He offered no further explanation as to why he picked that date, but it stuck. We now have the incongruous situation where Jesus was born at least four years before he was really born, according to the calendar developed in his his name. Hence the original Christmas star, if it ever existed, had to be a planet or planets. He took the account in Matthew as the gospel truth and set about calculating when Jesus was born. Nobody goes looking for the Christmas star any more to guess the date of Jesus’s birth.

Source: The Irish Times December 21, 2020 19:26 UTC