The Christmas story as we know it comes from two of the canonical Gospels, that of St. Matthew and that of St. Luke. St. Mark’s Gospel begins with the event which the Eastern Church makes the focus of Epiphany, the Baptism of Christ. The Fourth Evangelist begins his Gospel with a theological prologue that includes a plain statement of the significance of the Nativity – “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” – but the narrative portion the Gospel that follows this prologue also begins with the Baptism, or, to be more precise, with John the Baptist pointing Jesus out to His first disciples and relating to them the events of the Baptism, the day after it had occurred. To get the full Christmas story we need the Gospels of both SS Matthew and Luke, because, although the main participants are the same – the baby Jesus, His Virgin Mother Mary, and her betrothed husband Joseph – as is the location, David’s city of Bethlehem, each Evangelist tells a different party of the story. For example, whereas St. Luke tells of the Annunciation by Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, it is St. Matthew who tells of the angel visiting Joseph.
It is St. Matthew who gives the account of the Adoration of
the Magi, which is the principle event commemorated by the Western Church on
Epiphany (1). St. Luke, by contrast,
tells of the Adoration of the shepherds.
This is rather interesting due to the difference between the two
Evangelists.
St. Luke was a Greek physician who was an associate of St.
Paul’s in his missionary journeys. He is the only Gentile Evangelist, (2) indeed,
the only Gentile writer to contribute to the New Testament, or for that matter
the whole of canonical Scripture except the portion of Daniel that is told in
the first person by King Nebuchadnezzar. (3)
St. Matthew, who was also called Levi, was Jewish. His Gospel continuously references the Old
Testament and presents events in the life of Christ as the fulfilment of Old
Testament prophecy. Indeed, after the
very Jewish genealogy that he sticks at the beginning of his Gospel, he
presents his account of Jesus in such a way that it evokes the story of Israel
in the Old Testament (the angel visits Joseph, the namesake of the Old
Testament figure noted for receiving revelation in dreams, in a dream, the Holy
Family flee to Egypt to escape Herod as Israel fled to Egypt to escape famine,
and then return as Israel returned).
If St. John’s purpose in writing his Gospel, as he himself stated it,
was that his readers might come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
the Living God, and so receive everlasting life, St. Matthew’s purpose appears
to have been to present Jesus as the fulfilment of the Jewish Scriptures, and,
indeed, it is St. Matthew who records Jesus saying that He came not to abolish
the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil them.
All of this makes the difference between St. Matthew’s
account of the Nativity and St. Luke’s more striking. It is St. Luke, the Gentile physician, writing
a very Western, eyewitness based, account of the life of Christ, who provides
us with all the most Jewish details of the Nativity and the events surrounding it. St. Luke sticks the Annunciation to the
Virgin Mary in the middle of his account of the conception and birth of John
the Baptist, to St. Elizabeth, the cousin of the Virgin Mary, and wife of St.
Zacharias, a priest serving in the Temple, an account which resembles in many
details, Moses’ account of the conception and birth of Isaac to Abraham and
Sarah. St. Luke follows up his account
of the Nativity itself, with an account of the fulfilment of the post-natal
requirements of the Jewish faith, the Circumcision of Christ on the eighth day
when He was given the name Jesus, and the Presentation in the Temple on the
completion of His Mother’s purification period on the fortieth day. The only details from the Roman world that
make it into St. Luke’s account of all of this are who the Emperor and local
officials were at the time, and the census ordered by Caesar Augustus that was
the reason why the Holy Family made the trip to Bethlehem. It is to St. Matthew, the Evangelist who
emphasizes Jesus as the fulfilment of the Jewish Scriptures and their prophecy
of a Messiah that we must turn to find an account of Gentiles who feature into
the story in any way other than remote, background, details.
Although this is striking and interesting it is not counter
intuitive. For the Adoration of the
Magi itself has long been understood by orthodox Christians to be the fulfilment
of Messianic prophecy – specifically that of the sixtieth chapter of
Isaiah. The second last verse of the
chapter immediately prior to this hand declared “And the Redeemer shall come to
Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the LORD.” The
sixtieth chapter begins with the following passage:
Arise, shine; for thy
light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee. For, behold, the darkness shall cover the
earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and
his glory shall be seen upon thee. And
the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy
rising. Lift up thine eyes round about,
and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall
come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side. Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and
thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall
be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee. The multitude of camels shall cover thee,
the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah, all they from Sheba shall come; they shall
bring gold and incense; and they shall show forth the praises of the LORD. (vv 1-6)
It is not difficult to see why the Church has long seen a
specific foreshadowing of the Adoration of the Magi in these verses, as well,
of course, as the more general concept of the Gentiles coming to faith in the
True and Living God. The coming of
Christ into the world is likened to a light shining in the darkness in the
prologue to St. John’s Gospel, and the Adoration of the Magi was certainly a
matter of the Gentiles coming to that light bringing gold and (frank)incense
and myrrh. The Isaiah passage,
interestingly enough, is almost certainly the source of the tradition that
identifies the Magi as kings. While it
would be reading too much into these verses to say that they prove this
tradition conclusively, they should be sufficient to answer those who argue
that because St. Matthew does not describe them as such in the second chapter
of his Gospel, the tradition is therefore wrong. St. Matthew describes them as magoi, the
plural of magos, which, like its Latin equivalent magi, plural of magus, is
borrowed from the ancient languages of what is now Iraq and Iran. This word is rendered “wise men” in St.
Matthew’s Gospel in the Authorized Bible, otherwise it is generally rendered “sorcerer”,
being obviously the root of the English words magic and magician. In the lands of its origin it was the
designation of an ancient class or order, which was first and foremost
priestly, but whose members studied philosophy, astrology, and medicine among
other things. The wise men of Babylon
and Persia, depicted in the book of Daniel as advisers to the kings of those
empires, were of this order and the Gospel account of the wise men following a
star to the Holy Land to worship the newborn King of the Jews would suggest
these were of that order as well. (4) If the tradition that says they were also
the kings of the Isaiah passage is correct, they would therefore have been
philosopher-kings.
While the Eastern and Western branches of the Church have
developed different traditions concerning the Magi, there is a general
consensus as to the significance of the event.
The Adoration of the Magi in St. Matthew’s Gospel is the complement of
the Adoration of the Shepherds in St. Luke’s Gospel. The Shepherds as representatives of the Jews
and the Magi as representatives of the Gentiles both came to pay homage to Him
Who came to be the Redeemer of the entire world and in Whose Church, Jew and
Gentile would be united in one body of worshippers. Or rather, to the put the emphasis where it
belongs, in these events, Christ, as the fulfilment of the ancient promises of
redemption, was made manifest to the Jews and Gentiles for the very first time.
This is the significance of the name of the day
commemorating the event. The term
epiphany in colloquial use refers to a moment of realization or awareness. “I had an epiphany” is the common
expression. Originally, however, as a
Greek word it had the meaning of a manifestation or appearance. While the two meanings are clearly related,
the current vernacular meaning represents a shift in focus from that which is
made manifest to the person who experiences the manifestation. It is, of course, with the original meaning
and perspective, that the term was first applied to the festival. The Collect for today in the Book of Common
Prayer begins with the words “O God, who by the leading of a star didst
manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles” and, indeed, the BCP gives as
an alternative name for the day “The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles”.
The coming of Christ into the world two thousand years ago
was a manifestation, as both Isaiah and St. John tell us, of a light shining in
a darkness. The darkness, St. John
tells, us “comprehended it not”. That is
as true today as it was then. St. John
also tells us, however, that “as many as received him, to them gave he power to
become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name” and that too is
just as true today.
May the light of Christ shine upon you and may you in faith receive
Him this Epiphanytide.
(2) Some dispute that St. Luke was a Gentile, but they do not have a very strong case.
(3) The Book of Job, if written by the title character as has traditionally been believed, was not written by a descendant of Abraham but by one of his contemporaries. This predates, however, the distinction between Hebrews/Jews and Gentiles and so demonstrating Job not to have been the former does not place him in the latter category.
(4) By the time the events of the book of Daniel and St. Matthew’s Gospel took place, these priests had adopted the religion of Zoroastrianism, founded by one of their own, Zoroaster, or to use his name in his own tongue, Zarathustra, not to be confused with the Nietzsche character by the same name. It was from this religion that the heresiarch Mani borrowed the dualism that bears his name in the third century.
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