Read more of Kim Lawton's interview about the Star of Bethlehem with Rick Larson:

Q: What got you started looking into all of this?

A: I started working on the star doing the research for, I guess, sort of a funny reason. My daughter and I made Christmas decorations for the yard, and we hit on the Wise Men, and we built these kind of cool little Wise Men dolls that walk across our front yard every year, and when we were done putting those up, Marion, who was probably eight at the time, says, "Daddy, make a star." And so I was hit with this question: Yeah, I'll make a star, but what was the star? I mean, what did it do? Did it move? How long did it last? Was it bright? Did it explode? Was it an angel? Or was it a myth? And so that kind of set me off on the whole Star of Bethlehem -- what has become an adventure and actually has kind of taken over.

Q: Had you been interested in astronomy before that?

A: As a boy, yes. I had a telescope, and I liked looking at the sky. But I never made a deep study of any of it. It was more a hobby, and then I laid that aside for decades, and when the star became an interest to me freshly, it was new, really. I was really starting from scratch.

Q: How did you go about trying to figure it out?

A: I came across an article by a PhD astronomer, and this article took the position that the Star of Bethlehem was a real astronomical event, which was completely stimulating to me, very exciting and bracing. But I didn't understand the article, because the guy's a PhD, and I'm not, in astronomy. But I read the thing, and I set it aside, and I thought this is so interesting. I'm finally going to look into this. I'm going to get to the bottom of this someday. And it came about that I was teaching a course where it would be relevant to have external evidences for the truth of the Bible and things outside the Bible that tend to show that it's true. And the star hit me, and I thought, "My goodness, what a perfect thing to add to this little section of my course." And that's when I began the research in earnest. So basically I'm standing on the shoulders of researchers who've come before me. That's how all research works -- partly on the fellow who wrote that PhD article and then other people throughout history who have discovered parts of what to me now looks like a puzzle and really looks to me more like a poem that begins at the Star of Bethlehem and then ends later.

Q: What place did the star have in the Christmas story for you? Did the story itself have a special place for you as you look back?

A: The star never really bothered me very much. I thought of it as something beautiful. I wouldn't say figurative; I just didn't worry about it. It was part of the Christmas story that was interesting and perhaps charming, but not something that I had to puzzle through or worry over. Now having traveled with the star, I find that the star is widely regarded around the world. It's probably, behind the cross, the most prominent symbol of Christianity. I've presented in Muslim countries, for example. Stars are everywhere at Christmas time. The same thing is true around the world. So the star apparently captures the imagination of many people. But I'm not sure how many people have felt compelled to figure out, well, what was it? That quest, though, to find that out turned out to be very rewarding. One of the things that really amazes when you start to do the research on the star is how much material there is. Much of it's not very good. But there is scholarly material out about the star. People who've studied hard, worked hard, done good work may have come up wrong, at least from my perspective, and they probably think that of me, but that's all right. But, yes, nearly everything in the night sky has been proposed as the Star of Bethlehem at one time or another and that also troubles a researcher, if you're a careful researcher. I'm a lawyer. Lawyers do research. It's what we do. When you find that intelligent people have come to such varying conclusions, it makes you wonder if you have enough data, because you'd think if we had plenty of data that good people doing hardcore research would arrive at roughly the same result. So it is a puzzle that there are so many things proposed as the Star of Bethlehem. But I really think that comes down to the fact that most of the researchers are not paying very close attention to the data. I think we have plenty of data to resolve the question.

Q: When you started on your quest, what did you look at to figure out how you were going to approach this?

A: Well, the first thing I did when trying to figure out what the star might have been, well, first, of course, I read what I could find. But the source of the data is the second chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. That's where the data comes from, from the Bible. And my approach was -- do you remember the old show Colombo? Peter Falk did such a great job making everybody crazy. His character would always have this little spiral sheet of paper, pad of paper, and he would take down every tiny little thing he could find. He made everybody nuts. But that's how he solved his cases. Well, that's sort of how I approached the star. I went to the book of Matthew kind of like Peter Falk would do, and I combed that thing with a fine-tooth comb to come up with every data point that I could find on the star, and when you do that, you find that there are nine characteristics of the biblical star, nine things. That's actually a fair amount of data, and enough data to allow us to eliminate some candidate-things in the sky, some objects in the sky. So that's how it began, by combing through Matthew, meaning to take the Bible very seriously, and also, to this extent, if I found something in the sky that satisfied let's say eight, seven of those nine, I would say, well, that's interesting, but it's not the star -- always bearing in mind that there might not have been a star. I mean, might it have been a myth? Lots of people have assumed that, and I didn't assume one way or the other. I just said let's look at all the evidence. First, gather all the evidence -- what lawyers do. They marshal evidence. And then let's see what happened in the sky and see if there's a match. And that's the astonishing match that I've been presenting all over the world.

Q: What are some of the nine points?

A: Well, to give you some examples of the nine points, when the Magi arrived from the east, perhaps traveling from Persia or perhaps Babylon, they asked a question, and it's loaded. They say, "Where is the one who has been born King of the Jews?" Now something they'd seen in the sky suggested to them a connection with birth, kings, and the Jewish nation. So those are the first of the three clues. Another example would be they saw the star in the East. It's what we're told in the story. Then they traveled to Jerusalem. Well, if you're a crow that might be 450 miles. But if you're on a camel, it's going to be at least 500, and if you went through the Fertile Crescent, maybe 900. So it's going to take months to arrive in Jerusalem. And they saw the star when they arrived in Jerusalem, so it endures over time. So that's another clue, because most celestial objects endure over time, but not all do. Shooting stars don't, for example. So that kind of eliminates some of the things, and all nine add up to really eliminate most everything. Another couple of fascinating clues, to me, are that when Herod realized the significance of the star, I think he probably already formed his murderous intent. He calls the Magi secretly, and he asked them a question. But he wants to know the exact time the star had appeared. So that's a clue. It tells us it's associated with exact timing. We know why he asked. He wants to know exactly when it showed because he's deciding who he's going to kill. And because the clues are maybe somewhat ambiguous about whether or not there's conception at birth, or what's happening in there, he just gets the dates that are close enough, and just says kill everybody under two. That's how he's going to handle it. But he had to ask them when it appeared. That's a clue, too, because he didn't know. It took an expert to understand the significance of the star and say this is the star.

Q: So it wasn't some huge cataclysmic event that everybody in Jerusalem would have noticed at the same time?

A: I actually know that they did notice the star, but they didn't understand the significance of it until put in context by the Magi. The Magi were what we might call proto-scientists. This particular school, they understood the natural order, understood how to teach from it, and so they explained an entire story, because the star is actually a series of events that happens over a period of time. As we've discussed, it lasts over time. And some of those events are quite spectacular. And I'm quite sure the people of Jerusalem saw them, but they didn't put the story together. It's when you hear the whole story that it shocks Herod. It shocks Jerusalem, and babies get murdered.

Q: How did modern technology aid in figuring out what the clues may point to?

A: One of the interesting parts of this research is that you can do it at all, because we can understand and see the skies of ancient times, which is a surprise to many people. We can do that because of the laws of planetary motion discovered by Kepler back in the 1600s, and those laws are math. They don't change. NASA uses them. ESA [European Space Agency] uses them. Using those laws of math you can calculate the appearance of ancient skies, and, of course, you take that math and put it in software, and it's easy to do, not like it was for Kepler with his quill pens and velum. But, you know, I've tapped away on my laptop and can recreate skies, can make them move, you know, watch them. It makes the investigation much more interactive and a lot faster. So, yes, modern technology has certainly catapulted the star forward.

Q: With it you can figure out what the skies look like at a particular place, at a particular time?

A: That's right. That's the fun of the software is that I can recreate, using that math in the software, the appearance of the night sky viewed from any place on the surface of the earth at any time in history, and with great precision, because the software incorporate Kepler's math. Plus, Newton came along behind [Kepler] and added some refinements. The two men together have come up with a fantastically accurate mathematical model. And so, yes, we can recreate the skies of ancient times, and I get to show audiences. I mean, I literally show them what the Magi saw, and it blows them away.

Q: What do you think happened 2000 years ago?

A: Well, I think the Star of Bethlehem was a series of events. That's the only thing that can explain all of the nine points in the story. What I believe happened, to kind of put it in broad brush, is that in three B.C., Jupiter, which is often called the King Planet, and Regulus, often called the King Star -- they had a conjunction, a triple conjunction actually, in the constellation Leo. The Bible uses Leo as an animal symbol of a tribe of Judah representing the Messiah. More things happened in the sky after that happens. We see the symbolism from Revelation 12 that John saw, that he wrote of the woman clothed in the sun with the moon birthed at her feet. That rises in the sky next. It just becomes a sky laden with symbolism. Nine months later, in two B.C., we see the brightest planet, Venus, the Mother Planet, and the largest planet, Jupiter, the King Planet, come so close together that to the naked eye they formed a single star. You couldn't separate them. And so what the people saw in the sky was the brightest star anyone alive had ever seen. Now, how do I know that? Because it's math and so we know. They never saw anything. In fact, I can say none of your viewers will ever see such a thing because we can calculate those things -- very rare and remarkable and, when put in context of the whole story, totally shocking.

Q: I know you are conservative Christian. A lot of conservative Christians are reluctant to get too involved in the constellations. When you start talking about Leo and some of the zodiac signs, the names of the constellations, they can get a little nervous. How do you reconcile that?

A: You're right when you ask about this, the astrology issue, because in conservative Christian circles, and I would put myself there, there is resistance to anything astrological, because a lot of conservative Christians believe astrology to be occult and something that should simply be avoided. And, in fact, that worried me a little bit when I began to find lots of signs in the sky. I started to wonder, am I becoming an astrologer here? But when you consult the Bible, you find out what does the Bible really say about the stars? It turns out that the Bible treats the stars as kind of like signposts. Not that they can run your life. Not that they're having any effect on your decisions, but that they can be signs. Even Jesus said there are going to be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. So is it okay to look for them? Well, I guess so. I have to tell my audiences a little bit about that story, though, so that they feel comfortable looking for signs and realize that I'm not doing something occult.

Q: Go back to some of the symbolism you were finding when you were looking in the skies.

A: Let me talk about the events just in three B.C., because so much happened in three B.C. The symbolism of having Jupiter crown Regulus, if you choose to see it in Leo representing the tribe of Judah, nation of Israel, and then up in the sky rises, after Leo, Virgo, the Virgin. And just as described in Revelation 12, it's what John saw. She was clothed in the sun, and there's a moon birthed at her feet -- very symbolic. It is, in fact, a new moon. It's Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year. Just the weight of symbolism in the sky that day was just completely stunning. And I wondered when I saw all these things, in addition to the hairs coming up on my arms I thought maybe this is when Jesus was born. Then I thought, well, it could have been his conception. Maybe this is the annunciation. Maybe this is when Gabriel came to Mary, and Mary said, okay, "be it done unto me." And so I thought, well, we can test that theory. Let's wind forward nine months. And so when I did that, that's when I came across the brightest star anyone alive had ever seen, which I take probably to be Christ's birth. I'm not dogmatic on those things. I mean, it's not like you find a sign in the sky that says "Jesus born here." But the weight of symbolism is just gigantic, and the nine months is very suspicious to me. Jupiter, the largest planet, and Venus, the brightest of the planets, came into close conjunction, so close that they couldn't be separated by naked eye. And you have to remember the Magi [were] naked-eye observers. Not even any eye glasses, but certainly no telescopes. And so the two objects came together so close that to any viewer on earth, they appeared to be the same object, one object, the brightest star anyone alive had even seen. I believe the Star of Bethlehem was the brightest star, and that happened from the point of view of someone observing in Babylon, right over Judea in the western sky. How long did it last? Just that evening, and then they gradually moved apart, as they always do.

Q: So if the Wise Men had seen that and started off, what would they have seen when they arrived?

A: When they arrived in Jerusalem, and we have to allow months for that travel, the first thing they did was not so much see something as talk. They had an audience with King Herod. This shows something about the Magi. The fact that they could get an audience with King Herod shows they weren't just some rabble. They were important people, and they told the story of what they'd seen in three and two B.C., all this pageantry in the sky. And that got Herod totally stirred, and they asked this question: Where is the one born King of the Jews? Unfortunately, Herod's advisors knew. If they hadn't known the prophecy from Micah, Herod would not have killed all the babies in Bethlehem. But they did know, and so they said to Herod, and Herod said to the Magi, "He's in Bethlehem." So they leave Jerusalem headed toward Bethlehem, which -- a geography lesson here: It's due south, five miles, main road. Don't need a star. Don't need a map. Don't need an angel. It's right there. They're headed out from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, due south, and if they look up in the night sky in the morning hours, sure enough, there's Jupiter, ahead of them, over the little town of Bethlehem. So that fulfills one of the nine points, to have the star ahead of them as they head for Bethlehem.

Q: When you started putting some of these things together, what did that do for your own faith?

A: Originally, as I began finding some of the solutions and piecing together parts of the puzzle that perhaps some other people had found, and then adding things that I found, I began to see a story taking shape. And as some of the larger pieces of that story fell into place, I won't say it increased my faith. I'll say it did something more like put me in a state of awe. Not quite fear, but close. When I saw these things that explained what could have been very obscure portions of scripture that many have perhaps skipped over or dismissed as not soluble, when I see them all of a sudden coming into pictures, into graphic illustrations in the sky, there were several times when I saw things that brought me to tears. And I don't want to sound like I'm crying all the time. I'm not. But that got me there big time. And so I would say, yes, of course, it deepened my faith. But really more it helped me see a side of God I had not been fully aware of. To give you a fuller example of that, I believe the Star of Bethlehem is just the beginning of a celestial poem that ends at Christ's death, at the crucifixion, and when you see the star's nine points fulfilled, but then the sky continues to move, and then the sky culminates the end of what I believe is a poem at the crucifixion, it's actually that that blows the audiences away, and it's actually that that had my face running with tears and looking at the sky and asking, "My God, what did you do?" Because it's poetry of terrible beauty, and when the audience sees that, they're stunned. That's really the story I'm sharing.

Q: You say there was a side of God you hadn't known. What was it?

A: The deepest effect on me was probably revealing to me a side of God that I might have been able to tell you I believed, but to see it is so different, and that is that God is beautiful, and to see that he would write in the sky from before time celestial poetry to announce the coming and passing of our Messiah took me to a different place, took me a place where I could see beauty in our creator that I hadn't known.

Q: How does that affect how you hear the Christmas story every year?

A: This whole thing has changed the Christmas story for a lot of people, many thousands around the world, because once you hear that the star was real, it's demonstrable, historical, you know, physical, scientific, objective, it happened, it fits the Matthew story, it gives the whole story a different historicity, a feeling of fact, not just something pretty -- it is that -- but something true, and that's a wonderful thing to do for audiences.

Q: Why did you decide to share this? Why put together a DVD about all this?

A: My original audience for the star was just a small class I was teaching of about 30 people. But the reaction was very strong, and so strong that I decided, well, we need to present to larger groups. And pretty soon I was being asked by unrelated organizations, and then overseas, and I was presenting all over the world, in fact. Probably the strangest invitation was to the University of Pristina in Kosovo, so I presented to a Muslim audience in Kosovo. I felt like I was being pulled in so many directions. I mean, I can't go everywhere, and the demand was so high, and I realized, well, we have to have a film. We've got to freeze the story so that we can share it with people all around the world, and so we made a DVD for that reason. It was needed, absolutely needed to carry the story on. And also if I, for whatever reasons, can no longer work on this, someone else can stand on my shoulders just like I'm standing on the shoulders of others. They can take the story they see on the DVD and take it wherever the next step might be. I don't know what it is. And so now that we have that DVD in distribution, it's gone crazy. It's on fire. I mean, it keeps selling out every place. It surprises the people who are involved with it, which is always fun. The whole point of doing the DVD was not money, but to spread the word, and to do it in a way that preserves the beauty of the poetry.