The three 'wise' men?

Consider the three wise men in the Christmas story. Or should it be the three ‘wise’ men?

      The only Gospel account to mention these men is Matthew 2:1–12. The Church has since invented vast fictional ‘biog raphies’ to flesh out the story, but we know essentially nothing about them. Indeed, we are only guessing when we say there were three of them, which has
always been assumed because the men left three gifts, of gold, frankincense and myrrh (Matthew 2:11).

  But were they ‘wise’? The early Church was unanimous in calling them astrologers and magicians, that is, people who foretold the future by studying the movements of stars and planets. Astrology was always strictly forbidden within Jewish society: all references in Scriptures to astrology assume the practice was completely forbidden. Furthermore — just like today — the success of astrologers in predicting the future was pitifully bad. Isaiah 47:13–15 ridicules the ability of astrologers to predict the future, and passages in Daniel say the same (Daniel 2:4:7, 5:7). Perhaps the wise men were sometimes unwise.

  In fact Matthew’s Gospel does not use the word ‘wise’ at all, but ‘Magi’ — the meaning of which is now wholly lost. The more understandable word ‘wise’ was substituted centuries after Matthew wrote his gospel, during severe persecution of the Church by the Roman Emperor Diocletian (who reigned 284 to 305 AD).

  Some historians suggest the Church changed the word ‘Magi’ to ‘wise men’ as an act of gentle irony. Picture the scene: a blood-thirsty dictator clings to power at all costs. King Herod is known to have killed so many members of his own family that his Roman overlord Caesar Augustus once famously said he would prefer to be a pig in Herod’s household than one of Herod’s family. And then imagine someone requesting an audience with the dictator, and saying, ‘Please tell me where I can find the person who could topple you as King’! Mt 2:16–18 describes how the Magi’s actions led to one of the worst acts of persecution in the Middle East for generations: the killing of all local boys aged under two.

  Now scroll forward to the reign of Diocletian, when death was the penalty for being a Christian. When the Christians of that later century heard the story of the Magi in Matthew 2, it must have triggered a wry smile, a laugh of gentle irony, for they knew what it was like living under a foreign dictator. They would understand how misjudged were the Magi’s actions.

  So, to defuse and make safe the story of the Magi, they gently mocked their naiveté by nicknaming them ’the wise men’.