Reading the Bible Badly. Karl Allen Kuhn

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Recent readings of the magi within our American context have shifted away from the most exploitative of these retellings. But as noted earlier, the magi are still commonly regarded by Christians today as wise and admirable exemplars of how one finds his or her way to Jesus. The countercultural, even revolutionary, dimension of their story in Matthew, and its focus on God’s initiative in leading the magi to Jesus, is often overlooked. In other words, instead of experiencing the story as the surprising, disorienting tale which challenges our conceptions of who truly welcomes the kingdom of God—instead of experiencing the tale as Matthew likely intended—we often read it as a tale that affirms our sense of what it takes to be a believer, or perhaps the kind of believers we consider ourselves to be: wise, learned, and discerning. Here is a sampling of such readings readily found online.

The three wise men, also known as magi, were men belonging to various educated classes. Our English word magician comes from this same root. But these wise men were not magicians in the modern sense of sleight-of-hand performers. They were of noble birth, educated, wealthy, and influential. They were philosophers, the counselors of rulers, learned in all the wisdom of the ancient East. The wise men who came seeking the Christ child were not idolaters; they were upright men of integrity. They had apparently studied the Hebrew Scriptures and found there a clear transcript of truth.37

They were certainly men of great learning . . . The magi would have followed the patterns of the stars religiously. They would have also probably been very rich and held in high esteem in their own society and by people who weren’t from their country or religion. They had seen an unusual new star in the sky, and knew that it told of the birth of a special king in Israel . . . The Magi would have known about the prophesies of a special Jewish Savior (also known as the Messiah) from when the Jews had been held captive in ancient Babylon several hundred years before.38

Magoi were experts in such astral phenomena. But what about this star drew them to Jerusalem? The most plausible explanation lies in Israel’s Scriptures. As learned men who interacted with various religious literature, the magoi would have been familiar with Jewish political or messianic oracles. And one of the central political prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures is Balaam’s oracle.39

These foreigners, the first Gentiles СКАЧАТЬ