Wednesday 1 April 2020

The legend of the Three Wise Men




6th January is the Feast of the Epiphany and is traditionally the date on which the “wise men from the East” in St Matthew’s Gospel reached Bethlehem and offered their gifts of “gold, frankincense and myrrh” to the infant Jesus. It is also the date on which all Christmas decorations must be taken down if you haven’t done so already!

Did the Three Wise Men ever exist?

This is a story that has grown in the telling over the centuries. For one thing, it is only because there were three gifts that there has always been reference to three givers – Matthew says nothing about this. The wise men have also been promoted to kings in many versions of the story, although the justification for this seems to come from references in the Book of Psalms to kings bearing gifts.

It is easy to imagine how the sketchy mentions by Matthew (and no-one else) might have been given more substantial form in later years. When the story was read in a 2nd-century Christian gathering, as everyone hid in the catacombs for fear of being discovered by the Romans, a child might have asked “What were their names?” and so names were suggested . Another might have asked “What did they look like?” and an artist among the adults would have been inspired to paint them on the walls, using a measure of artistic licence.

As a result, the Christian tradition was that the three wise men were named Balthasar, Caspar and Melchior, and they were of different ages - young, middle-aged and elderly. One of them (Balthasar) was drawn as a black man. Traditions, once established, are hard to break, and so artists all down the centuries have followed the same conventions.

Cologne Cathedral and the Three Wise Men

According to tradition, the bones of the three wise men were preserved and eventually found their way to Germany. A special shrine was constructed and this became the central feature of the new Cologne Cathedral, which was founded in 1248, nearly 50 years after the bones had reached the city.

In 1864 the shrine was opened and the bones of three men were found to be inside, together with a coin dating from the time of the shrine’s construction. Strange to tell, the ages of the bones showed that the men had died at different ages, one being quite young, one being middle-aged and the third being elderly. This would fit the legend that the wise men became Christians and were martyred, presumably at the same time.

However, the huge medieval appetite for relics and physical links to the Bible stories gives credence to the notion that somebody made a quick buck by persuading the Church that three particular sets of bones (possibly dug up from a graveyard) were those of the three wise men. It would not have been the first nor the last time that a conman made a fortune from the gullibility of simple-minded people.

The three wise men, who have been accorded the status of saints by the Roman Catholic Church, may therefore never have existed or, if they did, their personal details owe a lot more to fiction than to fact. But it’s a good story, and where would the traditional school nativity play be without its three kings?

© John Welford

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