Reading the Bible Badly. Karl Allen Kuhn
moved from an Israelite to Gentile cultural context, those hearing it simply assumed that magi were wise. This interpretive tendency is still alive and well among American Christians today. Yet before discussing how the magi are most often viewed in our American context, it may be illuminating to explore how over the centuries Christians have told the magi story differently from how it is told by Matthew. In his book, The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story, Richard Trexler traces the various forms of the magi story as they appear in Christian literature and art from the opening centuries of Christianity until the beginning of the modern age. As we might expect, the story—and the magi themselves—have been presented in a number of different ways.
Early Christians of means often associated themselves with the magi in burial art adorning their tombs. A prominent motif in these settings was the generous gift-giving of the wealthy and wise magi and their subsequent reception of Christ’s salvation. Presumably, the wealthy Christians interred in the tombs displayed this depiction of the magi to emphasize their own wise and generous giving to Christ’s church and expectation of salvation. As Trexler summarizes,
The Christians who paid for these representations wanted to show that, like the magi, they had made gifts to Jesus through his church. This fundamental association between what had launched the church—the magi’s gifting of Jesus—and the salvational giving that was a consequence expected of all Christians will be one leitmotif of this work.31
Later, after Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as one of the unifying forces of his empire, a new motif was added to the portrayal of the magi. Funeral art and other sources depict the magi as legates or client kings submitting themselves to the authority of Jesus. In some of these depictions, the magi seem to represent the devotion and submission of the Roman emperors and leaders to Jesus and the church. Others associate the authority of Roman and later Byzantine emperors with that of Jesus. In these scenes, the image or example of the magi is used to depict the powers of the world presenting themselves to Christ and to the Christian emperor. Some depict the magi as members of Jesus’ royal court, as the child Jesus sits on a throne and receives the homage of foreign kings and the offerings of the nations. In both cases, the magi, Trexler points out, function as figures that legitimate not only the worship of Jesus, but also the authority of the emperor and empire, and their reception of tribute!
As we move into the early medieval period, many of these same depictions continue, including the use of the magi story to celebrate and legitimate elite power. It is also during this time that magi are first presented in Western art and literature as “the three kings” who pay homage to Jesus, and are assigned the names Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior.32 At the same time, the image of the magi was used not only to encourage allegiance to church and empire, but to cast emperors as faithful devotees to Jesus. The Emperor Justin and his wife, Theodora, are presented in a mosaic dating to 546–48 as “quasi-magi” offering gifts directly to Jesus.
Later, the characters of the magi would be used to promote and justify the church’s attempts to reclaim Jerusalem in the first of the crusades. Trexler writes,
the crusading idea that gentiles (also from the west) might be heirs of Jerusalem, even as the eastern magi had been the first gentiles to recognize the truth of Christianity, would over time develop into the notion that the western crusading monarchs were indeed like veritable magi, returning to rescue Jerusalem from latter-day Herods.”33
By still other writers and artists, the magi were cast as representative of humankind in general. Often, but not exclusively depicted as three in number (sometimes as many as twelve), the magi represented men in different stages of life, men of different dispositions, or different Gentile races or regions of the world.
Reading the Story through Elite-Shaped Lenses
The way in which the magi have been cast by Christian artists and thinkers throughout these centuries has been variable. But the surviving depictions reviewed by Trexler overlook a critical component of Matthew’s portrayal of the magi: their childlike simplicity that challenges the prevailing notions of wisdom, power, and access to God. Instead, the magi are frequently associated with elite gift-giving, faithful royalty, or submission to royalty. These depictions reflect a retelling of the magi story by the elite in promotion of elite values and the power of the state and church.
The Magi as Colonized Supplicants
As we move into the modern period, elite and state interests continue to guide the framing of the magi story, and now in service of colonization. Columbus and others speculated that the Americas included the gold and wealth-laden homelands of the three kings.34 Building on these assertions, artwork began appearing presenting at least one and sometimes all of the magi as native American, and numerous attempts were made to draw connections between the Americas and the fabled worlds of the magi. In the mind of the church-sanctioned state, this not only legitimated the exploration and eventually exploitation of native resources, but of the natives themselves.
Once established in a region of the new world, the colonizing Spaniards held a ceremony Trexler terms the “feast of the magi,” and compelled their new subjects to play along. This was a ritualized drama in which natives representing different communities dressed as magi and prostrated themselves before and offered gifts of their land not only to Jesus, but to their colonizing conquerors in exchange for the “salvation” they had received from their new lords.
The feast of the magi was soon established in the so-called new world, since it facilitated exchanging the salvation of the Americans for the wealth of the Indies. It brought native peoples before the one altar of the child, and it allowed the dramatic union of different indigenous social configurations, from the calpullis, or neighborhoods, up to the various tribes. That was precisely what the Spaniards needed, for even if they would tolerate ethnic diversity at the representational level, they were concerned to show the union of all the American tribes at the feet of the infant, that is at the feet of the Spanish crown and the European clergy.35
Similar feasts and processions casting natives as suppliant magi took place in North America as well during the feast of Epiphany. In summary, Trexler states that these rituals “show cultures forced to play the magi within paradigms and effects prescribed by the spiritual conquerors of those regions. Not surprisingly, missionaries loved to write home about how docile and childlike such people were.”36
Now, finally, the magi are portrayed by the elite in ways that have some semblance to their appearance in Matthew! They are childlike! But this is a far cry from the childlikeness that Matthew had in mind.
Tragically, the native Americans forced to play the role of the magi in these propagandizing spectacles actually had more in common with the slaughtered children of Matthew 2. These colonizing leaders and missionaries not only radically reconfigured Matthew’s portrayal of the magi, they themselves—through exploitation, enslavement, and disease—took on the role of Herod.
Our Magi Stories Today
Allow me to restate the summary of the magi story as read within the context of Matthew’s narrative I provided above:
In short, through this story and others to follow, Matthew is concerned to tell us that those whom the world often finds silly, naïve, trashy, powerless, and childish are more likely to open their hearts and minds to Christ. The saving reign of God makes little headway among those who hoard their riches, who seek to preserve their privileged positions, who celebrate their status at the expense of others, who so trust in their own manner of “wisdom” that they are blind to the way of blessing God is making known in plain sight before them. The kingdom of heaven comes to those who set the lies of this world aside, and rest their hearts in the truth and love of God made known in Emmanuel.
This summary, of course, reflects a very different understanding of the story of the magi than we see reflected in our history. Throughout the centuries, the story of the magi has often been framed in self-congratulatory and self-serving ways that reflect elite objectives: recognition by God and others for their generous patronage, maintenance of elite power, promotion of the crusades and later colonization, and subjugation of native peoples.
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