Biblical Magi
The Biblical Magi are the foreign visitors who, in Christian tradition, bring gold, frankincense and myrrh to the infant Jesus. They are also called the Three Wise Men, the Three Kings and the Three Magi. Their whole story rests on a single passage, found solely in the Gospel of Matthew. In it, they arrive asking after the "one who has been born king of the Jews." Then the passage sends them home.
Matthew never says how many they were. He gives no names, no home country and no social rank. All of that was supplied later, by Christians who drew inferences and passed down traditions. Many scholars regard the Magi as legendary rather than historical figures.
Yet in many communities they are venerated as saints, and in some as martyrs. They fill paintings, legends and customs. How did a party of unnamed strangers acquire names, ages and crowns? Where did people believe they came from, and what became of their gifts and their bones? And why do children in several countries still set out greenery for their camels?
King Herod was frightened when the visitors reached Jerusalem, and Matthew says the whole city shared his fear. The strangers had come asking where a newborn king of the Jews might be found. Herod gathered the chief priests and scribes and demanded to know where the Messiah would be born. They answered Bethlehem of Judea, citing a prophet who foretold a ruler who would shepherd Israel.
Herod then summoned the visitors in secret and questioned them about the exact time the star had appeared. He sent them to Bethlehem with orders to search carefully and report back, claiming he also wished to pay homage. The star they had first seen at its rising went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. Tradition calls it the Star of Bethlehem. The visitors were overwhelmed with joy.
Inside, they found the child with Mary his mother. They knelt, opened their treasure chests and offered gold, frankincense and myrrh. A dream warned them against going back to Herod, so they returned to their own country by another path.
Matthew's Greek word for the building where they find Jesus means a house, not a stable. Yet most nativity scenes show three kings at a manger, beside shepherds and angels, on the night of the birth. Artists merged two separate episodes for convenience: the Adoration of the Shepherds on the birth night, and the later Adoration of the Magi.
The traditional dates of the 25th of December and the 6th of January sit close together, which encourages the idea of a single winter. Matthew himself names no interval. Later traditions stretched the gap to as much as two winters. That longer gap explains why Herod, at Matthew 2:16-18, ordered the Massacre of the Innocents to include boys up to two years old. Some recent commentators propose other intervals entirely.
One Syriac story, the Revelation of the Magi, breaks the timeline altogether. It has the Magi arrive in April, while Mary was still pregnant.
The word magoi, which Matthew uses, descends from Old Persian maguš and, before that, the Avestan magâunô. That term named the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism in Iran. These priests watched the heavens closely and earned an international reputation for astrology, then a highly respected science. Their rituals and star-craft led later writers to apply the word to the occult in general, which is how English got "magic."
The King James Version renders the word as wise men, the same phrase it uses for the men Daniel led in the earlier Hebrew Scriptures. Elsewhere the same Greek word becomes sorcerer, as with Elymas the sorcerer and Simon Magus, whom the early Church considered a heretic. Several modern translations call the visitors astrologers outright. They include the New English Bible of 1961, J. B. Phillips in 1972 and Goodspeed's American Translation of 1935.
Nothing in Matthew suggests the Magi ruled anyone. The crown came from prophecy. Isaiah 60:3 and a psalm describe kings bowing before the Messiah, and the psalm declares, "Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations serve him." Readers reinterpreted Matthew through those verses. By the third century the visitors were increasingly called kings, and by at least the year 500 the idea was widely accepted.
The Protestant reformer John Calvin hated it. He wrote that "the most ridiculous contrivance of the Papists on this subject is, that those men were kings." In his view, God had stupefied his Catholic opponents so that everyone might laugh at their ignorance.
Matthew's Greek says the visitors fell down, knelt or bowed. Such gestures were typical when honoring a king. Together with Luke's birth narrative, this scene shaped later Christian practice. Kneeling remains an important part of worship, and prostration is still fairly common in the Eastern Churches, especially during Lent.
Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar are the names most Western Christians know, and they first appear in an eighth-century chronicle called Excerpta Latina Barbari. That work is a Latin translation of a lost Greek manuscript, probably written in Alexandria about two centuries earlier. Spellings wander: Gaspar, Jaspar, Balthasar, even Bithisarea. A second eighth-century text, Collectanea et Flores, also translated from Greek, carries on the tradition of three kings and adds further detail.
One possible source for Caspar lies in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas. It describes Thomas the Apostle visiting Gondophares I, an Indo-Parthian king who ruled from about AD 21 to about AD 47. He is also known as Gudapharasa, and the name Gaspar may be a corruption of his. Gondophares broke away from the Arsacids and ruled a realm covering present-day Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ernst Herzfeld argued that the city of Kandahar preserves his name, having been founded as Gundopharron.
Eastern churches tell different versions. Syrian Christians name the visitors Larvandad, Gushnasaph and Hormisdas, approximations of typical Zoroastrian names. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church says Hor, Karsudan and Basanater. Armenian Catholics say Kagpha, Badadakharida and Badadilma. In Syriac Christianity the group often numbers twelve rather than three.
Michael the Syrian lists eleven names in his chronicle, each paired with a father, from Dahdnadur son of Artaban to Marduk son of Bīl. All are Iranian or pseudo-Iranian Zoroastrian names. Waštaph echoes Vishtaspa, the first king to convert to Zoroastrianism. Elsewhere in Michael's chronicle, the word mage simply means Zoroastrian. That suggests these kings were Zoroastrian officials who came to honor Jesus as a holy figure. Many Chinese Christians believe that one of the Magi came from China.
Over time the three developed distinct looks. In one tradition, visible in art by at least the 14th century, Caspar is old, usually white-bearded, and gives the gold. Giotto painted him that way in the Arena Chapel in 1305. He is called King of Tarsus, land of merchants, on the Mediterranean coast of modern Turkey, and he kneels first. Melchior is middle-aged and brings frankincense from Arabia. Balthazar is young and brings myrrh from Saba, in modern southern Yemen.
Their ages were often given as 60, 40 and 20, so together they stood for the ages of man. Details shift between traditions. The gold is sometimes Melchior's, and in some accounts he is the oldest of the three.
Balthazar is very often shown black-skinned, and increasingly said to come from Aksum or elsewhere in Africa. In art this appears mostly in northern Europe, beginning in the 12th century and becoming very common by the 15th. It has drawn considerable recent scholarly attention. From the 12th century on, the three kings also came to represent the three parts of the world then known to Europeans.
Byzantine artists drew the Magi as Persians, in trousers and Phrygian caps. Crowns appear from the 10th century. Although they are saints, they are very often shown without halos, perhaps so as not to compete with their crowns or the halos of the Holy Family.
In 1995, Colin Humphreys, a professor at Cambridge University, published a study built on comet records from the Book of Han. He argued that the Star of Bethlehem was a comet that appeared in 5 BC. In his view, only a comet fits all three details in Matthew: a new star, a slow drift across the sky, and a stop over Bethlehem with an almost vertical tail. Chinese records confirm it was visible for more than 70 days.
On this theory, the Magi first saw the comet in the morning sky in the east. They traveled from Iraq, Iran or Saudi Arabia for one or two months to reach Jerusalem. By the time they headed for Bethlehem, the comet stood in the south, seeming to guide them. Earlier signs had prepared them. A triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces in 7 BC would have announced a divine king in Israel, and a grouping of Mars, Saturn and Jupiter in 6 BC his power.
NASA scientist Mark Matney added a detail about the stop. He said the comet would have guided the Magi from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on one morning in early June of that year. Its closest pass to Earth produced a "temporary geosynchronous" motion, creating the illusion of "stopping" for several hours over the town.
Matthew's own phrase for their origin is only "from the east," which in Greek is more literally "from the rising of the sun." The Parthian Empire, centered in Iran, stretched from eastern Syria to the fringes of India. Its dominant religion was Zoroastrianism, with its priestly magos class. The apocryphal Syriac Infancy Gospel, in its third chapter, says the Magi were following a prophecy from their prophet Zoradascht, meaning Zoroaster.
The historian of Christianity Sebastian Brock said: "It was no doubt among converts from Zoroastrianism that... certain legends were developed around the Magi of the Gospels." Anders Hultgård concluded that the Gospel story was shaped by an Iranian legend of magi and a star, tied to Persian beliefs that a rising star predicted a ruler's birth. A further model may have been the journey of King Tiridates I of Armenia, who went to Rome with his magi in AD 66 to pay homage to the Emperor Nero. That was a few years before the date assigned to Matthew's composition.
Local traditions claimed the Magi for their own regions. An Armenian tradition names Balthasar of Arabia, Melchior of Persia and Caspar of India. The historian John of Hildesheim recorded a tradition in Taxila, an ancient Silk Road city in present-day Punjab, Pakistan, that one of the Magi passed through on his way to Bethlehem. In her four volumes of visions of the life of Christ, Anne Catherine Emmerich placed their origin on the border between Chaldea and Elam, naming Ur and Shushtar near Susa.
The farthest-reaching claim belongs to Central Asia. A tradition held that the Naimans, and their Christian relatives the Keraites, descended from the Magi. That heritage passed to the Mongol dynasty of Genghis Khan when Sorghaghtani, niece of the Keraite ruler Toghrul, married Genghis's youngest son, Tolui. She became the mother of Möngke Khan and of Kublai Khan. Toghrul was identified with the legendary Christian king Prester John, whose Mongol descendants European monarchs and popes hoped to recruit as allies against the Muslims.
Sempad the Constable, elder brother of King Hetoum I of Cilician Armenia, wrote from Samarkand in 1243 to Henry I of Cyprus and Queen Stephanie, Sempad's sister. He claimed that the Three Kings came from Tangut. He wrote: "I have myself been in their churches and have seen pictures of Jesus Christ and the Three Kings, one offering gold, the second frankincense, and the third myrrh." Prester John himself was reportedly a descendant of one of the Magi.
In Koine Greek, the three gifts are chrysós, líbanos and smýrna. Interpreters sort their meaning into two groups. In the first, all three are ordinary royal offerings: gold as a valuable, frankincense as a perfume and myrrh as an anointing oil. In the second, each carries spiritual meaning: gold for kingship on earth, frankincense for deity and myrrh, an embalming oil, for death.
The second reading goes back to Origen, who wrote in Contra Celsum: "gold, as to a king; myrrh, as to one who was mortal; and incense, as to a God." The carol "We Three Kings," by John Henry Hopkins, Jr., in 1857, carries the same idea. Its last verse sums it up: "King and God and sacrifice." The late 4th-century Hispanic poet Prudentius had already given the gifts this medieval meaning in a hymn. A looser version pairs gold with virtue, frankincense with prayer and myrrh with suffering.
John Chrysostom took the argument further. He said the gifts suited God and not merely a king, and he contrasted them with the sheep and calves the Jews traditionally offered. For Chrysostom, the Magi worshiped Jesus as God. The Travels of Marco Polo offers another version: gold for power over the material world, frankincense for power over the spiritual world and myrrh for healing power over death.
Myrrh had a long record around death. The ancient Egyptians used it to embalm corpses, and the Romans burned it at funeral pyres. It served as embalming ointment and penitential incense at funerals and cremations until the 15th century. The holy oil of the Eastern Orthodox Church, used for chrismation and unction, is scented with myrrh, and receiving either sacrament is commonly called "receiving the myrrh."
The Franks Casket, an early 7th-century whale-bone carving, shows the third visitor, the one with myrrh, with a valknut on his back. That is a pagan symbol referring to death. Some scholars suggest that the gifts were medicinal rather than precious tribute.
A possible precedent comes from 288/7 BC, when the Syrian king Seleucus I Nicator offered gold, frankincense and myrrh, among other items, to Apollo in his temple at Didyma near Miletus. It is thought that these three gifts are why the number of Magi became fixed at three.
Scripture never says what happened to the gold. One story has it stolen by the two thieves later crucified beside Jesus. Another says it was entrusted to Judas, who misappropriated it. A third holds that Joseph and Mary used it to finance their flight after an angel warned of Herod's plan. One tradition proposes that the myrrh was used to anoint Jesus's body after the crucifixion.
A golden case purportedly holding the gifts was donated to the Monastery of St. Paul on Mount Athos in the 15th century. The donor was Mara Branković, daughter of Đurađ Branković, King of Serbia. She was the wife of the Ottoman Sultan Murat II and godmother to Mehmet II the Conqueror. After the Athens earthquake of the 7th of September 1999, the relics were shown in Athens to strengthen faith and raise money for the victims. At Christmas 2014 they were displayed in Ukraine and Belarus, leaving Greece for the first time since the 15th century.
In 1610, a text called the Chronicon of Dexter first appeared. It was ascribed to Flavius Lucius Dexter, bishop of Barcelona under Theodosius the Great, who reigned from 379 to 396. It describes the martyrdom of Gaspar, Balthassar and Melchior in the city of Sessania in Arabia Felix. The work was immensely popular throughout the 17th century, particularly in Spain. By the 19th century, historians and Catholic officials in Rome had declared it a pious forgery. A separate tradition, most likely from Germany, also holds that the Magi were martyred, without further detail.
In the 1270s, Marco Polo claimed he was shown the Magi's three tombs at Saveh, south of Tehran in present-day Iran. He wrote that the three lie in "very large and beautiful monuments, side by side." He added: "The bodies are still entire, with the hair and beard remaining." Paul William Roberts offers some modern corroboration in his book Journey of the Magi.
The better-known claim belongs to the Shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne Cathedral in Germany. According to tradition, Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, found the remains on her pilgrimage to the Holy Lands in 326-328. She carried them to the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. In 344 they were moved to Milan, in some accounts by its bishop Eustorgius I, and placed in a special tomb beneath a basilica.
In 1162, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I conquered Milan. At the urging of Archbishop Rainald von Dassel, the remains were transferred to Cologne Cathedral. Pilgrimages grew, and von Dassel's successor, Philipp von Hochstaden, commissioned the current shrine in the late 12th century. It remains widely visited and venerated.
The Milanese kept fragments of masonry from the emptied tomb as secondary relics and distributed them widely, including to southern France. That explains why the Magi appear so often on reliquary chests of Limoges enamel produced there. Milan still marks its part in the tradition with a medieval costume parade every the 6th of January.
The 14th-century cleric John of Hildesheim told a version of this story in his Historia Trium Regum, or History of the Three Kings. His Helena travels to the Land of Ind, finds the bodies of Melchior, Balthazar and Gaspar, and puts them into one richly decorated chest. She then brings them to Saint Sophia in Constantinople. Secular historians have verified none of the claimed burial places.
In Spain, the Three Kings, known as Los Reyes Magos, bring children gifts on the morning of the 6th of January. Children write them letters first. Each king is said to represent a continent: Melchior for Europe, Caspar for Asia and Balthasar for Africa. On the evening of the 5th of January, almost every Spanish city or town holds a cabalgata, a parade in which the kings and their pages throw sweets to the crowd. The cavalcade in Alcoy claims to be the longest-running in the world, having started in 1886. In the 21st century, the older practice of casting a white actor in blackface as Balthazar has drawn criticism.
In Argentina, Mexico, Paraguay and Uruguay, children also receive presents from the Reyes Magos on Epiphany Eve or Epiphany morning. In most Latin American countries, children cut grass or greenery on the 5th of January and fill a shoe or box with it for the Kings' camels. By morning the grass is gone, replaced by candy. In Spain and most Latin American countries the Christmas season runs from the 8th of December to the end of the 6th of January. Puerto Rico adds eight more days, called las octavitas.
Western churches mark the visit on Epiphany, the 6th of January, which closes the Twelve Days of Christmas. Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate it on their Christmas date, which is either the 25th of December or the 7th of January, depending on the calendar.
In the Philippines, the Three Kings are called Tatlóng Haring Mago, and Epiphany is for many the traditional end of Christmas. The cabalgata survives in places such as Intramuros in Manila and on the island of Marinduque. After American culture arrived in the early 20th century, Santa Claus largely replaced the kings as gift-givers in cities. They survive in the greeting "Happy Three Kings!" and the surname Tatlóngharì.
In Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and German-speaking Catholic areas, families chalk the kings' initials above the main door. The letters are also read as "Christus mansionem benedicat," meaning "May Christ bless this house." In German-speaking regions, the Sternsinger, or star singers, are children dressed as the Magi. They carry a star, sing carols such as "Stern über Bethlehem," and chalk the door frame in exchange for charitable donations. Each year, German and Austrian dioceses choose one charity to receive the money. The custom of having one child in blackface play Baltasar has been criticised by Afro-Germans. Poland made Epiphany a holiday in 2010, and since 2011 costumed processions have run in Warsaw from Plac Zamkowy to Plac Piłsudskiego.
In Spain and Portugal, a ring-shaped cake, the bolo-rei, hides a small figure and a dry broad bean. Whoever finds the figure is crowned, and whoever finds the bean must pay for the cake. Mexico's Rosca de Reyes works similarly, and whoever finds a figurine hosts the Candelaria feast on the 2nd of February. In France and Belgium the practice is called tirer les Rois, drawing the Kings. In New Orleans, the King Cake is sold from Epiphany to Mardi Gras, and the person who finds the baby Jesus figurine must buy or bake the next one.
The Magi have also inspired music. Peter Cornelius wrote the song "Die Könige" in his cycle Weihnachtslieder, Op. 8, which became popular in English as "The Three Kings." Gian Carlo Menotti's 1951 opera Amahl and the Night Visitors features all three. Johann Sebastian Bach's Cantata 65, "Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen," draws on Isaiah 60:6.
Film has returned to them since The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ in 1903, through The Star in 2017. The Spanish animated film The 3 Wise Men, directed by Antonio Navarro in 2003, was nominated for the Goya Awards. The opening scene of Monty Python's Life of Brian in 1979 parodies the visit. In the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, NERV runs on three supercomputers named Balthasar, Melchior and Caspar.
Literature has invented its own Magi. Henry van Dyke's 1895 novella The Other Wise Man follows Artaban, a fourth magus delayed by acts of kindness, who arrives in Bethlehem a day late. In Lewis Wallace's 1880 novel Ben-Hur, Balthasar comes from Egypt, Melchior is a Hindu and Gaspar a Greek. O. Henry's 1905 story The Gift of the Magi concerns Jim and Della Dillingham Young, who sell a watch and her hair to buy each other presents. T. S. Eliot's 1927 poem Journey of the Magi is told from the point of view of an aged king.
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Common questions
Who were the Biblical Magi?
The Biblical Magi are distinguished foreigners who visit Jesus after his birth, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. They appear solely in the Gospel of Matthew and are also called the Three Wise Men and the Three Kings.
How many Biblical Magi were there?
The Gospel of Matthew gives no number for the Biblical Magi. Western and Eastern Orthodox Christians usually assume three, matching the three gifts, while Syriac Christianity often counts twelve.
What were the names of the Biblical Magi?
Western tradition names the Biblical Magi Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar. These names first appear in the eighth-century chronicle Excerpta Latina Barbari, and Eastern churches use different names.
What do the gifts of the Biblical Magi symbolize?
Following Origen, gold is read as a gift for a king, frankincense as a gift for a God and myrrh as a gift for one who was mortal. Others see gold as virtue, frankincense as prayer and myrrh as suffering.
Where are the Biblical Magi buried?
Tradition holds that the bones of the Biblical Magi lie in the Shrine of the Three Kings at Cologne Cathedral in Germany. Marco Polo claimed to see their tombs at Saveh in present-day Iran, and secular historians have verified no claimed location.
When is Three Kings Day, the feast of the Biblical Magi?
Western churches celebrate the Magi at Epiphany on the 6th of January, which ends the Twelve Days of Christmas. Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate them on their Christmas date, either the 25th of December or the 7th of January.
All sources
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