Who were the three wise men?

What Matthew says

Only one Gospel tells this story. Luke has the shepherds; Matthew has the magi. Strangers arrive in Jerusalem with a dangerous question for King Herod’s city.

“Where is he who is born King of the Jews? For we saw his star in the east, and have come to worship him.”

Herod is troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. His scholars point to Bethlehem, David’s town, only 9 kilometers south. The magi follow the star there, and Matthew gives the scene in one verse.

They came into the house and saw the young child with Mary, his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Opening their treasures, they offered to him gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Notice the words. A house, not a stable. A young child, not a newborn. Herod will later order the killing of Bethlehem’s boys “from two years old and under” (Matthew 2:16), which suggests the visit came some time after the birth.

Who the magi were

The Greek historian Herodotus knew the magi as a priestly tribe of the Medes who read dreams. By the time of Jesus the word meant priests and star-watchers from Persia and Babylon. Our word “magic” comes from their name. “The east” most likely means the Parthian empire, Rome’s great rival, which held Babylonia and Persia. Babylon’s astronomers still wrote their star tables in cuneiform then. From there to Jerusalem is over 1,300 kilometers by the Euphrates road, weeks on the move.

How they became three kings with names

• Three. Matthew gives no number. Three gifts led readers to imagine three visitors, and the Christian writer Origen counted them that way in the third century. Some Eastern traditions counted twelve.
• Kings. Around AD 200, Tertullian called them nearly kings, reading them alongside Psalm 72, where kings bring gifts to a king.
• Names. A mosaic in Ravenna, from around 560, names them Balthassar, Melchior and Gaspar, still dressed in Persian caps and trousers. The crowns came later still.

The gifts

Later readers gave each gift a meaning: gold for a king, frankincense for worship and myrrh, a perfume used at burials, for a death to come. Matthew doesn’t explain them. Then the magi, warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, return home another way and vanish from the story. Churches in the West remember them at Epiphany, on January 6.