Peter CostelloThese days the Christmas story has become – with the star over the stable, the infant in the manger, the shepherds, the three kings and the wicked King Herod – so familiar that we rarely if ever look back to see what the Gospels actually say about the Nativity.
It often surprises readers to find that the Gospels attributed to Mark and John are silent on the matter. What tradition records about the birth of Jesus is related to us in the first chapters of Matthew, written about 80AD, and Luke, written towards 100AD.
The authors of Matthew provide among other details, the wise men (not kings, crucially) and the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Luke, in addressing Theophilus, relates the journey to Bethlehem, the birth, and the visit of the shepherds; but he says nothing of the wise men or the slaughter of the innocents.
The early Christians quickly conflated these gospel accounts to make up the popular story so familiar from school Nativity plays.
But the Three Wise Men and the Shepherds are the first to witness the Nativity, or rather for Christians, the fact of the Incarnation. And as the first witnesses, because they represent us all in a way, they are worth exploring in a little more detail, for in the Middle Ages they gave rise to a range of traditions and beliefs.
The Wise Men from the East
“When Jesus therefore was born in Bethlehem of Juda, in the days of King Herod, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem. Saying, ‘Where is he that is born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to adore him.’ And King Herod hearing this, was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And assembling together all the chief priests and the scribes of the people, he inquired of them where Christ should be born. But they said to him: In Bethlehem of Juda. For so it is written by the prophet:
‘And thou Bethlehem the land of Juda
art not the least among the princes of Juda:
for out of thee shall come forth the captain
that shall rule my people Israel.’ [Micha: 5.2]
“Then Herod, privately calling the wise men, learned diligently of them the time of the star which appeared to them; And sending them into Bethlehem, said: ‘Go and diligently inquire after the child, and when you have found him, bring me word again, that I also may come to adore him.’ Who having heard the king, went their way; and behold the star which they had seen in the east, went before them, until it came and stood over where the child was. And seeing the star they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.
“And entering into the house, they found the child with Mary his mother, and falling down they adored him; and opening their treasures, they offered him gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having received an answer in sleep that they should not return to Herod, they went back another way into their country.” (Matthew 2:1 – 2:12)
But where did these wise men come from? They are called Magi, the plural of magus, which was a term widely used for magicians, as in the case of Simon Magus, an early convert to Christianity, who was later seen as the founder of Gnosticism and the source of all heresies. However, some saw the wise men as being from Persia, and associated them with the Zoroastrians (as in the legend reported by Marco Polo [see panel]).
However the terms magus was loosely used, and there was much confusion in Palestine between Chaldea and Persia, especially after the Seleucids, of Greek origin, gave way to the Asian Parthians.
It could be that the wise men were actually astrologers, as the text suggests, from southern Mesopotamia, in modern Iraq. Chaldea was thought of in later centuries as the source of magical tradition. But it would be better to see the wise men as astronomers rather than astrologers.
That is to say, they were seekers after the truths of nature’s mysteries. They were, in contrast to the working shepherds, members of the intelligentsia of those days, serious minded men.
(We have to remember too that in later centuries many of the Popes and secular rulers employed astrologers, as indeed did Ronald Regan more recently. Whatever we think about them today, they saw themselves as serious students of nature too.)
The idea of the wise men as scientists of some kind makes, it seems to me, the three mysterious men more relevant for us today. Whatever they were, the three of them were not (I think) kings.
That idea seems to me to have arisen at a later date, from confused notions of the status of the magi in Persia. It gave some comfort to the secular rulers of the world, for whom the Gospels have in fact little respect. They were like many today mystified by the fact of the Incarnation, and worried their minds about it later.
T. S. Eliot concludes his poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’ with words that seem to epitomise the situation of Christians today in many places:
“We returned to our places, these kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.”
The Shepherds
“And there were in the same country shepherds watching, and keeping the night watches over their flock. And behold an angel of the Lord stood by them, and the brightness of God shone round about them; and they feared with a great fear…
“And it came to pass, after the angels departed from them into Heaven, the shepherds said one to another: Let us go over to Bethlehem, and let us see this word that is come to pass, which the Lord hath shewed to us.
“And they came with haste; and they found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. And seeing, they understood of the word that had been spoken to them concerning this child. And all that heard, wondered; and at those things that were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these words, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God, for all the things they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.” (Luke 2:8 – 2:20)
The role of the shepherds contrasts with the Three Wise Men. In thinking about their meaning we have to bear in mind that sheep and shepherds recall the early days of the patriarchs as nomad sheep herders. The figure of the pastor derives from this, with the idea of Jesus as “the Good Shepherd”.
In the Palestine of the day however, with its large cities like Jerusalem and Jericho, large town and villages too where farmers lived and went from to plough their fields, the shepherd and their way of life was a marginal one. The Good Shepherd, this suggests, was as marginal, in a way, as the Good Samaritan.
So living as we do today, we could see these first witnesses of the Nativity as representing ordinary working people, perhaps disadvantaged people in the society around them, living their lives in the best way they could, and so serving the community.
The Three Wise Men, too, can be seen as marginal figures, as all seekers after the real truth at the heart of the mysteries of nature must be.
When read and considered the seemingly simple passages of the Gospels relating to the Nativity are filled with possibilities. (The Orthodox Greeks maintain a shrine of the Shepherds’ Field near Bethlehem).
The Shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne
In the magnificent cathedral at Cologne, begun in 1248 and abandoned in 1473, is housed the magnificent Shrine of the Three Kings, a celebrated work of art, commissioned by Philip von Heinsberg, Archbishop of Cologne from 1167 to 1191 and created by Nicholas of Verdun, began in 1190.
The shrine takes the form a large reliquary in the shape of a basilican church, made of bronze and silver, gilded and ornamented with architectonic details, figurative sculpture, enamels and gemstones. The shrine was opened in 1864 and found to contain the bones of three individuals. These were replaced in the shrine wrapped in white silk.
The remains it contains were captured by Frederick Barbarossa in Milan in 1164. Legend recounts that these “relics of the Magi” were originally situated at Constantinople, but brought to Milan by Eustorgius I, the city’s bishop, to whom they were entrusted by the Emperor Constantine in 314.
They were allegedly discovered by St Helena, about 271AD, when she was in the Middle East searching for the True Cross.
But this is an improbable, indeed impossible legend, as she was most unlikely to have been able to visit Persia, which lay far outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire.
The Historia Trium Regum, or History of the Three Kings, by John of Hildesheim, who died in 1375, provided a fabulous account along these lines that became familiar across Europe.
But rather than repeat it, here we reproduce an earlier Persian account of the Three Kings recorded by the great medieval traveller Marco Polo.
