Wise Men Still Seek Him

At a fresh reading, the account of the Magi visiting the Christ child in Matthew’s Gospel seems bizarre. Wise men from a faraway land observe such a significant star that they set out for Jerusalem with gifts for a prince. Urged on to Bethlehem by a quote from prophecy (Micah 5:2), they find the child in a house and fall before him in worship, rejoicing. Perhaps we’ve seen the story enacted so often in Nativity plays that we overlook its weirdness, many alas writing it off as fantasy. The very word magi is barely translatable into our language, after all.

But the significance of this episode only seems to grow the more I look into it. The backstory seems to lie in the Babylonian captivity of Israel and Judah. Daniel and his three friends were famously taken into the custody of king Nebuchadnezzar to learn the literature and language of the Chaldeans (Daniel 1:4) in a three-year programme that has been likened to a university education¹, albeit one less voluntary than most students’ undergraduate studies today. They might even have been known as magi themselves. And while their witness to the God of the Jews in that pagan context may have been exceptional, other Old Testament writings indicate that many of the Jewish captives faithfully practised and taught their religion in that foreign culture. So it would hardly be surprising that there was some cultural exchange, with scholars of the Bablyonian empire taking interest in Jewish religion and prophecy.

Nevertheless, the fact that a certain group of astrologers would set out for the Holy Land to worship one born to be king of the Jews on the strength of witnessing a new star² surely testifies to the missionary impact of the Jewish captivity. The Queen of Sheba had travelled from the east to hear king Solomon’s wisdom, and now a group of wise men from the east travel to revere one greater than Solomon (as Jesus would later describe himself). There seems to be a certain validation of the scholar’s profession in these episodes, which I believe helps redress the ambiguous legacy of Solomon himself. Yes, wisdom can lead one astray but it can also lead one towards the world’s ultimate king. And we must note the close alliance of godly wisdom with humility.

The tradition of describing the Magi themselves as kings seems to have arisen over the first few centuries of the church’s life because of the line of biblical prophecy that God’s king would be worshipped by kings. This is found in the psalms (Ps. 68:29, Ps. 72:10-11) and Isaiah (60:3) among many other passages that refer more generally to the wealthy, nobles and whole nations bringing tribute to God’s king or to Jerusalem. There is also (among my favourite verses in Revelation) John’s glorious prophecy whereby the kings of the earth bring the glory and honour of the nations into the New Jerusalem where Jesus the Lamb is God dwelling with his people for the age to come (Rev. 21:22-24)³. This vision again seems to endorse the culture-building work to which we are all called in various ways, the Bible’s penultimate chapter reaffirming the cultural mandate of its second chapter.

I’m sure the Magi have much more to teach us. In believing that the key to knowledge and ultimate reality is personal and in encountering Jesus the Messiah, wise women and men still find that the beginning of wisdom is in the fear of the Lord.

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1. E.g. Gavin D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square: Church, Academy and Nation (2008), ch.1: “Theology’s Babylonian Captivity in the Modern University”. ↩︎
2. Possibly with support from Balaam’s prophecy in Numbers 24:17 – this suggestion seems to me romantic, at least! ↩︎
3. In all this there’s surely some irony in the Magi of Matthew’s Gospel being redirected from Jerusalem to Bethlehem while Jerusalem’s regal incumbent of the day perpetrated the tragic Slaughter of the Innocents (Mat. 2:16-18). ↩︎

Image: “Les rois mages en voyage” (The Magi journeying) by James Tissot.

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Richard Gunton

Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London

Richard is the Director of Faith-in-Scholarship at Thinking Faith Network.He's also a senior lecturer in data science at Queen Mary University of London.His passions include Reformational philosophy, history of sciences, and wildlife gardening.He worships, and occasionally preaches, at St Mary's Church in Portchester.
[Views expressed here are his own.]

Latest posts by Richard Gunton (see all)

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