The Wise Men: The Mystery Magi of the Bible

  It has become such a part of the lore of Christmas that we do not even consider how odd the story of the Wise Men is in the birth of Jesus. These Magi, Wise Men from the east, unnamed, never to recur in the Biblical record, that just show up. What do we know about them?

We know they were people of means, given the gifts that they brought with them. It was enough to allow Joseph to take his family to Egypt before the Slaughter of the Innocents

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We know they were people of some kind of importance, given that they were entertained by King Herod when they arrived in Jerusalem.

We know they were astronomers and astrologers (those two were intermingled) of some kind, interpreting the signs of the sky.

We know that, unlike pretty much every creche scene anywhere, they did not arrive with the shepherds at the stable to find Jesus in a manger. Rather, they told Herod they ‘saw the star at its rising’. I have always interpreted this as the angels rising up from where they sang to the shepherds. So there was some time lapse before they arrived. We know that, on questioning them closely, Herod went after every male child two years and under in an attempt to rid himself of this rival to the throne of Israel, which seems to give us a sense of the time gap.

We know that Mary and Joseph were living in Bethlehem. It might have been that they considered Jesus too young to travel with, or it might have been the result of the taxation. Joseph returned to his own city, to Bethlehem. The expectation might have been then that he remain there. 

There is something else we know about the gospel of Matthew. It is the gospel with the most explicit references to the Old Testament. For example, when the Wise Men returned to their land by another road, the Lord warned Joseph and Mary to flee to Egypt ahead of Herod’s retribution. This is to fulfill Hosea 11:1, where God says, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” Unpacking that is going to require its own posting.

More directly, we know that the Wise Men coming to Jerusalem lead Herod to direct his own scribes to dig up the reference to Bethlehem, where the king of the Jews is to be born, as found in Micah 5.

With this backdrop, do we have more that we can say about these mystery men, these mystery magi of Matthew 2? Were they simply a foil to allow Matthew to draw out these references to our Lord Jesus? Or do we find a forerunner to their presence in the Old Testament? Tomorrow, a theory..

Pastor Peter