The Great Christ Comet (88 page)

1
 Cf. Clement of Alexandria,
Excerpta ex Theodoto
69–75;
Origen,
Contra Celsum
1.60.

2
 Josephus,
Ant.
17.6.4 (§§164–167).

3
 Herod's main symptoms in the run-up to his death were fever, intense whole-body itching, severe intestinal inflammation and pain, voracious hunger, foul breath, edema of the feet and lower abdomen, painful and ulcerated bowels, genital gangrene (Fournier's Disease), the production of worms, asthma, and convulsions. See Josephus,
Ant
. 17.6.5 §§168–173.

4
 Of course, since December–March tends to be rainy in Israel and Babylon, it was presumably not always easy to see the comet. Assuming that the comet remained intact, when the clearer skies associated with spring came, it may well have been easily missed by an untrained eye.

5
 As we saw above, the constellation Aries was sometimes associated with Israel (see Ptolemy,
Tetrabiblos
2.3).

6
 In his letter to the Galatians, the apostle Paul declares that “When the fullness of time came, God sent forth his son, born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4, my translation). On what ground is Paul able to claim that “the fullness of time” had come when Jesus was born? Ethelbert Stauffer comments, “Perhaps Paul, too, is thinking of the appearance of this star [i.e., the star seen by the Magi] in Gal. 4.3f.” (Ethelbert Stauffer,
Jesus and His Story
[New York: Knopf, 1960], 36. Stauffer goes on to write, “At any rate, Ignatius of Antioch [
Eph
. 19:2–3] understood [Paul] to mean this when he combined the themes of Matt. 2 and Gal. 4 quite naturally in an apocalyptic advent hymn to the star of Bethlehem”). Although Stauffer's proposal regarding Gal. 4:3–4 has been largely ignored by subsequent scholarship, it merits attention. After all, Paul must have had some objective basis for his striking claim that Jesus was born at the divinely ordained moment for the initiation of the plan of salvation.

7
 900 AU is 135 billion km, 0.014 light years, or 1/307 of the distance to the closest star system, Alpha Centauri. The approximately 1,000-km-diameter trans-Neptunian object 90377 Sedna, the largest solar system object discovered since Pluto, has an eccentricity of 0.84 and an aphelion distance of about 900 AU.

8
 My translation.

1
 The 87 BC apparition of Halley's Comet may also be preserved only by the Bab­ylo­nians, since the Chinese record does not prove a natural fit. To get the Chinese record to agree with Halley's Comet, one must assume that the Chinese made a mistake in the month or direction (see Tao Kiang, “The Past Orbit of Halley's Comet,”
Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society
76 [1972]: 56).

2
 Virgil (
Georgic
1.488), a contemporary writing in 36–29 BC, speaks of frequent fearsome cometary apparitions at the time of the battle of Philippi (as does Manilius,
Astronomica
1.907–908). The use of the Latin
cometae
and the context make it clear that comets are in view. Cassius Dio 47.40.2 speaks of the “Sun” shining at night.

3
 Cassius Dio 66.17.2, and Suetonius,
Vespasian
23.4, refer to a “long-haired” comet that portended Vespasian's death. We simply cannot be sure that it was the same comet recorded in April by the Koreans.

4
 However, this may not have been a comet.

5
 Donald K. Yeomans,
Comets: A Chronological History of Observation, Science, Myth, and Folklore
(New York: John Wiley, 1991), 361–424; and A. A. Barrett, “Observations of Comets in Greek and Roman Sources before A.D. 410,”
Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada
72 (1978): 81–106. It should be noted, however, that the reliability of Korean records up until about AD 400 is questionable (see Ho Peng-Yoke, “Ancient and Mediaeval Observations of Comets and Novae in Chinese Sources,”
Vistas in Astronomy
5 [1962]: 149). Thomas John York, “The Reliability of Early East Asian Astronomical Records” (PhD thesis, Durham University, 2003), 12, comments that the Korean source of these early comet reports contains few records and that most of them are simply copies of Chinese records (York's thesis is available online at
http://
etheses
.dur
.ac
.uk
/3080
/).

6
 Seneca,
Natural Questions
7.17.2.

7
 Plutarch,
Caesar
69.3 (my translation).

8
 With respect to the chronology and the question of the relationship between the late-July comet and the Chinese reports of a comet in May–June of 44 BC, John T. Ramsey and A. Lewis Licht (
The Comet of 44 B.C. and Caesar's Funeral Games
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997]) claim that the same comet is in view. On this basis they seek to use the two reported positions of the comet to “arrive at a relatively narrow range of orbital parameters that fit our evidence” (12). The Roman apparition is taken to be a sudden cometary flare-up due to “change in the internal structure of the comet's nucleus” or nucleus splitting “almost two months after the likely date of perihelion” (119–124). Assigning May 30 to the Chinese observation and July 23 to the Roman sightings, they develop hypothetical orbits of the comet (125–132). Ramsey and Licht may be correct in suggesting that the same comet was described at different stages of its apparition (their development of a single orbit that holds together the two apparitions is impressive), but their hypothesis requires that there was a massive outburst well after perihelion. It seems equally, if not more, likely that a different comet was being reported (cf. Alexandre Guy Pingré,
Cométographie ou Traité Historique et Théoretique des Comètes
, 2 vols. [Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1783–1784], 277–279), a very bright one around perihelion time.

9
 
Octavia
231–232.

10
 Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
2.23.

11
 Also Tacitus,
Annals
15.47; Suetonius,
Nero
36.

12
 E.g., Yeomans,
Comets
, 368.

13
 Gary W. Kronk,
Cometography: A Catalog of Comets
, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–), 1:33.

14
 Tacitus,
Ann
. 15.47 (my translation).

15
 Kronk,
Cometography
, 1:298–308.

16
 C/1618 Q1, V1, and W1.

17
 See Kronk,
Cometography
, 1:342.

18
 C/1880 C1 (Great Southern Comet), C/1881 K1 (Great Comet), C/1882 F1 (Wells), and C/1882 R1 (Great September Comet). We could also include other naked-eye comets like C/1880 S1 (Hartwig) and C/1881 N1 (Schaeberle). Peter Grego,
Blazing a Ghostly Trail: ISON and Great Comets of the Past and Future
(New York: Springer, 2014), 105, points out that six of the nineteenth century's eight great comets appeared within a 40-year period.

19
 Josephus,
J.W.
6.5.3 (§289; cf. Cassius Dio 64.8.1).

20
 Fourteen comets if we include a rather peculiar record in January–February of 5 BC: “a white vapor emerged in the southwest, reaching from the ground up to the sky. It emerged beneath Shen and penetrated Tiance, as wide as a bolt of cloth and over 10
zhang
[100 degrees] long. It lasted more than 10 days before departing” (David W. Pankenier, Zhentao Xu, and Yaotiao Jiang,
Archaeoastronomy in East Asia
[Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2008], 23–24). Curiously, I find that this phenomenon coincided with the birth of future Emperor Guangwu of Han, who ruled from AD 25 to 57. When I asked David Pankenier how sure he was that this was a comet, he replied (email correspondence, October 6, 2012):

The record would be dubious, were it not for the fact that it says that the vapor was extremely long and persisted for more than 10 days, with the stellar location explicitly noted. With that it met our selection criteria. We can rule out an aurora, a bolide trail, or an atmospheric phenomenon, and the record is consistent with the appearance of a comet whose coma was invisible below the horizon but whose tail stretched up into the sky at the terrestrial place and time in question.

21
 Pankenier et al.,
Archeoastronomy in East Asia
, 21–25.

22
 Christopher Cullen, “Halley's Comet and the ‘Ghost' Event of 10 BC,”
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society
32 (1991): 113–119, discusses a Chinese record in the
Thung Chien Kang Mu
(1189) that has been interpreted by some as referring to a comet in 10 BC. He argues that it is actually referring to Halley's Comet in 12 BC. Of course, if the 10 BC comet recorded in the
Thung Chien Kang Mu
is not a wrongly dated record of Halley's Comet in 12 BC, then we would have to add it to our count of Chinese comets from 50 BC to AD 50, making 11 (or 12). It is also sometimes claimed (dubiously, in my view) that the 4 BC cometary record is misdated and originally referred to the comet in the spring of 5 BC (see Kronk,
Cometography
, 1:26–27).

23
 Wolfram Eberhard, “The Political Function of Astronomy and Astronomers in Han China,” in
Chinese Thought and Institutions
, ed. John K. Fairbank (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 57–58. Michael Loewe,
Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 67, 71n25, 75–76, points out the close association between cometary records and military campaigns. On pp. 81–83 he demonstrates that the 12 BC Chinese comet was preserved because it was regarded as having successfully augured events of great political significance. Note the AD 22 records of a “fuzzy star” that coincided with the beginning of Liu Yan's rebellion against Wang Mang (who had usurped the throne in AD 9).

24
 See Eberhard, “Political Function,” 57–58. In 7–6 BC, the honeymoon period of Emperor Ai's reign, the officials and people were united in believing that, after the incompetent rule of Emperor Yuan and the extravagant reign of Emperor Cheng, they now had a proficient emperor (Wikipedia, s.v. “Emperor Ai of Han,”
http://
en
.wikipedia
.org
/wiki/Emperor
_Ai
_of
_Han
[last modified March 22, 2013]). Any comet occurring at that time was liable to have been regarded as an auspicious omen and hence may have been of less interest to the court astrologers and the historian. Note how Homer H. Dubs,
The History of the Former Han Dynasty
, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Waverly, 1938–1955), 1:261, explains the lack of eclipses and comets recorded during Emperor Wen's reign in the second century BC: “it looks as though the recorders of phenomena deliberately refused to record eclipses or comets, for the good reign of Emperor Wen made them think that Heaven was sending no admonitions, hence they concluded that there were no ‘visitations.'” Notably the historian introduces inauspicious comets, along with an increased number of other portents, in the period when the positive sentiment toward the emperor dissipated, namely in 5 BC and 4 BC. At that very time tensions within the palace were growing and Ai began to be perceived as harsh, indecisive, easily offended, and always sick, and became involved in a homosexual relationship with Tung Hsien. These negative omens were no doubt included by the historian writing the
Han shu
in order to make the point that doom was now destined for Ai and the Former Han dynasty.

25
 Zdenek Sekanina and P. W. Chodas—see, for example, “Fragmentation Hierarchy of Bright Sungrazing Comets and the Birth and Orbital Evolution of the Kreutz System. I. Two-Superfragment Model,”
Astrophysical Journal
607 (2004): 624.

26
 Barrett, “Observations,” 81–106.

27
 Ibid., 94–98: catalog numbers 32–42.

28
 If Cullen, “Halley's Comet and the ‘Ghost' Event of 10 BC,” is wrong and the 10 BC comet is one that went unrecorded in the
Han shu
, it would be further evidence that those responsible for the
Han shu
were selective regarding which cometary records of the imperial astronomers they included in their work.

29
 Ramsey and Licht,
Comet of 44 B.C
., 47. David Pankenier, a respected authority on Chinese astronomical records, concurred with this assessment (personal email message to the author, October 6, 2012).

30
 Virgil,
Georgic
1.488–489; Manilius,
Astronomica
1.907–908; cf. Cassius Dio 47.40.2.

31
 Cassius Dio 54.19.7; Julius Obsequens,
Liber de prodigiis
71.

32
 Cassius Dio 54.29.8.

33
 Ibid., 56.24.4; cf. Manilius,
Astronomica
1.899–900.

34
 Hermann Hunger, F. Richard Stephenson, C. B. F. Walker, and K. K. C. Yau,
Halley's Comet in History
(London: British Museum, 1985), 45. Ramsey and Licht,
Comet of 44 B.C.
, 109n48, point out that astronomical records in the imperial archives “no doubt perished in the turmoil that followed the overthrow of the usurper Wang Mang” in AD 23 or 25.

35
 David W. Pankenier, “On the Reliability of Han Dynasty Solar Eclipse Records,”
Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage
15.3 (2012): 211, states that, at times during the Former Han dynasty, the standard of record-keeping declined on account of cronyism, negligence, civil unrest, etc. Speaking more generally, York (“Reliability,” 121), in his doctoral study of the reliability of East Asian astronomical records, concludes that the fluctuating numbers of surviving comet records are explicable with reference to changes in the proficiency of astronomical observations, record-making, and record-keeping. He points out that, in their observations of conjunctions, the efficiency of Chinese astronomers ranged from 0% to 20%, and he suggests that this low rate probably applies to other astronomical phenomena (123).

36
 F. Richard Stephenson, “The Ancient History of Halley's Comet,” in
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
, ed. Norman Thrower (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 238. The histogram he mentions is found on page 239 of Stephenson's essay (fig. 13.3).

37
 Hunger et al.,
Halley's Comet in History
, 45.

38
 David Pankenier,
Popular Astrology and Border Affairs in Early Imperial China
, Sino-Platonic Papers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2000), 4–5.

39
 See Cullen, “Halley's Comet and the ‘Ghost' Event of 10 BC,” 117, who emphasizes that a number of the Chinese constellations through which the comet traversed were of great astrological importance and that it is this fact that explains the “apocalyptic note” in the commentary. See also Loewe,
Divination
, 82.

40
 David W. Pankenier, “Notes on Translations of the East Asian Records Relating to the Supernova of AD 1054,”
Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage
9.1 (2006): 80, which is a modification of a translation in Cullen, “Halley's Comet and the ‘Ghost' Event of 10 BC,” 117.

41
 Hunger et al.,
Halley's Comet in History
, 47.