The Untold Truth Of The Nativity Of Jesus

The Gospel of Matthew doesn't tell anything of the circumstances of Jesus' birth, but he does lay out what happens a little later: some wizards from Persia come to visit him. They give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh and then go away. That's all the details we get, but in the centuries since the composition

The Gospel of Matthew doesn't tell anything of the circumstances of Jesus' birth, but he does lay out what happens a little later: some wizards from Persia come to visit him. They give him gold, frankincense, and myrrh and then go away. That's all the details we get, but in the centuries since the composition of Matthew, these strange Persian wizards have been refined into the Three Kings we know so well from the one song. As Professor Brandon W. Hawk points out, the biblical account does not tell us there were three of them or that they were kings, but these points have been inferred from their three costly gifts, and the idea of foreign kings bowing to the King of Kings is an appealing one.

In the ensuing years, a number of details have been added to the Magi's biographies, including traditional names (Caspar/Gaspar/Jasper, Melchior, and Balthazar are the most common, but there are tons of variations), ages (one young, one middle aged, and one old), and geographic origins (one from Europe, one from Asia, one from Africa). By the time of a medieval legend called the Historia Trium Regum ("History of the Three Kings") by a monk named John of Hildesheim, they were magical astrologers with a headquarters on the Hill of Vaws who were baptized in India by the apostle Thomas before ending up in Germany somehow.

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