3 Kings or Many Magicians?

Notice that those strange and mysterious visitors to Mary and Joseph and the new baby, are nowhere referred to as kings.

Nowhere is it specified that there were three royal visitors to the Christ child.
Though the Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates the Greek as wise men,
the word is magi – the same Greek word that we use for magician – and magic.

And again, it's plural, to be sure, but we just don't know how many of them there were;
one ancient source puts their number at twelve – another at 120.

And the group might easily have included women.

(Only hundreds of years after the fact have we come to imagine three kings beside the manger. )

Happy Epiphany

The church recognizes the Day of Epiphany as being tomorrow – the first day after the twelve days of Christmas.

It may surprise you to know that many cultures of the world make more to do over the twelve days of Christmas and Epiphany than they do over Christmas day itself.

In fact, Epiphany is one of the oldest days of celebration recognized by the church – they celebrated the Day of Epiphany for several hundred years before anyone thought of celebrating the day of the birth of the baby Jesus.

Truth be told, I think we in the US of A should do far more with the twelve days of Christmas and Epiphany than we do.