Journey to Bethlehem round-up: a new clip and a newer, longer soundtrack album

The "deluxe" soundtrack album has more than twice the music of the original album.

Balthazar (Geno Segers, left) confuses Gaspar (Rizwan Manji, right) with his astronomical jargon in a new clip from Journey to Bethlehem.

Four weeks after the original soundtrack album came out, and three weeks after the movie came out, we now have a new “deluxe” edition of the Journey to Bethlehem soundtrack album. It’s about 70 minutes long, or a little more than double the length of the first album—but it’s still short enough to fit on one CD, if anyone still makes those.

You can listen to the album via the usual platforms, including Spotify:

The original album had most of the songs from the film, so the new music on this album consists mostly of the instrumental score composed by Peer Åström and Adam Anders. (Note: Anders’ name comes first on the song credits, but Åström gets top billing on the score credits.) There are two new vocal bits, though:

• ‘The Betrothal Song’ plays during the betrothal scene and is basically a snippet of the song ‘Brand New Life’ which plays over the end credits.

• Christian pop musician Riley Clemmons performs a cover of ‘Mother to a Savior and King’, the song that Mary sings as she’s going to visit Elizabeth.

I don’t believe the Clemmons track appears anywhere within the film itself, not even over the end credits, so it’s basically a bonus track. There is a lyric video for the Clemmons version of the song on the album’s official YouTube channel:

Meanwhile, I am aware of at least one more clip from the film that has appeared on YouTube, though it’s a short (and non-musical) one, in which one of the Magi, who has just spotted the Star of Bethlehem for the first time, confuses one of the other Magi with his excited, rapid-fire spouting of astronomical and/or astrological jargon:

I don’t know that much about the astronomical theories around the Star of Bethlehem, but I’d be curious to know if the jargon here lines up with any of them.

(Among other things, Balthazar refers to an “alignment between Cronus and Aries”. At first I thought he said “Ares”, because Cronus is the Greek name for Saturn and Ares is the Greek name for Mars, so it sounded to me like he was referring to an alignment between two planets. But the Wikipedia entry on these theories has several references to Aries, the Zodiac sign, and none at all to Mars or Ares. Then again, most of the theories that reference Aries also reference Jupiter, not Saturn, so it’s not clear to me that the movie is referring to any of those real-world theories, either.)

Anyway, I think that brings us up to date. More later, maybe.

Previous videos for Journey to Bethlehem:

• The teaser trailer (April 28, 2023)

• The official trailer (September 14, 2023)

• The ‘Heart of Journey to Bethlehem’ featurette (September 20, 2023)

• The Mary and Joseph featurette (September 29, 2023)

• The Mary’s sisters featurette (October 3, 2023)

• The Antipater featurette (October 6, 2023)

• The Fig (donkey) featurette (October 10, 2023)

• The ‘Can We Make This Work’ clip (October 13, 2023)

• The King Herod featurette (October 20, 2023)

• The Gabriel featurette (October 25, 2023)

• The ‘Brand New Life’ music video and featurette, the ‘Gift of Giving’ promo, and the Catholic and Protestant screening reactions (October 27, 2023)

• The Wise Men featurette (October 31, 2023)

• The ‘Married Collaborators’ featurette (November 3, 2023)

• The ‘In My Blood’ clip (November 4, 2023)

• The Mary featurette (November 7, 2023)

• The Joseph featurette (November 9, 2023)

• The ‘Mother to a Savior and King’ clip, the ‘A Story Worth Sharing’, ‘God Is with Us’, and ‘What We Know’ videos for local church use, and the ‘Dallas Jenkins Shoutout’ video (November 16, 2023)

• The ‘Mary’s Getting Married’ and ‘The Ultimate Deception’ clips, and the Adam Anders and Joel Smallbone see-it-in-theatres videos (November 22, 2023)

Other previous posts on Journey to Bethlehem:

• ‘Has The Road to Bethlehem not been filmed yet?’ (August 19, 2022)

• ‘Adam Anders’ Nativity musical now filming in Spain’ (February 23, 2023)

• ‘Adam Anders’ Nativity musical gets a title’ (April 3, 2023)

• ‘Exclusive: Journey to Bethlehem director Adam Anders on his years-long quest to make a musical about the Nativity’ (October 23, 2023)

• ‘The Journey to Bethlehem soundtrack is here’ (November 3, 2023)

• ‘Box office: The Marvels, Journey to Bethlehem get the holiday season off to a rocky start’ (November 13, 2023)

  • Other box-office reports: Weekend 2 | Weekend 3

• ‘A few thoughts on Journey to Bethlehem’ (November 16, 2023)