Did the wise men use instruments to find baby Jesus?

Answer 1

A:The wise men (magi) are in the Gospel of Matthew, but this does not say how they followed the star all the way from the east to Jerusalem and then Bethlehem, but it seems they were able to do so with such accuracy that they used the star to identify exactly which house in Bethlehem was the home of Jesus.

We know more about the star from Ignatius of Antioch (died around 110 CE), who wrote (Letter to the Ephesians, XIX), "A star shone in the heaven beyond all the stars, and its light was unspeakable and its newness caused astonishment, and all the other stars, with the sun and the moon gathered in chorus around this star, and it far exceeded them all in its light." With a star brighter than the sun, moon and all other stars combined, it would of course not have been possible to look directly at it, so it would also have been hard to use any instrument to observe it.

Nevertheless, Pope Leo I tells us that the star was entirely invisible to the Jews because of their blindness. This begins to place the star in the realms of myth rather than fact. You can not use an instrument to observe a mythical star. Ian Wilson (Jesus: The Evidence) says that the hard reality is that Matthew's nativity story offers insufficient historicity for anyone to be confident that there was a star at all. This is echoed by John Shelby Spong, who says (Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus) that neither birth story contains any historical truth. He reports that among people he knows in New Testament circles, the universal assumption is that the magi were not actual people, and that Matthew was simply writing Christian midrash. If there were no wise men, we can not tell what instrument they would have used to follow an imaginary star.

Answer 2

Yes. But not today's Sat. Nav.!

In the gospel according Matthew they used the Sat. Nav. of the time - the star!!

• Matthew [2:9] When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.

• You might concur it was a Sat. Nav. with the utmost precision!!!.