TruthBook Religious News Blog

By Tim Townsend
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS - In the children's Christmas play at Salem-in-Ballwin United Methodist Church this year, sheep grazed as Joseph led Mary into the stable, and the four wise men brought gifts to the baby Jesus.

About 20 smiling parents and grandparents sat on folding chairs in the church's fellowship hall, some holding camcorders, others gripping green programs adorned with white snowflakes. They applauded and laughed as the children put on the play, which was based on the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

The Christmas story is a narrative familiar to most Americans, regardless of religion, and to the world's 2 billion Christians. It's the story of the birth of Jesus Christ. As told in Matthew, it is the story of a true king, God-made-man to redeem the sins of everyone.

But the author of Matthew's Gospel does not specify how many wise men appeared in Jerusalem asking for "the child who has been born King of the Jews." The traditional number of three magi was derived over the centuries from the three gifts - gold, frankincense and myrrh - they offered the child as they knelt before him.

Millennia after the fact, believers are free to guess how many magi visited the baby Jesus that day. The members of the Salem-in-Ballwin church decided not only to have four magi, but that they would not all be men. And so a girl joined three boys in blue, green, red and purple robes with brown magi headwear held in place with gold bands.

The magi appear only in Matthew's Gospel. They are replaced in Luke's Gospel with shepherds, and neither Mark's nor John's Gospel includes the story of Christ's birth. In his book "The Birth of the Messiah," the Rev. Raymond E. Brown summarized the 12 verses of Matthew's Gospel featuring the wise men.

"The magi from the East, representing the Gentiles, receive God's revelation about the birth of the Messiah through a proclamation in nature, a star," he wrote. "They come to Jerusalem and are further enlightened about the place of the Messiah's birth through the Jewish Scriptures. They go to Bethlehem to pay him homage with gifts, and then return another way."

These three kings of orient are, in fact, not kings at all. "Magi" comes from the Greek word "magoi," meaning sorcerers or astrologers - the scientists of their day. Scientific theories attempting to explain the Star of Bethlehem have historically included a supernova, a comet, or most often, a planetary alignment of Jupiter, Saturn and Mars.

"These were men who searched the sky for signs," said the Rev. John Paul Heil, professor of New Testament who recently left Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis to teach at Catholic University of America in Washington. "They were learned people who would advise kings as to what was going on in the heavens."

In later centuries the magi themselves began to be depicted as kings.

Later Christian tradition gave the magi names - Melchior, Balthasar and Gaspar - and since the 12th century their purported bones (some say their skulls) have been encased in the Shrine of the Three Kings now in the Cologne Cathedral in Germany.

But the characterization of the magi as kings "is quite contrary to what Matthew thinks about kings," said Heil. Especially when contrasted with the role of King Herod in the narrative. Herod, duped by the magi whom he'd sent to find the newborn Messiah for him (but who never reported back to him on Jesus' whereabouts), killed all the children in Bethlehem who were 2 years old and younger, an event known as the massacre of the innocents.

In the 17th century, the translators of the King James Version of the Bible rendered "magoi" as the English "wise men" instead of "astrologers." The identification of the magi as wise men or eastern kings stuck because later Christians "were uncomfortable with the depiction of the magi as astrologers," said James A. Kelhoffer, professor of New Testament at St. Louis University.

For the author of Matthew, it is the magi's identity as gentiles that is crucial, according to most biblical scholars. As the first characters to speak in Matthew, the magi are strategic to the author's mission of promoting the concept that the birth of Christ was an event that would change the lives of gentiles and Jews alike.

"For Matthew's original readers, the modern equivalent expression for who the magi were would be `pagan unbelieving philosophers,'" said Jeffrey A. Gibbs, professor of exegetical theology at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. "These are the least people you'd ever expect to know a new king of the Jews had been born." Which, said Gibbs, is precisely Matthew's point: "They are unexpected candidates for faith."

Not all scholars agree that Matthew's author intended the magi as symbols of pagan sin driven to their knees at the sight of the true God.

"There is not the slightest hint of conversion or of false practice in Matthew's description of the magi; they are wholly admirable," wrote Brown. "They represent the best of pagan lore and religious perceptivity which has come to seek Jesus through revelation in nature."

Even the last line of the magi verses in Matthew - "And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road" - has long held meaning for theologians. In the fourth century, St. Augustine wrote that "the Magi didn't return to the Orient by the same route they arrived on. Learn from the past. If you want to change your life, then change your way."

Some pastors attempting to make sense of the magi's theological importance for their flocks see this last point as the most important lesson they can teach.

"For me they represent worshippers," said the Rev. Thomas W. Wyrsch, pastor of St. Margaret of Scotland parish in St. Louis. "When the magi saw the star, they moved, and in doing so they changed their lives. The magi can inspire us to do something, to get up off the couch, to change our lives."