Matthew’s second chapter gives us a story about Magi coming to worship the newborn King of the Jews. “Magi” is a transliteration of the Greek term μάγοι, the plural form of μάγος, and it is related to our English term “magic.” So, why do we call them “Wise men” or “Kings”? I can only offer some preliminary responses to those questions, but largely I suspect Matthew’s story is just too raw and uncomfortable for many folks to take at face value.
The people of Israel had a difficult history with astrology. Much of the Old Testament seems to have been written during or immediately after the exile, when Israelites spent several generations in Babylon, surrounded by its devotion to astral cults. I heard an Old Testament professor say that the casual way that Genesis describes God creating “the heavens and the earth” was, to protest against astral cults and relocate “the heavens” as a part of God’s creation, not as divine in itself. So, a story about Magi, who saw a star at its rising and discerned that a new King of Israel had been born, might at least deserve a footnote about how Matthew is not intending to give astrology any credit. Matthew offers no such footnote, but translators and interpreters of Matthew’s story have tried to “fix” Matthew’s story over the years.
I’m not entirely sure how the phrase “Wise Men” came to be a way of translating μάγοι. The annotations in different translations of the Bible that are comical in how they try to maintain translation integrity, without ruining a story that we have come to love. When the word “magi” first appears in v. 1, the New International Version reads “Magi” but annotates, “traditionally called wise men,” whereas the English Standard Version goes the other way by reading, “wise men” and annotating “Greek: magi.” The New Revised Standard Version reads, “wise men” and annotates “or astrologers; Greek: magi.” It’s a lovely hodgepodge of nobody simply translating μάγοι as “magi” and certainly not as “magicians” or “astrologers.” The only other times variations of the word μάγος are used in the New Testament are in the book of Acts (cc. 8 and 13). In each case, the person described is translated as a “sorcerer” or “magician,” and what they practice is “sorcery” or “magic,” with no annotations suggesting that they might be “wise.”
The tradition of calling the Magi “Kings” is easier to trace. Isaiah 60 has long been embraced as a prophecy about Matthew’s story, since it mentions visitors who come bringing “gold and incense.” In part, it reads, “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” At least one early hymnodist, John Henry Hopkins, took his cue from Isaiah and wrote the song “We Three Kings,” which has solidified the idea that the Magi were royals ever since. Mr. Hopkins took another liberty in writing this song, although he was not the first by any means. Matthew mentions three types of gifts – gold, frankincense, and myrrh – but never number of Magi themselves. Through the years, church tradition has decided there were three of them, that they were Wise Men and/or Kings, granted them names (Gaspar, Balthasar, and Melchior), and even identified which countries they came from.
In the end, Matthew’s sparseness makes this story so fascinating to me. He offers no explanation or apology for a story where certain Magi read the stars, saw the truth in them, and came to worship the newborn. In that same story, Bible scholars read the Scriptures and concluded that the promised one would be born in Bethlehem, but none of them traveled to Bethlehem to worship, leaving us with an uncomfortable story where stargazers were more in touch with what God was doing in the world than the Bible readers. I suspect that contrast is part of the reason the church has worked so hard to make the Magi exotic and downplay their magical interest and astrological reading.
There’s a lot more to Matthew’s story that is worth exploring - not the least of which are the political implications. It is a fabulous, fascinating, and tragic story that doesn’t need us to sanitize of fix it, but to be humbled and learn from it.
Mark of St. Mark
