Magi’s tale a new look at an ancient story
No one likes to see a good story end. Take Homer's epic Iliad for example. It comes to a conclusion with the Achaean army still camped for the ninth straight year outside the walls of Troy and a seemingly-invincible Achilles allowing the body of Hector, his latest Trojan victim, to be returned to his father King Priam. A very unsatisfying ending, you might think; Greeks certainly thought so.
Homer, or some other unknown genius to whom his name became attached, realized his audience would want to know the rest of the tale�"and so came the Odyssey, the adventures of Odysseus as he tries to return to his island home after the sack of Troy. Other Greek and Roman playwrights and poets in the centuries after Homer produced sequels of their own, describing the fate of the warriors, princesses and slaves who survived the fall of the topless towers of Ilium. Each writer gave his own spin to the tale and the sequels often disagree.
So it was with the Christians of the early Church. The knew the biblical accounts of the Nativity of Jesus and the last few years of His earthly life but there was too much of the story that was missing. Questions abounded. What was so special about Mary that she had been chosen to bear the Son of God? Why do we hear so little of Joseph? Weren't there any adventures as the holy family fled to Egypt? What was Jesus like as a little child?
Such urgent curiosity had to be satisfied and these questions answered. And so they were in a series of accounts often referred to as Pseudo-Gospels, pious fictions written over a period of centuries after the resurrection that provided wonderful stories that filled in those gaps. In books such as the Protoevangelium of James, Pseudo-Matthew, the Book of Seth and the Arabic Infancy Gospel, readers learned about the virgin's parentage, Joseph's advanced age, the birth of Jesus in a cave attended by a midwife and children from Joseph's first marriage. Here are the origins of the Cherry Tree Carol, the comforting presence of the ox and the ass by the manger and the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. A favourite subject of these fanciful narratives is the identity of the Magi.
We speak so confidently these days of Gaspar, Melchior and Balthazar: the three wise men or the three kings who brought the baby Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Scripture, however, makes no mention of names or the number of magoi or where they came from. This did not deter the pseudo-gospels from spinning wonderful fables of these visitors from the mystical East.
The Arabic Infancy Gospel, which considered the wise men royalty, named them Hormizdah, king of Persia, Yazdegard, king of Saba and Perozadh, king of Sheba. Other Middle Eastern chronicles termed them Larvandad, Hormisdas, Gushnasaph, Kagba, or Badadilma. It was the sixth-century Excerpta Latina Barbari which gave them the names that have endured. Over time it was accepted that there had been three magi, to accord with the number of gifts; that they represented the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa; and that one was a young man, one was middle-aged and one was old.
To these richly-inventive sequels we must now add another tale, written in the late second century, surviving only in a single manuscript in the Syriac language and hidden for centuries in the Vatican archives. The message it contained and the significance for the Church in the 21st century is the story behind a new book, The Revelation of the Magi: The Lost Tale of the Wise Men's Journey to Bethlehem by Brent Landau.
As a doctoral student in early Christianity at Harvard University, Landau came across the mention of a magi legend that none of his colleagues had ever heard of and which had never been translated into English. He found the last remaining manuscript in Rome and determined that the story had been written around the year 200 with an important addition made in the fourth century. The manuscript itself had been produced in the Byzantine Empire in the 800s, found its way to Egypt and was discovered there by a Vatican collector in the 1700s.
The Revelation of the Magi purports to be a first-person account of the miraculous travels of the wise men from their native land of Shir in the far East on the shores of the Great Ocean (not Persia as most early Christians had supposed) to Bethlehem and back. These magi were descendants of Adam and Eve's son Seth and members of a mystical order who possessed a prophecy that one day a star of enormous brightness would appear and herald the birth of God in human form.
In due course the promised Star appeared and led the magi to a cave where it revealed itself as none other than the Son of God. He instructed them to journey to Judea to witness His birth and become part of God's salvific plan. Astonishingly the Star has revealed Himself to each of the magi in a different form, each representing a different point in the life of the Saviour.
This Star (whom no one else can see) magically leads the magi to Jerusalem. They speak to Herod and then follow the Star to a cave near Bethlehem where the infant-Star explains the ancient prophecies and enlists them in spreading His good news. Mary and Joseph appear only to worry that they are there to steal their newborn but the magi reassure them.
Back home the Magi tell their tale to the astonished folk of Shir and share with them the food the Star has provided them; on eating this the Shirites also see visions of the Son of God. Though the narrative might end at this point, a later author has added yet more: another sequel in which these travelers meet the Apostle Thomas who baptizes them and commissions them to preach their message to the world.
Does this obscure and odd little manuscript have any real significance? Landau certainly thinks so. He points out (to this medieval historian's surprise) how The Revelation of the Magi influenced Christian art in the Middle Ages. More important, and much more controversial, is Landau's claim that this story of a polymorphous, omnipresent Saviour who appears to different people in different forms (and who is never identified as Jesus or the Christ) is a teaching that the world might now be ready to hear. The Revelation, he suggests, is a message in favour of religious pluralism with the Son of God as the source of all revelation to different peoples throughout history. The Revelation, says Landau (p. 97), “apparently believes that having an experience of Christ is much more important than being a Christian." In it the Son of God proclaims:
I am everywhere, because I am a ray of light whose light has shone in this world from the majesty of my Father, who has sent me to fulfill everything that was spoken about me in the entire world, and in every land by unspeakable mysteries, and to accomplish the commandments of my glorious Father, who by the prophets preached about me to [Israel], in the same way as for you, as befits your faith, it was revealed to you about me.
That is certainly a provocative interpretation and one that will prompt no little theological chatter. Others might be inclined to see The Revelation of the Magi as a work meant to reconcile Christianity with Zoroastrianism for recent Persian converts. Some others will catch more than a hint of Gnostic heresy. Whatever the case, Brent Landau has performed a valuable service in his translation of this unique voice from the early Christian past.
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