The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story
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The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story
294Paperback
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Overview
The author demonstrates how the magi as a group functioned in Christian society. For example, magi plays, processions, and images taught people how to pray and behave in reverential contexts; they featured monarchs and heads of republics who enacted the roles of the magi to legitimate their rule; and they constrained native Americans to fall in line behind the magi to instill in them loyalty toward the European world order. However, Trexler also shows these philosopher-kings as competitive among each other, as were groups of different ages, races, and genders in society at large. Originally modeled on representations of the Roman triumphs, the magi have reached the present day as street children wearing crowns of cardboard, proving again the universality of the image for constructing, reinforcing, and even challenging a social hierarchy.
Originally published in 1997.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691606293 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #362 |
| Pages: | 294 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.10(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The journey of the Magi
Meanings in History of a Christian Story
By Richard C. Trexler
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1997 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-01126-4
CHAPTER 1
THE STAR ARRIVES
For almost two millennia, western Christians have heard the gospel of the magi on 6 January, the feast of Jesus' "epiphany," a word that means "appearance" or "manifestation," "revelation" or "coming out." For almost that long, the faithful in most of western Europe have thought that these wise men arrived at the crib on that same date, the twelfth day of Christmas, when Jesus was thirteen days old. During the Middle Ages, 6 January and the previous evening were also called the feast of the kings, when Balthazar, Melchior, and Caspar had their annual moment in the sun. Let us say something about the origins of this important festival.
The early Christian feast may have descended from a pre-Christian celebration in Egypt on the evening of 5 January that commemorated the sun god Aion's birth to a virgin. This feast featured the blessing of the Nile, whose water was said to turn to wine. Our first record of the Christian feast of the epiphany occurs among eastern Christians of the early second century, who celebrated on that night and (perhaps with something of a hangover) on the following morning of 6 January.
The themes of the Egyptian rite are important because they overlap those of early Christian celebrations. The early church in Jerusalem celebrated the birth of Jesus on 6 January, not the magi. Other Eastern Christians chose that date to recall John's baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, when Jesus really "came out." The celebration of other events was assigned to this date as well—the marriage banquet in Cana, at which Jesus turned water into wine, and Jesus' multiplication of the loaves and fishes. To these narrative evocations of the early Egyptian celebration may be added a ritual one: On 6 January eastern Christians baptized newcomers and blessed holy water. So far in the East we find no mention of a celebration of the magi.
Some time after Constantine recognized Christianity in 313, the western church decided to strike out on its own and to celebrate the birth of Jesus on 25 December, a date probably chosen to draw some of the crowds that were out celebrating the Roman saturnalia. By the end of the fourth century, most eastern churches had adopted this date for the feast of the nativity. Significantly, they included the magi in their commemorations of that date. In the same eastern rites, however, 6 January remained the more important feast, celebrating the baptism of Jesus (i.e., his epiphany, or coming out) along with the other biblical events just listed, but not the magi. To this day, Armenian Christianity only celebrates 6 January.
The western church celebrated these same memories on 6 January, with one important variation: it relocated the celebration of the magi's adoration of Jesus from his nativity to 6 January. Thus eastern Christianity considered the baptism of Jesus as his epiphany but from the time of Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), western Christianity, while it also recorded the baptism of Jesus on that day, identified Jesus' epiphany with the arrival and adoration of the magi before Jesus. In the West, the magi eclipsed the baptism of Jesus as an occasion for celebration.
Thus were born the twelve days of Christmas. In the West, the magi—their journey, gifting, and adoration—became the center of Epiphany celebrations in an explosion of fifth-century sermons and treatises on their story. Jesus did not "manifest" himself when he was born, for there were no witnesses to the nativity per se. Nor did Luke's humble Jewish shepherds provide sufficient witness. The advent of the wise men, potentates from the East, and Mary's unveiling of the child to them became Jesus' epiphany. Based on this liturgical calendar, it came to be said that the magi had seen the star on 25 December and had arrived in Bethlehem just thirteen days later, on 6 January.
Now hear Matthew's words:
When Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, "Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and have come to worship him." When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is written by the prophet: 'And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel.'"
Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star appeared; and he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, "Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him." When they had heard the king they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen in the east went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy; and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.
Matthew continues. After the magi departed, an angel told Joseph to flee with the child and his mother to Egypt, where they would remain until the death of Herod (4 B.C.). This fulfilled a prophecy, Matthew says, and it protected the infant from Herod who fell into a rage "when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men" and ordered the massacre of the innocents. So as to eliminate Jesus, "... he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men."
Who were these mysterious, obviously rich visitors? Matthew's very imprecision tantalized early Christians, indeed, the faithful to this day; no one, of course, has shown the same interest in Luke's poor shepherds. The magi were from the East, they interpreted stars, they traveled, and then they gave gold, frankincense, and myrrh as presents to an infant. That is all the curious have had to go on. Yet over the centuries, every vital statistic about the magi and their journey has been worked out from these sparse leads, from Old Testament stories that were seen to announce elements of the Jesus story, and from the visions of Christian mystics. These details have been widely represented in literature, in the arts, and in festivals. In this chapter, I shall describe what was discovered about the magi in these early centuries when they first passed the gates into the Christian imagination. My next goal is to understand the social and political context into which they were first received. Finally, we shall study the use to which early Christians first put the magi saga of travel, adoration, and gifting.
To determine the background of the magi, early Christians used three discrete approaches. The first was to emphasize their astrological skills in reading the meaning of the star. This suggested to some commentators that the magi came from Chaldea or the Mesopotamian valley, whose intellectuals were famous on that score. In this reading, their adoration of the child showed that religion had superceded astrology as an occult tool.
A second approach was to exploit the word "magi" itself. The magi were from Persia, many assumed. They were the people or priesthood of that name in a part of modern Iran, whence came the word "magic." Because this area of Medea had long been ruled by the Persian king of kings, it was easy to imagine that subjects of that great king recognized Jesus' royalty long before Constantine did. They did this not by setting off on their own for Bethlehem; rather, they went on legation to find the child on the orders of the Persian king. In this reading, Persia proved itself wiser than Rome. In its time, this political approach was quite as important as the symbolic interpretation of the Persians' adoration, which was that magic, as well as Persian Zoroastrianism and Mithraism, had been delegitimized by this "true religion."
Both these readings obviously served the elect Christian clergy in its struggle with contending priesthoods. Whether Chaldaic or Persian, the magi came from an area to the east, which lay in the grip of the forces of darkness. Yet a third approach suggested that the magi came not from the east but from the south and that they were rulers more than intellectuals, thus representing many lands rather than one. More than the other approaches I have mentioned, this one searched the Old Testament for confirmation.
The Christians' conviction that Jewish and even gentile prophets had foretold Jesus' birth meant that they were also the primary sources of information on the magi. Matthew himself knew that Jesus was fated to be born in Bethlehem of a virgin. So early Christians like Origen (ca. 185–254) found it child's play to determine, for the whole Christian tradition, that the star had been forecast by the Mesopotamian outsider and "magus," Balaam. "There will come a man out of [Israel's] seed," Balaam had said, "and he will rule many nations.... A star will rise from Jacob, and a man will stand forth." To learn more about the magi, one had only to discover the prophetic texts that foretold their journey.
The first biblical passage lending itself to such a forecast was put forward by Tertullian (160–220). He thought that Psalm 72 obviously had the magi in mind because, like Matthew, it features foreigners bringing gifts and submitting themselves:
May the kings of Tarshish and of the isles render him tribute, may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts! May all kings fall down before him, all nations serve him!
To the present day, this passage, early adopted into the liturgy of the feast of the epiphany, has remained the classic Old Testament forecast of the magi. Countless Christians learned from it that the magi were "as good as kings," as Tertullian himself first suggested. Some then surmised that they came from the area of the Red Sea. The mention of Sheba engendered the idea that the famous queen of Sheba had prefigured the magi's visit to Jesus when she made her journey up the Red Sea to visit Solomon in Jerusalem, as well as the possibility that at least one of the magi, like her, had gifted the gold of Ophir.
The general thrust of Tertullian's choice is more important than these details, as a comparison with earlier notions of the magi's origins makes clear. Those who thought the magi came from Persia or Chaldea saw them as intellectuals, sent as legates of the king of kings to Bethlehem. Tertullian, on the contrary, imagined them as quasi-monarchs who represented different kingdoms and commanded their resources. The notion that, far from harboring the philosopher's stone, the lands of the magi hid economic resources conveniently controlled by monarchs would interest medieval commentators and would fire the imagination of future explorers and conquerors.
Early commentators could not have dreamed that Christianity would one day command these resources. Their purpose was simply to fill in the sparse Matthean picture of the magi, and in that pursuit they next searched out passages in the Old Testament that mentioned foreigners bringing the particular gifts brought by the magi. There is a source that twice mentions frankincense and myrrh—products of varieties of balsam trees commonly imported to Judea from the Red Sea—but which our exegetes do not bring into relation with the magi story. This source is the Song of Songs:
What is that coming up from the wilderness, like a column of smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all the fragrant powders of the merchant?
In the gorgeous "behold you are beautiful, my love" passage, Solomon, after describing his beloved's eyes, hair, teeth, lips, cheeks, and neck, turns to the woman's breasts:
... like two fawns, twins of a gazelle, that feed among the lilies. Until the day breathes and the shadows flee, I will hie me to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense. You are all fair, my love; there is no flaw in you.
It is not difficult to divine why these passages were so rarely pressed into service as harbingers of the magi. The eroticism of the Song of Songs has always embarrassed solemn readers, and Matthew himself was presumably interested in the magi's frankincense and myrrh as offerings for divine services not as aphrodisiacs. Another reason exegetes did not refer to these mentions of myrrh and frankincense is that the former passage calls these aromatics "the powders of the merchants." Church commentators had something else in mind for the magi than to cast them as crude merchants who only bought and sold wares.
To assume that the magi were intellectuals or rulers was one thing. To suggest that they might have been spice and drug merchants, as the class of magi were in fact sometimes understood to be, was clearly unworthy. Actually, some scholars now believe that the first gift of the magi was not gold but a third spice, the error having arisen from a bad translation of Matthew's lost Aramaic original into the Greek Septuagint. Zahab ("gold") is in fact listed along with frankincense and myrrh in surviving commercial documents from the Red Sea area. Matthew may therefore have imagined figures somewhat akin to the snake oil sales-men of the American heritage: healers who peddled occult wisdom with their goods. But the magi did not emerge as merchants from the musings of exegetes.
Instead, early students selected the other biblical text that mentioned their gifts as the most significant prophecy of the magi, and it indeed emulated the pluralistic, aristocratic, Arabian focus of Psalm 72. When we look back over two thousand years of magian history at the end of this book, we will be in no doubt about the triumphal role this Isaiahan passage has played in ascertaining the meaning of the magi:
Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen
upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and
thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will arise upon
you, and his glory will be seen upon you.
And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the
brightness of your rising.
Lift up your eyes round about, and see; they all gather
together, they come to you; your sons shall come from far,
and your daughters shall be carried in the arms.
Then you shall see and be radiant, your heart shall
thrill and rejoice; because the abundance of the sea
shall be turned to you, the wealth of the nations shall cover you.
A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian
and Ephah;
all those from Sheba shall come.
They shall bring gold and frankincense, and
shall proclaim the salvation of the lord.
All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered to you, the
rams of Nebaioth shall minister to you; they shall come
up with acceptance on my altar, and I will glorify my glorious house.
In an unmistakably triumphant mode, Isaiah 60 pictures kings and whole nations moving from diversity to unity, and from darkness to light. Accompanied by great retinues of men and animals, they wend their way to submit themselves before the altar of Israel, to become the Christian altar. In a narrow sense, Isaiah confirms the southern origins of the magi. But his poetic vision makes far greater claims. Through the blinding light of his verse, Isaiah suggests a cosmic vision of philosopher-kings. They come to the infant "from the ends of the earth," terminology used by the ancients to vaunt the power of their kings. Precisely this global reading was then classicized by Augustine.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The journey of the Magi by Richard C. Trexler. Copyright © 1997 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction 3
Ch. 1 The Star Arrives 9
Ch. 2 The True Light Shines in the Darkness 44
Ch. 3 The Pageant of the "Two" Kings 76
Ch. 4 El Dorado 124
Ch. 5 The Ancien Regime of the Magi 158
Ch. 6 Return by Another Way 187
Conclusion 206
Notes 211
Bibliography 255
Index 271
What People are Saying About This
"Richard Trexler attempts to construct the kind of global account of an originally sacred Christian story that is sorely needed by many contemporary historians, cultural and otherwise. He explores a strikingly wide variety of times, places, and social milieus in a study that is broad, ambitious, and concerned both with deep structures and powerful historical change."—Paul H. D. Kaplan, State University of New York, Purchase