Journey of the Magi

"It is absolutely very vague. The Magi story, the story of the wise men, is probably one of the best examples of places where people have read into the Bible all sorts of beliefs that are not exactly there. For example, the idea that there are three of them, Matthew’s Gospel never says that. Matthew says that there were three gifts – gold, frankincense and myrrh. So it ends up being a deduction on that basis, that there are three. Matthew never says they are kings. That is an interpretation that is probably based on some parts of the Old Testament, particularly the psalms, that deal with kings bringing tribute to a ruler of Israel. The names people are familiar with – Balthazar, Caspar and Melchior – don’t appear in the New Testament. In fact they only show up, for the first time, in a sixth-century source. So there are lots of interpretations and extra layers of interpretation that have gotten added on to the actual Gospel story, beyond what Matthew has written. What Richard Trexler’s book is doing is, firstly, exploring how this interpretation began in early Christianity, how these details start getting added in one by one. He takes a long historical view of the evolution of traditions about the wise men, and goes up to the 18th or 19th century. One of the things he spends a lot of time on is how the Magi end up, in the Middle Ages, being interpreted as kings. Apparently there were a number of actual kings who really co-opted the symbol of the Magi, envisioning themselves in this role, and so there would be nativity plays where it would actually be royalty that would take on the part of the Magi. It’s tricky. The reason they come when Jesus is born, at least in the harmonised version, is because you need to have the shepherds and the Magi all there at the same time – otherwise it’s not a complete Christmas scene. Luke’s Gospel is very clear that the shepherds show up at the birthplace of Jesus quite soon after Jesus’s birth. But Matthew is a lot more vague on when the wise men show up. It doesn’t necessarily seem that they show up right at the moment of Jesus’s birth. There are even some hints, in Matthew’s story, that maybe Matthew is envisioning that the Magi showed up when Jesus was about two years old. The reason for that is that after the Magi go and talk to King Herod, King Herod asks them about the star that they had seen, and exactly what time the star had appeared. Then, a little bit later, after the Magi don’t return to Herod, it says that he went and killed all the children in Bethlehem under age two, because of the information that the wise men had given him about when the star appeared. Readers of Matthew have put two and two together and suggested, ‘Oh, so the Magi must have seen the star in their country at the moment Jesus was born, and started travelling soon thereafter, and it took them approximately two years to get there.’ Matthew never spells all of that out, but that seems to be one of the standard interpretations. In terms of why it gets connected up with January 6, one of the interesting things is that in eastern Christian churches, in Palestine, Syria, and further east, January 6 ends up actually being more ingrained as the time for the celebration of Jesus’s birth. My guess is that it stays on as a significant date just because it was so influential for the early church, and hence you have this 12-day sacred season, between December 25 and January 6. But there aren’t a lot of traditions in early Christianity that say the Magi showed up 12 days after Jesus was born. Some late Irish texts make this claim, but reasons for associating the Magi with that date seem to be much more because that was when the eastern Church identified the date of Christmas. Yes, The Revelation of the Magi— which is translated into English for the first time in my book—is by far the longest and most complex and certainly the most strange account of who the Magi were, how they knew about the significance of the star, and what happened when the star itself actually appeared. It places the Magi at the very, very east of the inhabited world, in a land that seems to be equivalent to China. They’ve had this prophecy that they’ve been passing down for thousands of years, expecting a star that signalled the birth of a god in a human form. So they’re actually waiting for the star, and they’re not surprised when it shows up. What’s interesting is that when the star does show up, it descends to the place where the Magi are praying and it actually transforms into a human being. The text makes it clear that this human being is Jesus himself in the form of a star. So The Revelation of the Magi ends up doing something very different in terms of what early Christians thought about the star of Bethlehem. There were certainly Christians who looked at Matthew’s account of the star of Bethlehem and thought, this star is behaving very strangely, so it’s probably not an ordinary star. Some of them thought it was the holy spirit, some of them thought it was an angel. But this is the only early Christian text that actually says, the Star of Bethlehem and Jesus Christ are actually the same thing. That’s one of the traditions that is in The Revelation of the Magi . Early on there is a list of the names of 12 Magi. It’s not clear whether that was part of the original text. It never says there were three, and there are actually some hints in the text that the story may envision an even larger group of Magi. That’s because the word it uses to describe the entourage of Magi who travel with the star is a word that usually means a small army. So we’re not talking about a handful of Magi. The earliest form of the text may actually have envisioned hundreds of Magi following along. It was in Syriac, which is an ancient Christian language related to Aramaic which was used in the eastern regions of the early Christian church."