Mystery of the Magi

The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men

Dwight Longenecker

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781621576563
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Biography

"The perfect Christmas gift for anyone interested in the historical background behind the birth of Jesus of Nazareth." — Robert J. Hutchinson, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible, The Dawn of Christianity, and Searching for Jesus. "Utterly refreshing and encouraging." — Eric Metaxas, New York Times bestselling author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Martin Luther "The best book I know about the Magi."—Sir Colin John Humphreys, Ph.D., author of The Mystery of the Last Supper Modern biblical scholars tend to dismiss the Christmas story of the "wise men from the East" as pious legend. Matthew's gospel offers few details, but imaginative Christians filled out the story early on, giving us the three kings guided by a magical star who join the adoring shepherds in every Christmas crèche. For many scholars, then, there is no reason to take the gospel story seriously.But are they right? Are the wise men no more than a poetic fancy? In an astonishing feat of detective work, Dwight Longenecker makes a powerful case that the visit of the Magi to Bethlehem really happened. Piecing together the evidence from biblical studies, history, archeology, and astronomy, he goes further, uncovering where they came from, why they came, and what might have happened to them after eluding the murderous King Herod. In the process, he provides a new and fascinating view of the time and place in which Jesus Christ chose to enter the world. The evidence is clear and compelling. The mysterious Magi from the East were in all likelihood astrologers and counselors from the court of the Nabatean king at Petra, where the Hebrew messianic prophecies were well known. The "star" that inspired their journey was a particular planetary alignment—confirmed by computer models—that in the astrological lore of the time portended the birth of a Jewish king. The visitors whose arrival troubled Herod "and all Jerusalem with him" may not have been the turbaned oriental kings of the Christmas carol, but they were real, and by demonstrating that the wise men were no fairy tale, Mystery of the Magi demands a new level of respect for the historical claims of the gospel.

CHAPTER ONE

Is the Bible True?

When most people say a story is “true,” they mean “it really happened that way.” Even though a story might be exaggerated or embellished, we say a story is true if it relates actual events.

However, we might also say that a story is “true” if it communicates truth. In that sense a fairy tale like “Cinderella,” a fable like “The Tortoise and the Hare,” a movie, or a novel might be “true” even though it is not historical.

But there is a third type of “true” story, one that is factually true and communicates greater truths. Here is an example. In December 1944 my grandfather was walking to the farmer’s market in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, with his two young sons—aged ten and twelve. It was the week before Christmas. Snow was on the ground, and the roads were treacherous. As they crossed the bridge over the Schuylkill River they stepped carefully because its surface was icy. When they were halfway across, a fully loaded coal truck turned the corner and came onto the bridge. It hit an icy patch and careened toward the boys. My grandfather jumped to push the boys to safety but was hit by the truck, which crushed him against the guardrails.

When well-meaning bystanders folded his broken body into the back of a car to rush him to hospital, his splintered ribs punctured his internal organs, and he began to bleed internally. Two days later, he lay in a hospital bed with my grandmother by his side. As they were praying together, he opened his eyes and looked to the corner of the room. Suddenly, my grandmother recounted, his face was filled with radiance, and he said, “Can’t you see them, my dear? Can’t you see them? They are so beautiful!” Then he was gone.

This story is not only factually true but also deeply moving. It engages our emotions, communicating deep truths about a father’s love for his sons, the beauty and heroism of self-sacrifice, the reality of heaven, and the possibility of a good, noble, and redemptive death.

Stories like this—true in both senses of the word—are called “testimony stories.” They are the stories that are most precious to us. They are the most powerful stories, because the greater truths are wrapped up in events that really happened at a certain time and place to real people.

Dissecting the Gospels

For sixteen hundred years most Christians believed the stories told in the Bible were testimony stories. They believed the Bible stories not only communicated truth but also were historically true.

Then in the mid-seventeenth century, scholars began to question the accuracy of ancient texts. Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), Benedict Spinoza (d. 1677), and others began to examine who wrote the books of the Bible, questioning their historical accuracy. They dissected the ancient documents with rational and logical tools. The fruit of their analysis was summed up by the Enlightenment scholar H. S. Reimarus (d. 1768), who concluded that very little in the stories about Jesus of Nazareth was historically reliable.

Doubts about the historical accuracy of the New Testament continued into the nineteenth century with the work of the Frenchman Ernest Renan (d. 1892) and, a generation later, imbued the young Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906). Books debating the true personality and message of Jesus are still being churned out today, as scholars continue to analyze the quest for the historical Jesus.¹

The same technique was applied to other ancient writings. For example, The Iliad—the Greek epic about the Trojan War by the poet Homer—was considered to be nothing but a legend. Then, in the 1860s the amateur archaeologists Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann announced that they had unearthed the ancient city of Troy on a hillside in Turkey, and the world of literary and historical scholarship was turned upside down. Scholars mocked Schliemann as an amateur, publicity-seeking adventurer. Eventually their work was taken seriously, however, and from Calvert and Schliemann’s Indiana-Jones-type sleuthing the modern scientific approach to archaeology emerged.

A similar thing happened with the discovery in 1946 of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A shepherd boy found some ancient manuscripts in a cave, and suddenly a whole new perspective on the Scriptures and the religion and culture of ancient Palestine opened up. Subsequent advances in technology and forensics, as well as new disciplines like archaeoastronomy, enable us to take a fresh look at the fascinating history of the ancient world.

At the same time, since the 1960s a new generation of scholars has made steady advances in the analysis of the New Testament. Theories about the dating of its books that once seemed watertight are proving to be leaky. Research continues, and new discoveries are revolutionizing our understanding of the ancient texts.

The Biblical scholar Margaret Barker comments on the revolutionary nature of recent research: “The impact of the last fifty years of discoveries has been comparable to the impact of the Bible translations on the Reformation. New questions have been raised and old certainties have been challenged.”² The old certainties of both the “believers with blinders” and the “scholars and skeptics” are being re-examined, and as new information is uncovered the established theories are being overturned.

Among these are the theories concerning the narratives of the birth of Christ.

History or Mystery?

The familiar tales of Christmas are found in the gospels according to Luke and Matthew. Luke tells the story from Mary’s point of view, recounting the miraculous birth after she was visited by an angel and supplying the familiar details of the journey to Bethlehem, the search for lodging, the birth in the stable, the vision of angels, and the visit of the shepherds.

Matthew tells the story from Joseph’s point of view. An angel reassures and guides Joseph not to reject Mary despite her scandalous pregnancy. Matthew includes the visit of the Magi, the slaughter of baby boys by King Herod, and Joseph’s flight with Mary and the child into Egypt before finally returning to settle in Nazareth.

We are going to focus on the story of the Magi, but before we can discover who the wise men might have been, we have to ask whether the Magi story has any foundation in history.

As the scholars dismissed the historical reality of Troy, so most Bible scholars dismiss the narratives about the birth of Jesus Christ. They propose that the stories of Jesus’ birth were invented many years after his crucifixion to bolster the Church’s claims that he was the Son of God.³ Others say we should treat the Christmas stories as parables: They’re meaningful tales, but they never really happened.⁴ However, there are several problems with these conclusions.

First, one of the reasons the scholars have decided that the infancy stories are fictional is the perceived contradictions between Luke’s and Matthew’s versions.⁵ Inconsistencies in different versions of a story, however, are not necessarily evidence that the stories are all fabricated. It could be that the different storytellers simply got some of the details wrong in what was essentially a factual account.

Indeed, it is far more likely that there would be no contradictions or difficulties if the stories were invented. Fiction writers make their facts line up. Two or three people relating the same events are more likely to provide details that clash because they have perceived the event from different perspectives and have remembered it differently.

Some scholars also claim that the stories of Jesus’ birth can’t be rooted in history because they too obviously fulfill Old Testament prophecies.⁶ It is true that Matthew, of the four gospel writers, likes to draw attention to the prophecies he thinks are being fulfilled. The skeptics have two problems with this. First, they don’t believe it is possible for someone to prophesy the future. Secondly, they suspect that the author of Mathew’s gospel invented stories deliberately to fulfill the prophecies.

I will deal with prophecies in more detail in chapter seven, but an author’s invention or re-arrangement of some details to make his story fulfill certain prophecies does not prove that the story is a complete invention. Furthermore, when one considers the prophecies that the supposedly fabricated Magi story is said to fulfill, it is surprising that Matthew did not do a better job.

For example, one of the Old Testament prophecies that is supposed to be fulfilled by the Magi story is from the sixtieth chapter of the prophet Isaiah: “[T]he wealth of nations shall come to you. Caravans of camels shall cover you, dromedaries of Midian and Ephah; All from Sheba shall come bearing gold and frankincense and heralding the praises of the Lord.”⁷ If the writer of Matthew’s gospel was inventing the story to prove Jesus’ birth was a miraculous fulfillment of prophecy, why didn’t he add the details about camels and omit the gift of myrrh so his story would match the prophecy more precisely?

Supernatural Nonsense?

Finally, the skeptical scholars reject the possibility that the infancy stories about Jesus could be historical because they contain supernatural elements.⁸ The first problem with this is that the skeptics simply assume supernatural experiences are impossible. Any story that contains supernatural elements must therefore be a fanciful invention.

They seem to miss the point that the stories in the Bible are about religious experiences, and religious experiences, by their very definition, have to do with the supernatural. It is true that some of the supernatural elements are more astounding and difficult to believe than others, but religious literature is about the supernatural.

Sacred texts are concerned with religion, and religion is about the encounter between divinity and humanity. Removing the supernatural from religious literature is like removing the ball from the game of baseball. When you do, there is no longer a game.

Whether scientifically biased skeptics believe in them or not, supernatural religious experiences are a part of universal human experience. People of every language, religion, and ethnic group down through history have reported experiences they regard as supernatural. A good scholar therefore includes reports of such experiences in his data. He doesn’t have to be gullible and swallow them whole, but he should take them seriously and analyze them with respect.

The second problem with the skeptics’ approach to the Nativity narratives is that a person’s attribution of an unusual experience to a supernatural cause does not mean that he did not have the unusual experience. These unusual experiences are the stuff of religion, and for a scholar of religion to dismiss them simply because they seem difficult to accept is shortsighted and narrow-minded. Furthermore, dismissing a whole story as an invention simply because it has problematic supernatural elements does not inspire confidence in a scholar’s ability to see clearly and weigh the facts objectively.

Whether it is a near-death experience, a paranormal experience, or something less dramatic, people retell the amazing things which have happened to them in ordinary life. For example, Aunt Sally tells how she was healed at the summer camp revival meeting by Jesus Christ himself, or Cousin Jimmy tells how he was miraculously preserved from falling headlong into a pot of acid by his guardian angel.

One does not have to accept the miraculous element of the story to acknowledge that Cousin Jimmy really did almost fall into a pot of acid, and that two workmates saw it happen at Florsheim Fertilizer Plant in Hudson Falls, Missouri, on January 27 at three o’clock in the afternoon.

One does not have to accept that Aunt Sally was miraculously healed by Jesus to accept that she really did go to the Hosanna Camp Meeting led by Pastor Bob Johnson on August 3 and that she went in feeling sick and came out feeling better. In other words, it is perfectly possible that a human story that is reported as having miraculous elements might be historical even if the supernatural dimension of the story is questionable.

The third problem with the skeptical scholars’ dismissal of the stories because of their supernatural element is that, once they have dismissed them, they will not consider them again. This is what has happened to the story of the Magi.

In the early twentieth century, Biblical scholars began to write off the stories of Jesus’ birth—especially the story of the wise men—as pious fantasies. They did so without considering whether the stories might at least be rooted in real events, so they never did the necessary research to uncover the historical element buried beneath layers of legend. Once they decided, based on their preconceived notions, that the stories were not historical, they didn’t give the question a serious consideration.

Exploration of the historical basis of the Magi story therefore became an academic no-go zone. When one’s academic reputation might be at stake, one’s motivation to challenge the received academic wisdom is weak. If a majority of one’s respected peers and professional superiors take a particular position, it is easier and better for one’s career not to dissent.

Happily, I don’t have an academic career to consider. I’m an amateur scholar and freelance sleuth. I’m delighted that our quest to discover the identity of the wise men will require some courage and the ability to think outside the box. We’re going to challenge the academic orthodoxy with a kind of cheerful chutzpah.

To do this, we are going to suspend our disbelief in the supernatural elements of the story. This does not mean we accept the supernatural elements at face value. We simply put them to one side and keep an open mind.

Maybe something unusual happened with a star. Maybe not. Maybe someone received supernatural guidance in a dream. Maybe not. We’re going to allow that something supernatural may have happened, but we’re also going to be skeptical and look for every natural explanation first.

How to Read the Bible

To begin our detective work we must go to the most ancient source of the story: the second chapter of the gospel according to Matthew. Before we start, however, it is important to understand how to read the Bible. The Bible is not an ordinary book. It is not like a modern novel or biography or work of history. Instead it is a collection of ancient texts. The New Testament dates from the time of the Roman Empire, and the first part of the Bible—the Old Testament—takes us back many centuries into the history of the Jewish people.

The Bible therefore comes to us from a radically different world. To understand the New Testament, we have to read it as much as possible as the first-century Christians read it. When we go to see a play by Shakespeare, we can best appreciate it if we not only acquaint ourselves with the Elizabethan diction but also study the plot, the characters, and the historical period of the author. The more we know about Shakespeare and his time, the richer our experience of his play will be.

It’s the same with reading the Bible. If we read the New Testament assuming that it is like a twenty-first-century history book, we’ll be disappointed. If we assume that the Christians of first-century Palestine shared our worldview, we’ll get it wrong. If we assume that the text is ...