"The Usual Suspects" - The Wise Men

One of the readers of last week's blog about the shepherds, sent me the following message: Lynn - when we were in Winnipeg last week I thought the wise men on camels on an insurance building across from the legislature were really out of place. Instead it could be Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont and a Cree chief on horseback. What a great lead-in to this week's blog!

‘In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ Matthew 2:1-2

So when was this gospel written and by whom? Both of these questions have a bearing on the ‘why’ this particular story came to be written: “Most scholars believe the Gospel of Matthew was composed between 80 and 90 CE, with a range of possibility between 70 to 110 CE … The anonymous author was probably a male Jew, standing on the margin between traditional and non-traditional Jewish values, and familiar with technical legal aspects of scripture being debated in his time …Matthew simply presents an event at an unspecified point after Christ's birth in which an unnumbered party of unnamed "wise men" visits him in a house not a stable, with only "his mother" mentioned as present.” [Wikipedia]

The word we have translated as Magi or wise men refers in the original Greek of this gospel to the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism. As part of their religion, these priests paid particular attention to the stars and gained an international reputation for astrology, which was at that time highly regarded as a science. According to the story they came from the east and so the tradition has developed that they were Babylonian, Persians or Jews from Yemen.

Because there are three gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh mentioned in the story, we traditionally think that there were three wise men.These same 3 gifts are said to have been offered by the Syrian king to Apollo in his temple in 243 BC, perhaps the precedent for them being mentioned in Matthew. Isaiah 60 and Psalm 72 report gifts being given by kings. Thus we have come to see the Magi as kings, rather than as astronomer-priests.

So if the gospel of Matthew was being written today just who might these ‘wise men [sic]’ be? Would they be the theologian, the astrophysicist, and the cosmologist? Would they be bringing their theory of dark matter’ their ‘double dark theory, their new picture of the universe? Would the theologians be telling ‘new’ origin story, one for the whole world, based on these theories? Their gifts would be those that could be used today to explain what that new picture of the universe means for who and what we are.

Matthew’s story was written to the people of that time and reflects the reality of the people to whom it was written. We need to reflect the time in which we live with the stories we tell. That is the gift that those in the churches could give to us this Christmastide …

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