CAUTION: The above video examines powerful evidence that the scriptures of the New Testament gospel accounts are based upon a system of celestial allegory rather than being accounts of literal terrestrial historical events. If you are not comfortable exploring this subject, please consider refraining from watching.

Here is a new video exploring the events described in the Gospel According to Matthew, chapter 2: the Visit of the Magi.

It asks a question which I believe poses a king-sized problem for the "literal-historical" school of scriptural interpretation: If the wise men described in Matthew 2:1 came "from the east to Jerusalem," but then explain that they "saw his star in the east" in Matthew 2:2 (which "stood over where the young child was," according to Matthew 2:9), how did they ever end up arriving somewhere in the west of where they began?

If you start east of somewhere, and then see a star in the east which is your guide, it would seem that you would then travel towards the east.

Did the wise men of Matthew 2 first travel across China, then across the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of the Americas, then across the Americas to the Atlantic Ocean, and then continue east until they arrived at the point that the star directed?

The texts do not support a literal-historical-terrestrial understanding of the episode, unless you believe that the wise men as described in the text were among the ancient circumnavigators of the globe . . . but they work perfectly well for the celestial approach, as we will see.

Also, while it would seem that this is a subject that is more appropriate to examine around Christmas-time, it turns out that the events of the Easter-story actually incorporate the full cycle of the great wheel of the zodiac and the year, and thus a very comprehensive message regarding the journey of the human soul of every man and woman -- as future posts (and possibly future videos) may have occasion to explore!

The celestial analysis of the Star of Bethlehem and Visit of the Magi which underlies much of the discussion in this video was first given by Robert Taylor (1784 - 1844) in a lecture entitled "The Star of Bethlehem" which was published posthumously in a book entitled The Devil's Pulpit in 1857, which  is available online in its entirety here (see in particular pages 42 - 44).

image: Wikimedia commons (link).