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“We saw an immense star shining among these stars and causing them to become dim, so that they no longer shone; and we knew that a king had been born in Israel.” 35 This description suggests that the comet’s brightness was greater than the Moon’s. Moreover, this document portrays the Star as exceptionally large. For a very large comet to be extraordinarily bright means that the apparent magnitude must be most remarkable. 36
    Apparent magnitude compares the brightness of complete entities to the star Vega (the second brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus). It does not compare the entity based on the brightness of a set portion of its area, that is, its “surface brightness.” For a large object to be bright enough to bleach out the light of the stars, its apparent magnitude has to be extraordinary, because its overall brightness is distributed over a wider area, which means it is diluted. It is much like the brightness of a beam of light on a wall cast by a flashlight. When the beam is small, the brightness is more concentrated. When it is large, the brightness is more diffuse. If you compare a set area of the beam when small to a set area of it when large, the brightness of the set area of the more compact beam would, of course, be more intense than that of the more extended beam. That, in a nutshell, is surface brightness. On the other hand, do not forget that the same amount of light is being distributed—think of that as the apparent magnitude. The difference between apparent magnitude and surface brightness is the difference between the overall brightness of your whole computer display screen and the brightness of the average pixel on it. In the case of a large comet, the brightness of the whole coma (the apparent magnitude) needs to be high for the brightness of each small section of it (the surface brightness) to be really intense.
    We have mentioned Ignatius and the Protevangelium of James , but what did the first generations of Christians claim about the brightness of the comet?
    First, Revelation 12:2, 5 would seem to imply that the coma of the comet, in playing the role of the baby that grew in Virgo’s womb and then seemed to cause her intense agony as it was “born,” grew very large. It may possibly be inferred from this account that the coma became as large relative to Virgo as a newborn baby is in comparison with its mother: something like 9–12 degrees long (major axis), on October 20, 6 BC. That would be astonishing, because only a coma that had a strong apparent magnitude value would have a sufficiently great surface brightness at that size to be clearly visible to the naked eye. At apparent magnitude -9 to -11 (n=3, assuming that the comet was first seen between May and December, 7 BC), the large coma would have been easily detectable but it would not have been stunningly bright. At apparent magnitude -11 to -13 (n=4) it would have been more striking, with a surface brightness like that of Neptune (seen through a telescope). 37 Magnitude -13 to -16 (n=5) would have made for a stunning sight, with a “surface brightness” like that of Saturn. 38
    Second, we may perhaps tentatively glean indirect clues about the comet’s brightness from texts that speak of Jesus in terms of the comet that heralded his birth. In particular, it is possible to detect some information about the comet’s brightness from how New Testament texts draw upon Isaiah 9:2’s great oracle concerning the coming of the Messiah and the great natal star: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.” Luke 1:78–79 and Matthew 4:16 speak of the Messiah’s coming in terms drawn from Isaiah’s oracle, as does the Gospel of John.
    Luke speaks of a rising star that “shall visit us from on high to give light to those who sit in darkness