a trick of the light.
Reply:I saw a special on TV about this one time and I wish I could remember more of it. Here's what I do remember: the star WAS a real star. The Three Wise Men were wealthy kings who had astronomers who told them of the star's significance. It marked a monumental event. They "followed" it based on the guidance of those astronomers to discover the newborn King Jesus. The star is documented historically as well as Biblically.
Reply:I recently saw a special on the Discovery Channel about the Star of Bethlehem. They used a computer to tell us what stars were out at that time, and the found that the planets were in alignment and the star was actually the Planet Jupiter at the brightest it has ever been. Not bad for the birth of the savior.
Reply:yes
Reply:It was Star Jones.
Reply:a star could be an angel
Reply:Actually, they think that a star went supernova around the time that Jesus was supposed to have been born. Anyway, though, about 'following stars'.... y'know how people say that you should look for the North Star when you get lost in the woods? Because of the Earth's rotation, there is the illusion of stars moving throughout the sky at night. So, you can 'follow' the general direction of a star's course. That definitely doesn't mean that you can follow the average star to a specific building, though.





I have no idea what it was. I have no idea whether it even existed.
Reply:It was a UFO.
Reply:More than likely, since the wise men are described as magi, they weren't following an actual object but were instead following a conjunction of Mars and Jupiter to a spot that had been calculated by careful observation to be directly under the conjunction at the closest point of the conjunction's timing.

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