How many Magi were there?

When we look at the Christmas displays and nativity scenes, we always see just three Magi or “wise men” giving gifts to the baby Jesus while he is still in the manger. How accurate is this? Let’s look at the text:

1 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem ² and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

³ When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. ⁴ When he had called together all the people’s chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Messiah was to be born. ⁵ “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they replied, “for this is what the prophet has written:

⁶ “‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
    are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
for out of you will come a ruler
    who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

⁷ Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. ⁸ He sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him.”

⁹ After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. ¹⁰ When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. ¹¹ On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. ¹² And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

The bible actually doesn’t say how many wise men there were here. It just says that there were 3 gifts given. It doesn’t even say they took turns giving it. There could have been 2 or 3 or 50 wise men who came to worship. If they were traveling with that much wealth, for such a long journey, they likely had a private military to escort them. They went to the king’s throne first before exploring the countryside likely to get support from the king to travel with such an entourage as you couldn’t just show up with a bunch of men out of nowhere. So, this was likely several dozen to hundred people.

Also, the Magi get to Jesus several years later. He is called a child and not an infant/baby here. Hebrew and Greek both have words to distinguish babies from toddlers from children. So, Jesus was likely walking and talking by the time they arrived, and Mary was likely already pregnant with James / their sister. So, keep your wise men out of the nativity scene haha. My family has always had them across the room on their way over.

A star is born

We see the Magi say, “We saw his star”. This is actually a reference to Numbers 24:17:

“I see him, but not now;
    I behold him, but not near.
A star will come out of Jacob;
    a scepter will rise out of Israel.

In this prophecy, Balaam son of Beor was looking forward to the coming Messiah. A vision of Jesus. He starts by saying that Jesus will come a long time in the future, and he will be a King. He is called a star and a scepter. The scepter is pretty obviously pointing to the Messiah’s status as king but what about the star?

The star might not seem like much but there was a common belief among pagans that stars are gods. We see this all the time in ancient literature. The constellations and specific stars were worshiped (Mars, Venus, Jupiter, etc.). In Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform (the cultures during the time of Numbers being written), stars are gods. With their greatest god being the greatest star; Ra, the sun god.

So, with that in mind, the passage about the Messiah in Numbers 24 shows that God will be born out of Israel, and he will reign and rule. We also can see that the Magi understood that he was God by saying that they came “to worship him”. Would rich and powerful foreigners travel such a vast distance to worship a baby who may or may not become king? The only explanation is that they knew a God had been born. Immanuel, God with us.

The Bread of Life

Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Bet means house and ham means bread. Bethlehem means “house of bread”. Jesus was also born in a manger (feeding trough). He was laid in the place where the animals would eat inside of the cave (oh yeah, Jesus was born in a cave, or maybe a guest room. That will be a separate post.). The significance of Jesus, the bread of life, the second matzah of the Passover seder, being born in the house of bread, in a feeding trough, is kinda amazing. I will get into the Passover seder and how the matzah points to Jesus in another post but the matzah that most clearly points to Jesus (of the 3, the afikomen) is broken and eaten.

God could have been born anywhere in the world, with any amount of fanfare, and been glorified by all people. Yet God chose to be born in a cave full of animals. Humbly. In a manger. No doubt this was intentional. Isaiah 53:2 says that the Messiah would have no splendor and nothing to attract us to him. Philippians 2:5-8 shows that Jesus left his divine glory and stature and became a man.

He is the bread of life. Animals would go to the manger for physical food, but we go to Christ for spiritual food. He is also the lamb to be slain. He was born among the animals. It doesn’t specify what type of animals there were but if I were a betting man I would say they had sheep.

So, Jesus was born in the house of bread, the king’s city, as the bread of life and as the lamb to be slain. The infinite, eternal God took on flesh and wasn’t born in a palace or some high position. He came lowly, approachable, accessible, like us. There are no palace gates or guards or barriers to keep us from coming to him. The King of kings came humbly to die for us.

Jesus and the Mad King

¹³ When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

¹⁴ So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, ¹⁵ where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

¹⁶ When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. ¹⁷ Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

¹⁸ “A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

Here we see that all boys 2 and under were killed. This likely means that Jesus was 2 when they got there.

On another note, Herod committed genocide, yet we don’t have this recorded by anyone outside the bible. The most likely candidate for recording such an event would be the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (who lived shortly after Jesus had died; 37-100AD). He recorded several events surrounding the destruction of the temple including the history which led up to the event. He does mention Herod the great several times. Dude was crazy.

He was heavily paranoid and killed anyone he thought would take his throne. Including his own wife and 3 sons. He killed well into the thousands and left a bloody mess behind him. He killed his mother-in-law, he drowned a high priest, killed several of his uncles and cousins, and tried to have an entire stadium of Jewish leaders killed. Josephus actually wrote 2 whole books on Herod and the crazy stuff he did. But he didn’t include the baby slaughter. Josephus described him this way, “He was of great barbarity toward all men equally”. His genocide of the children is not the only one that took place. So, Josephus might not have mentioned this particular genocide as it was rather tame or insignificant compared to the other acts of Herod.

This act also mirrors the genocide against the Jewish boys from when Moses was born. Jesus is the prophet onto Moses and his birth has this similar element. Which is pretty cool. There are many more similarities, but I will save them for my typology series. Jesus then fulfills a prophecy about God’s son coming out of Egypt.

¹⁹ After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt ²⁰ and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”

²¹ So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. ²² But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, ²³ and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.

The meaning of the gifts

Jesus was given gold, frankincense, and myrrh. All 3 of these were present with Jesus at his death. There are actually many parallels with his birth and death, and we’ll look at those at the end of the Luke series. He was perfumed (frankincense), embalmed (myrrh), and his eyes had gold coins placed on them (which we know both from the shroud of Turin and customs).

It also points to his deity, humanity, death, and rulership. The gold represents his kingdom and his status as the King of the world. The frankincense represents his deity as it was used as a perfume for the worship of God. Showing that they wise men were worshiping him as God. It was also primarily burned in the sacrifices of the temple as a pleasing aroma to God, showing that Jesus is the pleasing sacrifice for sin. Myrrh represents both his humanity and his death. Myrrh was used to embalm the dead and was very expensive. His death had at a great cost. God died.

He had his trinity broken for us. The first and only time Jesus was ever fully separated from the Father and the Spirit was to pay for our sins in death. God experienced human life and human death in order to faithfully and fairly judge us.

That is how much God loves us and how great of a God we have. Also, he knew the end from the beginning and the depth at which he planned everything out still astounds me every time I ponder on it.