To pin down the true identity of the Magi we must first understand the primary source of the story: the gospel according to Matthew. To grasp why the story of the Magi was important to Matthew and his audience, we have to understand the mind of Matthew and his world, and we can’t understand that unless we know when Matthew lived and wrote his gospel.
Most people who take the Bible at face value assume that the gospel bearing Matthew’s name was written by Jesus’ disciple of that name a few years after Jesus’ death in AD 33. If they remember their Bible stories, they’ll identify him as the tax collector who was also called Levi. New Testament scholars, however, have shown that it is not quite that easy.
Books can be based on various sources and go through different versions, some by the original author and others by later editors. To understand the gospel of Matthew, we have to pick through the process of editing and the question of authorship. Did Jesus’ disciple Matthew really write the book a short time after Jesus’ death?
The earliest direct written record we have about the author of Matthew’s gospel comes from a bishop in Gaul (modern France) named Irenaeus around the year AD 180. Just one generation removed from the apostles themselves, Irenaeus was taught by Polycarp, who was taught by Jesus’ disciple John.
Irenaeus wrote, “Matthew also published a gospel, written among the Hebrews in their own language, while Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel and founding the church in Rome.”1 The historian Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea in Palestine, writing in the early fourth century, records an even earlier witness—Papias, a bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, who lived just fifty or sixty years after the death of Jesus. Drawing on those who knew the apostles, Papias asserted that “Matthew set in order the logia [sayings] of Jesus in a Hebrew dialect.”2
The New Testament scholar David Turner believes that “set in order the sayings” means that Matthew collected and organized the oral traditions about Jesus that were circulating in the area of Jerusalem and Judea (what is now southern Israel), and that the “dialect” could refer to Aramaic—the everyday language of Jesus and his disciples.3
Furthermore, when Papias refers to the “sayings” of Jesus, he probably means “the things said and done.”4 This earliest evidence about the origin of Matthew’s gospel is supported by every other writer of the ancient period of the Christian church, including Ignatius of Antioch (d. AD 107), Tertullian (d. AD 220), and Origen (d. AD 254). In fact, none of the writers of the earliest age disagrees with Papias that Matthew set down the sayings of Jesus in Hebrew or Aramaic.5
Jerome, in the late fourth century, claimed to have a copy of Matthew’s Hebrew gospel in his monastery in Bethlehem. And the New Testament scholar Wilhelm Schneemelcher shows that Clement of Alexandria (d. AD 215), Origen, and Eusebius had all seen copies of the early version of Matthew’s gospel in Hebrew.6 It’s not quite as easy as all that, however.
Irenaeus and Papias say Matthew wrote his collection of sayings in Hebrew or Aramaic, but the Gospel of Matthew that we now have was written in Greek. (For simplicity’s sake, I will use “Hebrew” as shorthand for “Hebrew or Aramaic” when referring to Matthew’s original collection of sayings.) Most scholars have therefore concluded that the gospel was composed by someone other than Matthew decades later than first thought. In 2009, however, the New Testament scholar James Edwards overturned established theories by showing that Matthew, or perhaps a later writer, wrote an updated version in Greek of the Hebrew collection of sayings and stories.7
The detective work becomes more intriguing because much of the language in Matthew’s gospel is virtually identical to that in Mark’s gospel, leading scholars to suppose that the author of the Greek version of Matthew’s gospel used Mark’s account as a source, adding Mark’s stories to Matthew’s original Hebrew collection of sayings for a more complete gospel story.
Because the story of the Magi is found only in Matthew’s gospel, some scholars conclude that it must have been added by a later editor to embellish the tales of Jesus’ birth. Of course, the story might just as well have been part of Matthew’s earlier Hebrew collection of stories and sayings, which the author of Mark’s gospel did not have.
If the stories and sayings found only in Matthew’s gospel date back to that older, Hebrew redaction of oral traditions, then they are among the earliest recorded and must have come from people who had first-hand knowledge. As the renowned New Testament scholar Raymond Brown—no traditionalist—concluded, “The simplest explanation of the pre-Mathean background of the magi story is that it is factual history passed down from the time of Jesus’ birth in family circles.”8
Detecting the Dates
Unfortunately, the writers of the New Testament did not put a date at the top of their papers. Nevertheless, because they mention certain externally verifiable events, with a bit of sleuthing, we can date the writing of the gospels fairly accurately.
To do so, we begin with the latest possible date for a document and work our way back to the earliest possible date. First, we know that the second (Greek) edition of Matthew’s gospel must have been completed before the end of the first century—fewer than seventy years after the death of Jesus. We know this because Matthew’s gospel is quoted in the writings of Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch who died in the year 107.
The older (Hebrew-Aramaic) version of Matthew’s gospel must have been compiled forty or fifty years earlier, a conclusion we reach by considering some other important events within the first few decades after Jesus died. The most pivotal is the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70. In the twenty-fourth chapter of his gospel, Matthew records Jesus’ prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, but he never mentions its fulfillment—a silence that is highly significant. The destruction of their sacred capital by the hated Romans was a gigantic calamity in the history of the Jews. The Roman soldiers crucified thousands of Jewish rebels after a terrible siege, and the Roman army finally leveled the city, including the Jews’ beloved temple. The destruction of Jerusalem was more cataclysmic for them than the attacks of September 11, 2001, were for the United States.
Why would Matthew not have mentioned such a momentous event when Jesus had predicted it? Almost certainly because it had not yet happened. Matthew is nothing if not enthusiastic about the fulfillment of prophecy. He often points out an incident that he thinks fulfills a prophecy, and he is also intent on showing Jesus to be in the line of the Jewish prophets. If Matthew wanted to show Jesus to be a miracle-working prophet, he would most certainly have mentioned that Jesus’ prophecy about the destruction of the temple had come true in the terrible events of AD 70.
Because Matthew does not mention the destruction of Jerusalem, we can deduce that his gospel must have been completed before AD 70. If we dig a bit deeper, however, we’ll find that Matthew’s first collection of sayings and stories about Jesus goes back even further.
Details and Data
Everyone loves a good detective story. Gathering clues, sifting data, and making connections are vital for dating ancient documents. The dating of Matthew’s gospel will depend on another date, and at this point the puzzle gets a bit complicated but intriguing.
As I have pointed out, most scholars believe that the writer of Matthew’s gospel used Mark’s gospel as a source. If he did, then to date the expanded Greek version of Matthew’s gospel accurately, we need to know when Mark’s gospel was written. Having thus determined a date for the Greek version of the gospel of Matthew, we can then work back from there to estimate when his collection of Jesus’ sayings in Hebrew was compiled.
Papias records that Mark wrote his gospel based on the stories he had heard from the apostle Peter. We know from the New Testament that Mark was Peter’s traveling companion,9 and that Mark was a companion of Paul as well.10 We also know that Peter and Paul died in Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome around AD 65.11 Peter, the leading apostle, was a dominant figure in the early Church, yet Mark, who was with him in Rome, does not record his death. We can conclude, then, that Mark’s gospel must have been written before Peter’s death.
Even more interesting is the dating of the gospel of Luke. Some scholars believe that like Matthew, Luke used Mark’s gospel as a source. Like Mark, Luke was a traveling companion of Paul. He wrote not only the gospel bearing his name but also a sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, which records the missionary efforts of Peter and Paul.
The Acts of the Apostles does not mention the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, the deaths of Peter and Paul around AD 65, or the beginning of Nero’s persecution in AD 64. Now, the heroism of the martyrs, who followed Christ’s example even to death, was enormously important for the early Christians. Peter’s martyrdom is mentioned in John’s gospel,12 and in Acts, Luke records the martyrdoms of Stephen and James. But Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome. Because there is no mention of Paul’s death or the beginning of the persecution by Nero, it seems reasonable to conclude that Acts must have been completed before AD 64.
Luke’s gospel was written before the Acts of the Apostles.13 Therefore, splicing together the evidence, we know that if Luke used Mark’s gospel as a source, and if he completed both Acts and his gospel before the year AD 64, then Mark’s gospel also had to have been written before AD 64. Furthermore, if the scholars are correct that Matthew used Mark for the Greek version of his gospel, then the Greek version of Matthew’s gospel was also composed prior to AD 64.14 Matthew’s Hebrew collection of sayings and stories must therefore have been compiled even earlier—probably between the years AD 50 and AD 55, and some scholars place it as early as the decade before.15
With such an early date—just ten or twenty years after the death of Jesus Christ in AD 33, there is no reason why the core of Matthew’s gospel could not have been written by Matthew the disciple of Jesus, just as the earliest writers—Papias, Irenaeus, and others—attest.16
Why does this matter in our search for the Magi? Because the later the date of Matthew’s gospel, the more likely the story of the Magi is to be a pious legend devised by someone other than Matthew. An anonymous editor or writer distant from Jesus and the people who knew him might be more inclined to create stories to support a theological point.
If, however, it was Matthew the apostle who began to collect the stories and sayings of Jesus that were circulating just ten or twenty years after his death, then it is probable that the story of the Magi originated with people close to the actual events. If this is so, it is far less likely that the story of the Magi is a mere fable.
Are the gospels based on eyewitness accounts? As one respected Biblical scholar puts it, “quite a few scholars believe that the gospels, if not written by one of Jesus’ disciples, nevertheless reflect genuine reminiscences by these disciples that were preserved in their Christian communities.”17 Meanwhile, in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, Richard Bauckham of the University of St. Andrews presents a detailed case for the gospels’ foundation in first-hand accounts. The Jewish New Testament scholar David Flusser agrees: “My research has led me to the conclusion that the Synoptic gospels [Matthew, Mark, and Luke] are based on one or more non extant early documents composed by Jesus’ disciples and the early church in Jerusalem.”18
If the Magi story is just pious fiction, then our detective work has ended. But if the story might be rooted in eyewitness accounts of historical events, we must press on in our quest to discover the identity of the wise men. If we uncover plausible candidates and all the facts fit, then the skeptics are wrong, and their understanding of the Magi story and the rest of the infancy narratives will need to be revised.
The Mind of Matthew
Having done the detective work, we have little reason to doubt that the core elements of the Gospel of Matthew were compiled by Jesus’ disciple Matthew.19 The evidence is strong that Matthew’s stories about Jesus were collected only ten or twenty years after Jesus’ death. They were most likely collated from notes taken by his disciples and the word-of-mouth traditions that had been circulating in Judea since his death.20
It is probable, then, that the story of the wise men is rooted in a shared memory of the earliest Jewish Christians in Judea, and that probability increases when we consider the context of Matthew’s writing. Most scholars agree that Matthew’s gospel was addressed to Jewish Christians in Judea or Syria. An audience that close to the events of the gospel would have sniffed out any fabricated stories. To put it bluntly, if the story of the Magi was a fairy tale, the Jewish Christians living where the events had taken place just ten or twenty years earlier would have called the writer’s bluff.
We’re almost ready to start looking for the wise men, but first we have to discern the mind of Matthew. Understanding not only what Matthew wrote but also why he wrote is essential to solving the mystery of the Magi.
Matthew the Jew
Most importantly, Matthew was a Jew writing for Jews. We know that he was writing for fellow Jews because, unlike Mark, who was writing for Gentile Christians, he doesn’t bother to explain Jewish customs and laws. He quotes the Old Testament more than the other gospel writers and carefully links the events of Jesus’ life to the Old Testament prophecies of a coming savior called the Messiah.
At the time Matthew was writing, the nascent Christian Church was struggling with a huge controversy. Its leader, Peter, had had a vision that convinced him that the message of Jesus Christ was supposed to be taken not only to the Jews but to the Gentiles as well.21 Peter and his brother apostles commissioned Paul to be the “Apostle to the Gentiles.” Why was this a problem?
It was a problem because the Jews, who for centuries had thought of themselves as God’s chosen people, considered the Gentiles to be dogs. To the men of the ancient world, a dog was not a cute puppy. A dog was a filthy, flea-bitten scavenger. How could Jesus’ message and mission also be for the Gentile dogs? Such a thought was revolutionary, disgusting, and unthinkable. These unclean peoples, moreover, had invaded the Jews’ Promised Land and oppressed them. Suddenly, everything was changed, and the filthy dogs were also God’s chosen ones.
Matthew had the task of convincing his fellow Jews not only that Jesus was the long-looked-for Messiah but also that the Gentiles were part of God’s plan.
The second thing to remember is that Matthew’s audience of Jewish Christians in the first years after Jesus’ death and resurrection—a small underground group—were persecuted by the Romans for being Jews and by their fellow Jews for being Christians. We will see later why appreciating this double persecution is crucial to understanding Matthew’s telling of the Magi story.
Tools for Detecting the Truth
If the first version of Matthew’s gospel was written ten or twenty years after the death of Jesus by the disciple of that name, then we need to ask whether it might have included the story of the Magi. Most Biblical scholars contend that the stories about Jesus’ birth are too full of contradictions and mythical elements to have any foundation in historical events.22 But have the scholars and skeptics done all their homework?
In the vast realm of Biblical scholarship, one finds surprisingly little research and writing on the stories of Jesus’ birth, and almost none of it takes seriously the possibility that the story of the wise men is historical. The work that has been done is biased, out of date, and based on false assumptions and wrong conclusions. Even the scholars’ own tools for determining the authenticity of a story have not been used.
To determine whether a particular story in the New Testament might be historical, scholars use certain tools of deduction. The first of these is the “criterion of dissimilarity”: If a gospel depicts Jesus saying or doing something that clashes with the Jewish religion of his day, and therefore with the religion of the first Jewish Christians—that is, something that would have made believers uncomfortable—then it is more likely to be authentic.
For example, since it was unheard of for a rabbi to engage a woman in conversation alone, the story of Jesus with the woman at the well in Samaria is unlikely to have been made up. Another example is the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a person the Jews despised turns out to be the hero. The stories of Jesus’ accepting the hospitality of sinners or breaking the Sabbath laws with his disciples likewise meet the “criterion of dissimilarity.”
According to the criterion of dissimilarity, the Magi story should be authentic. Why? Because its depiction of non-Jews coming to worship the Jewish Messiah clashes with what good Jews and good Christians from a Jewish background would have expected. They were convinced that the Messiah was for the Jews, not the Gentiles. The story of pagan Magi coming to worship the Christ Child is so improbable that Matthew is unlikely to have made it up.
The scholars’ second tool is “the criterion of embarrassment”: If a saying or event would have been embarrassing to the memory of Jesus, the apostles, or the early Christians, it is more likely to be authentic. Jesus’ losing his temper and clearing out the temple and his allowing a prostitute to pour perfume on his feet and wash them with her tears are examples of stories that meet this criterion, as are stories in which the apostles appear proud, vain, stupid, or unbelieving. The story of Jesus’ baptism is likely to be authentic because its depiction of his apparent subordination to John the Baptist would be embarrassing for those who wished to portray Jesus as the preeminent Son of God. The same can be said about his apparently illegitimate birth and his execution as a criminal. Would the story of the Magi have embarrassed the early church?
It would. The Jews considered all foreign religions to be false religions and believed they involved the worship of demons. Foreign magicians were thought to engage in necromancy and witchcraft, sins that carried the penalty of death in the Jewish law. Such people were not supposed to worship the Messiah. That foreign astrologers came to honor the infant Jesus would have been an embarrassment, and therefore it is not likely that the story of the Magi is a pious fantasy invented by the gospel writer.23
The third criterion that scholars apply is that of “cultural and historical congruency”: A story is less credible if it contradicts known historical facts or if it conflicts with cultural practices common in the period in question. If, on the other hand, the account matches the known historical facts, it is more likely to be authentic. Therefore, when a gospel story fits neatly into what we know of the politics, geography, history, and culture of the time, the story is more likely to be authentic.
Here is where many modern Biblical scholars have been most remiss. Assuming that the Magi story is pious fiction, they have not bothered to investigate the political, historical, geographical, and cultural details that support the historical accuracy of the story of the Magi. Unlocking those details will reveal much about Matthew’s world and show how the visit of the Magi to Bethlehem fits perfectly with what we know about the historical circumstances of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.
Filtering Fact and Fiction
The figure of Santa Claus that we have today is a fanciful development from historical facts about Saint Nicholas of Myra. The story of the wise men developed in a similar way. Elaborations of the Magi story influenced the early Christians, and by the Middle Ages several full-blown mythical versions of the stories had become part of the accepted Christmas tradition.
In the Middle Ages most Christians did not have access to a Bible. They believed the elaborate stories about the sages named Melchior, Balthasar, and Caspar who followed a magical star from exotic distant lands. They heard the various non-Biblical stories about the Magi and lost track of the simple Bible story. Unfortunately many of these accretions are still part of the Magi story today, and they make the story of the wise men sound almost as fanciful as Santa Claus.
In this chapter we sorted through the evidence to determine that Matthew’s simple account was part of an early collection of sayings and stories about Jesus. It is perfectly reasonable to conclude that Matthew’s version of the Magi story is not only ancient but part of the earliest oral traditions in the Christian church from the region of Judea, where Jesus lived, worked, and taught.
How did the simple story in Matthew’s gospel become so elaborate? Why did the Christians over the next five hundred years embellish the story? The answers to these questions will help us cut through the fanciful tales to discover the true identity of the wise men.