FINDINGS VII By Harry T. Cook
 
Epiphany  - C - January 3, 2016
Isaiah 60: 1-6; Ephesians 3: 1-12; Matthew 2: 1-12
 
       
Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
12/28/15

The evangelist known as Matthew gave Christianity what turned out to be one of its most misunderstood and therefore misused biblical narratives: the so-called visit of the magi to the child Jesus. Some commentators -- even W.F. Albright -- have suggested that, for all of its evident mythological trappings, the story has "on the face of it all the elements of historical probability." /1 If that were true, why would we not encounter it anywhere else in early Christian literature? And why any aspect of the magi story should be considered as historical when the one preceding it in Matthew 1: 18-25 is not, save by fundamentalists, Albright does not explain.

Let us say it: Matthew 2: 1-12 is mythology, though pretty good mythology. Matthew chose to back up this myth in his typical fashion by supplying a quotation from the Hebrew Bible via the Septuagint: Micah 5:2: "And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel." The Hebrew of Micah 5:2 does not include the term "shepherd" and adds of "the one who is to rule in Israel" and that his "origin is from old, from ancient days."  This latter is probably a reference to the half-mythical David, also reputedly from Bethlehem.
 
Matthew could as well have added Numbers 24:17 to his backup material: "There shall a star from Jacob come forth, and a scepter from Israel rise up . . ." Or even the text selected by the editors of the RCL to complement the appointed gospel passage: Isaiah 60: 1-6: "Nations shall come to your light (as in the star of Matthew 2:2) and kings to the brightness of your dawn." Kings did not come. But Matthew said "wise men from the East" came. A "king" was already in place -- Herod who reigned from 36 to 4 or so BCE.
 
How did "magi" become "wise men" and then "kings" as thus depicted in the bathrobe-and-crown church school pageants? Magi did exist in several forms in Middle Eastern antiquity as Herodotus bore witness. He identified them as a class or type of sages or maybe priests. They were also named as priests of Zoroaster and, as such, located in Persia. The term "magus," whence our words "magic" and "magician(s)," was a generic term also applied to those thought to be adept at sleight-of-hand and other more sinister craft.
 
Then there is the story of the Parthian magus Tiridates who, after he was made king over Armenia by the emperor Nero, went to Rome with fellow magi to present gifts to the emperor ca. 66 CE. It is said that the magi returned to Armenia by a way other than that by which they had come. /2 Perhaps that otherwise irrelevant datum somehow found its way to the author(s) or editor(s) of According to Matthew.
 
A word about the "star": What gives the star business a kind of nervous verisimilitude is that conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn are said by astronomers to have occurred in 7 BCE and Halley's Comet would have been visible in the night sky of the Middle East ca. 12 BCE.
 
"From the east" and "star at its rising" connect Gentile lands and peoples with the star (a perceived phenomenon often associated in antiquity with the birth of a major figure) /3 promised in Numbers -- suggesting to some that Matthew, with his emphasis on the humble site of Bethlehem and his use of the Micah fragment which stresses the commonplace nature of the foretold ruler, meant to turn the world spotlight on that strip of land along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and upon the happenings in it during "the time of Herod the king."
 
Depicting representatives of a Persian or other alien elite studying the stars to discern the birth of a Jewish king and then coming to worship him in his infancy or early childhood was a daring reach. Not that a "Jewish king" was an unknown quantity. The Hasmonean dynasty consisted in a series of "kings of the Jews." Formed in the wake of the 166 BCE Maccabean victory over the forces of Antiochus Epiphanes IV, commemorated in the Jewish holiday Hanukah, the Hasmoneans ruled in all for about 100 years (140-37 BCE), and that independently until Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II were caught up in the Pompey-Julius Caesar conflict. By 37 BCE, Herod was installed as the Roman puppet king.
 
However, by the time Matthew appeared in the form we now have it, the idea of a Jewish king could only have been nostalgic fantasy. The tableau of exotic wizards from an alien land bowing low before a child and bringing gifts to him was one way for the evangelist (who, of course, knew the end of the story even as he was crafting its beginning) to say that the gospel he was promulgating was or could be a universal one -- so long, of course, as the East was "westward leading, still proceeding" looking for that "perfect light." /4
 
That note of universality was sounded by an editor of Paul's epistles in Ephesians, the introductory encyclical or cover letter introducing them. See 3:5: "In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed . . . that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise . . ."
 
There is no reasonably pastoral way to avoid the singing of Hopkins's "We three kings" on the Feast of the Epiphany. And there is not much to be gained by trying to tell a congregation that the magi were neither kings nor wise men, at least in the sense of their having been public intellectuals. A homilist could mention that nowhere is the number of them given as three, though the gifts they are depicted as bringing are three in number. Also it is easier to outfit three Sunday school boys than an indeterminate number, except perhaps in churches that have very large rummage sales from which an ample supply of bathrobes and towels (for turbans) can be fashioned to outfit an entire brigade of magi. Also the camels, which in the Isaiah reading are promised to cover the chosen people in a multitude, are nowhere present in Matthew's narrative.
 
A world of trouble awaits the homilist who will observe 1) that supposedly "wise" persons from Persia (now Iran) came westward, led by the star, to Israel to worship its king, 2) that Persians of antiquity thereby had set an example for their twenty-first century descendants and 3) that Christianity with its Jewish roots is therefore the superior religion. This is not to say that one is unable to hear that latter point relentlessly and unmercifully driven home by evangelical preachers in every television market in North America.
 
The better tack for the homilist might be to reference the universal phenomenon of religion that has arisen in every culture at least since the recession of the last Ice Age, maybe even to quote John Calvin on the subject: "We lay it down as a position not be controverted that the human mind, even by natural instinct, possesses some sense of a deity . . . God has given to all some apprehension of his existence," /5
which is Calvin's restatement of Romans 1:20 ("Ever since the creation of the world the eternal power of the divine nature [has] been understood").
 
The Calvin and Pauline quotations may be a bit much for the non-theist, but they are helpful in witnessing to the universality of religion and to the probability that religious beliefs are perceived through cultural lenses and history. Every significant cultus known to scholars of comparative religion includes in its literature or otherwise in its tradition some variation of what Jews know as Hillel the Great's summary of Torah ("What you hate, do not do to another") or the so-called Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you").
 
That is to say, therefore, that no single religion is innately superior to another, though the beliefs of every religion can be and have been misconstrued, e.g. ultra-Orthodox Judaism in its unsupportable claims of God-given land, Christianity in its monstrous rationale for the Crusades and some sects of Islam in their misinterpretation of jihad.   
 
1 Albright, W..F and C.S. Mann, The Anchor Bible No. 26, p.13   
2 The Interpreter's Bible (1951), Vol. 7, p. 257   
3 Several sources suggest that contemporaries of Mithradates the Great, a king who claimed to be a descendent of both Alexander the Great and Darius the Great, insisted that star heralded his birth in ca. 131 BCE.    
4 "We three kings" John Henry Hopkins, Jr., (1820-1891)
5 Calvin, John, Institute of the Christian Religion, Book I, Chap. 3

Copyright 2015 Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.
 

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