  The Star of Bethlehem is only known from a few verses in the Gospel of
Matthew, with the Star inspiring and leading the Magi (i.e., Persian
astrologers) to Jerusalem and ultimately worshipping the young Jesus Christ in
Bethlehem. In the last four centuries, astronomers have put forth over a dozen
greatly different naturalistic explanations, all involving astronomical events,
often a bright nova, supernova, or comet. This paper will evaluate one
prominent recent proposal, that the Star was a 'recurrent nova' now catalogued
as DO Aquilae, and provide three refutations. In particular, (1) DO Aql is
certainly not a recurrent nova, but rather an ordinary nova with a recurrence
time scale of over a million years, (2) in its 1925 eruption, DO Aql certainly
never got brighter than 8.5 mag, and the physics of the system proves that it
could never get to the required luminosity of a supernova, and (3) the Magi
were astrologers who had no recognition or interpretation for novae (or
supernovae or comets) so any such event is completely irrelevant and
meaningless to them.
