Tuesday, January 5, 2010

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. )

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