December 17, 2006

• Three Magi

  Eight days to Christmas
  

  The
  
  Three
  
  Wise
  
  Men

  [Originally posted this date, 2004, minimally edited for 2006]

  The myth du jour, the latest things to shake out of Satan’s Claws Santa Claus’s
  pockets, are Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar.

  
  A Sunday or two
  ago, Greyfox phoned me to read me some funny stuff from Dave Barry’s
  syndicated column.  The first words he read were something about
  the Bible telling us that the Three Wise Men… and there I interrupted
  him to say that the Bible doesn’t say anything about any three wise men.

  Greyfox was undaunted.  He’s used to my interruptions and even if
  he weren’t, it can be devilishly hard to deter a man with NPD when he’s
  intent on anything.  He dismissed my cavil and insisted that the
  facts didn’t matter, then he went on and read me some funny stuff about
  men being lousy gift givers.  I think there could have been a
  touch of defensiveness there.  Gift giving has been a touchy
  subject between us for as long as we have been together, the Old Fart
  having gifted me with numerous wildly inappropriate and unwelcome
  items, including pickled crayfish, pickled in formaldehyde.

  
  But I digress.  Here’s the straight skinny on Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, straight from snopes.com:

  As Santa Claus and his reindeer are to
  the secular celebration of Christmas, so the three wise men and the
  creche are to the religious celebration. Even most of the non-religious
  (or non-Christian) among us recognize the symbolism of the nativity
  scene: it depicts the biblical account of three wise men from the east
  who rode atop camels and followed a star to Bethlehem, bearing gifts
  for the newborn Christ child who lay in a manger.

  The truth is, the Bible contains virtually none of these details. They
  have all been added over the years from sources outside the Bible.

  Mathew 2:1 tells us:

      Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in
  the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east
  to Jerusalem . . .

  
  That’s it. Matthew doesn’t say how many wise men came from the east,
  doesn’t mention their names, and doesn’t provide any details about how
  they made their journey.

  It has generally been assumed that the wise men (or magi) were three in
  number because Matthew 2:11 makes mention of three gifts: ” . . . they
  presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.” The number
  of wise men is not specified in the Bible, however, and some Eastern
  religions have claimed up to twelve of them made the journey to
  Bethlehem. The names of the wise men, Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar,
  do not come from the Bible and did not appear in Christian literature
  until over five hundred years after the birth of Jesus. Nothing in the
  Bible says the wise men rode camels (or any other animal); they may
  have made their journey from the east on foot for all we know. And
  despite the familiar lyrics of the Christmas carol “We Three Kings,” no
  biblical source depicts the three wise men as kings. (They were most
  likely learned men, perhaps astrologers.)
  
  However many wise men there were, and however they got to Bethlehem,
  the Bible tells us they arrived just after the birth and found the baby
  Jesus in a manger, right?

   Not quite. Matthew 2:11 states:

      And when they were come into the house, they saw the
  young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him . .
  .

  
  The wise men came “into the house,” not the stable, and they saw a
  “young child,” not a newborn. This passage indicates that the wise men
  didn’t arrive until quite some time after Jesus’ birth. (According to
  Luke 2, it was shepherds, not wise men, who visited the infant Jesus in
  the manger.)

   To sum up: we are told by the Bible that wise men came from the east,
  that they followed a star to Bethlehem to find the Christ child, and
  that they brought him gold, and frankincense and myrrh. We must look to
  sources external to the Bible to find the origins of any of the other
  familiar details, however.

  [EDIT: Sunday December 17, 2006
  It pleases me to have some seasonally appropriate material to repost now, because I have little time at the computer (Doug has been using it a lot.), little energy to spare, and lots of brain-fog to wade through.  It has been amusing to see the impact my Xmas entries have on some of the people who are seeing them for the first time.  I am considering an entry on what Christmas means to me now (as opposed to the remembrances from childhood and the research pieces I have been posting) if the fog clears sufficiently.  Anyhow, have a merry and a happy, and I'll be around.] 

  ---

  Warm Light –
  Cold Scene

  

  That’s the scene out my front door today. [...was, in '04 -- there's just some packed, tracked, and crusty old snow now, and the light is gray.]  I didn’t want to suit
  up and boot up to go out in the new snow, so I just opened the door and
  took a shot.  That is neither sunrise nor sunset, just low angle
  midwinter midday sunlight at 62 degrees north latitude.

  

  • 4:50 pm
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