Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 2 January 2011

Epiphany

Elsewhere in these pages, we have surmised from evidence regarding the Essene sect of the Jews, that their appointment ceremonies were aqueous ones. The extant scriptures of the Jews prescribe annointment with oil for appointment ceremonies, but Essenes eschewed oil for all but medicinal purposes, preferring water. So they made appointments by what Christians now call baptisms.

In the gospels, John baptised Christ aged thirty, apparently as his heir, and under the hypothesis that Jesus was an Essene and an inference from the Dead Sea scripts, three Zadokite (Essene) priests will have witnessed the ceremony. As the Essenes seemed the Jewish sect which most closely preserved the foundational Persian traditions of their religion, it seems these witnesses were later transformed, in the composition of the birth narratives, into Magi.

Aristides Rhetor in about 160 AD tells us that water drawn from the Nile at the Festival of the Immersion is at its purest. Stored in wine jars, he said, it improved with time just like wine. Two centuries later, Epiphanius wrote that the stored water actually changed into wine! In Dionysos worship, water turned to wine on 6 January. The miracle at Cana when Jesus turned water into wine is celebrated in the Christian calendar on 6 January! The Egyptian Gnostics known as Basilidians, seeing the traditional “Festival of the Immersion” ceremonies as symbolic of the baptism of Jesus, celebrated it on 6 January. Gradually Christians elsewhere adopted this date as the anniversary of the Jesus’s baptism. By 386 AD the two great Christian festivals were Easter, the festival of the crucifixion, and Epiphany, when rivers and springs were blessed and water was drawn and saved for baptisms throughout the year.

Jesus was thought to be exactly 30 years old at his baptism—his baptism was his birthday. Cassian, at about the beginning of the fifth century, says the Egyptian provinces identified Epiphany with the anniversary of the birth of Jesus. As many Churches commemorated the birth and the baptism of Christ on the same day, no separate birth story was known. The churches had no tradition of a separate birth legend, corresponding with the fact that the first gospel Mark began with the baptism of Jesus. On the day that Jesus was baptized, Christ was born.

It cannot be coincidence that the Persian lawgiver Zoroaster was exactly thirty when the spirit of god descended on him. The Egyptian Pharaohs also had a celebration called Sed exactly 30 years after the day they had been chosen by their father as his successor, their spiritual birthday.

The Revelation of the Magi

In ancient Greek religion, an epiphany was the appearance of a god. By the same token, the Christian Epiphany is the appearance of God on earth, the birth of Christ. Before the nativity stories were invented, the birth of Christ was thought to have been at his baptism, and that was the original date used for his birth too. Since the fourth century AD, with the invention of Christmas, Epiphany has become most closely associated with just twelve verses of Matthew (Mt 2:1-12) concerning the visit of the wise men from the East (magoi apo anatolon), or Magi, who came to adore Jesus in Bethlehem.

For the exclusive Christians, the visit of the Magi became an embarrassment. Magoi (“Magi”), was the Greek word from which we get “magician” and in the first century AD had largely taken on that meaning. Elsewhere in the Greek bible—in both the Septuagint (Dan 1:20; 2:2,10,27; 4:4; 5:7,11,15) and the Greek New Testament (Acts 8:9; 13:6,8)—magoi is translated as “magicians” but not here in Matthew! Justin, Origen, Augustine and Jerome use “magicians” to translate magoi in Matthew 2, and the old but well known Matthew Henry Commentary on Matthew follows them.

The Magi are most famously a sect of Persian priests, incorporated into the Zoroastrian priesthood about the time of Darius the Great, who became renowned in the West for their knowledge of astrology and magic. Philo uses “Magi” both in the sense of philosopher priests and in the sense of magicians. But, the Magi having been denigrated as magicians, the implications of them visiting the new Christian savior became dubious.

The Christian apologist, Origen, dealt with it by adding another layer of mythology. The Magi were indeed agents of the “daimones” but the advent of Jesus destroyed their demonic power. Just as Jesus had realized his power had gone when his tassels had been deliberately touched by the menstrual woman, the Magi suddenly realized they had lost all of their demonic power and knew that a powerful good god had entered the world. Naturally they had to seek him out to offer their devotions just to be on the safe side! Origen was himself a strong believer in magic besides Christianity!

Today, Christians insist it is all fine. The story is a true one, supported by all manuscripts and versions of Matthew, and by the Fathers of the Church. Critics counter that the existence of many copies of the original is not evidence of its truth. It could have been an original symbolic tall story. And external clues from our knowledge of the history and culture of the ANE are not often admitted by Christians, so critics conclude the gospel account is a fairy tale, or more properly a myth—it is indeed a symbolic tall story meant to make Christ superior to Mithras.

The other gospels are silent about it, but Christians explain that because Mark and John did not contain any birth narrative, they had no reason to include it. Yet, as Luke does have a birth narrative, but still has no story about the Magi, Christians have to find a different reason, and do—Luke has many other stories that the others do not have, and it was omitted out of necessity.

So, only Luke and Matthew, of the four gospels, have birth narratives, Mark and John do not. Of the two birth narratives, Luke has no Magi, but shepherds instead, and Matthew has no shepherds, but has the Magi. In Matthew, the account of the visit of the Magi is woefully short. Yet, there are longer versions in books outside the bible.

The Revelation of the Magi is an old Syriac apocryphal Christian work and the most extensive Magi account from the ancient world. It is part of the Chronicle of Zuqnin, a sort of world history, Vaticanus Syriacus 162, a codex in the Vatican Library from the 8th century AD. Brent Landau, an Anglican Christian and assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Oklahoma, has, for the first time, translated The Revelation of the Magi into English and added a commentary. Now, he has written a book from his doctoral study called The Revelation of the Magi—The Lost Tale of the Wise Men’s Journey to Bethlehem.

Syriac is a later form of Aramaic or Aramaean, sometimes called Assyrian because it was used widely as a diplomatic and trading languages through the periods of the Assyrian and Persian empires. Many think it was the daily language of Judaea and Galilee at the time of Christ. As the language Jesus was thought to have spoken, the film, The Passion of the Christ, was scripted in Aramaic with English subtitles for a spurious authenticity. Modern Hebrew script, the letters used to form Hebrew words is not Hebrew script at all, but Aramaic script. Hebrew script is Phœnician script, its letters not dissimilar to Greek letters, but Aramaic is quite different. Aramaic script was introduced by the Persians, and Hebrew, a Canaanite dialect restored as the holy language of the Jews by the Persians at the end of the fifth century, was nearly always written in Aramaic script.

The Syriac manuscript is written in the first person plural to appear to be a true record of the events by the Magi themselves, but the number of them is nowhere three. Traditionally, there are three Magi, but the gospels do not say it. It is inferred from the three gifts—gold, frankincense and myrrh. Rather, early in the Syriac text, twelve are named, though it may be an interpolation because the names appear nowhere else in the document.

The number identifies the Magi with the number of Jesus’s disciples, but some pictures of Mithras show him with twelve attendants too. The number twelve emerges in religions because the sun passes through twelve constellations in its annual journey. It shows how religions either were solar originally, or have taken up many of the traditions of solar religions.

The names of the 12 Magi are all late Persian—Zaharwandad, Hormizd, Aushtazp, Arshak, Zarwand, Ariho, Artahshishat, Ashtanbozan, Mihruq, Ahshirash, Nasardih, Merodak, and include the names of Ahuramazda (Hormuzd) and Mithras (Mihrug). A Syriac tradition harmonizes the numbers with the story that twelve Magi journeyed from further east to Urfa, but nine had to return home, so only three remained on to Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

The conventional three names, Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar[†]Illustration. The three are named on the picture below, beneath the heading Persian Magi, were late inventions, but the names imply three nations or races of people—Semites in the word Melchior (King), Aryans (Persians) in the name Caspar, and Chaldaeans in the name Balthazar (Belshazzar)—all being inhabitants of the Persian empire. Indeed, the Syriac names are—Larvandad, Gushnasaph, and Hormisdas, also sounding Persian, or perhaps Indian in the case of Gushnasaph, perhaps the original of Caspar, and Hormisdas again standing out as the very name of the Persian high god—Ahuramazda, one literal reading of which would be “Lord Magus”.

Another ancient tradition that probably stems from Zurvanism[†]Zurvan was a Persian god of time. Gods of time usually are a type of sun god because the motions of the sun over the year measure time. in Persian religion, has it that the Magi did not see a child before them but each saw one of the three ages of man, a youth, a mature man and an old man, like the symbolism of the goddess as virgin, matron and crone in the phases of the moon. Three ages supports the idea that three was original number of Magi in the myth, and the old mosaic of the three Magi shown below pictures the three Wise Men themselves in this way, as a youth (beardless), a mature man (dark beard), and an old man (white beard).

Elsewhere the Syriac document hints at a host of Magi, implying that a whole army or tribe of magi were involved, after all, they were in reality a whole caste of people, the Persian priestly class. It explains that the Magi are the main line of descent from Adam, the same sort of explanation that justifies the status of Jewish priests as descendents of Aaron, the brother of Moses.

In fact, The Revelation of the Magi is a pseudepigraph—it refers to biblical events written after Christ had been crucified. So it must have been written after New Testament books had been published, a lifetime after the date of the Magi’s visit. At the end, it even introduces the apostle, Thomas the Twin, legendary missionary to the East, in a section written in the third person, and at last mentioning Christ, evidently a Christian addition. The whole of the first person singular portion looks rather like a loose reworking of a Persian story.

Though the extant plot source is Matthew, the theological style and vocabulary is closer to that of John, the gospel thought to be closest in terminology to the Qumran Essene scrolls, particularly in the use of the metaphor of light as God and salvation. The Magi undertake a monthly ritual for which they purify themselves for six days, then begin to pray on the first day of each month, praying for two days, whereupon they are ready to enter the Cave of the Treasures of Hidden Mysteries. Persian Magi had to be ritually pure, and Essenes had six day purification ceremonies. They were also fond of “hidden things” and mysteries.

The Magi’ Story

The Revelation of the Magi says the home of the Magi was not Persia, as, pace Landau, all the allusions imply, and early Christians generally believed, but a land called Shir that produced silk, identified by a great wall, so apparently was China, the farmost eastern kingdom in the imaginable world. In fact, access to China was for centuries by way of Persia and the silk road, so stories about the origin of silk and the Great wall of China came from Persia. Moreover, Shir could also be one of the western terminations of the Silk Road.

To digress marginally, but to some purpose, Shir is a word common in Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan—all places once inhabited by Iranians, and mostly once part of Persia—even Syria! It is an Iranian word meaning “lion”, not a Chinese word. Part of Khorasan, in the northeast of Iran and on the Silk Road, is called Shir, and there are several towns around there, close to the Silk Road, with names like Shirabad, Shirwan, Sera, and so on. Iranians consider it a holy land. The Shir-Kuh mountains are in central Iran. Indeed, Shiraz is a town in Fars itself quite close to where Persepolis once stood.

Out of interest, here is a picture of the Iranian national emblem, once part of the Iranian flag, but not now acceptable to the fanatical religionists of the aniconic Moslem faith. It is a Persian lion sun, a sun rising over the back of a lion:

For comparison, perhaps with some relevance, here is a sun lion from an old Moslem(!) madrasa in Samarkand, the great oasis on the Silk Road, showing a Chinese or Mongolian looking sun apparently riding, not a lion—they do not live in the north and east of Asia—but a tiger! However the tiger has a mane, suggesting that the artist understood tigers and so depicted one, but with a mane! It suggests a considerable cultural overlap between Persia and China along the Silk Road, which possibly confused writers in the west.

As for the reference to a Great Wall showing the place of origin of the Magi was China, a more likely candidate is the Great Wall of Gorgan or Dam of Alexander, also called the Red Snake because it is entirely made of red bricks. It was built in ancient Hyrcania by the Caspian Sea in northeastern Iran to stop the maurauding of nomadic horsemen from the northern steppes into Parthia and Persia—the same bandits and rustlers hated by Zoroaster as agents of Ahriman and, therefore, the epitome of disorder. At 195 km long, only the Great Wall of China is longer, but the Chinese Wall originally consisted of earthworks, and much of it still is—bricks not being used until the fifteenth century Ming dynasty. The Persian Wall was initially of a much higher quality, and therefore more notable.

Alexander the Great passed this way to subdue the east of the Persian empire, but despite its name, he did not build it. Some think the Parthians built it, but radiocarbon dating puts it in the sixth century AD, when Khosrau I, named Anushirvan, was Shah (531-579 AD). This is much more likely to be the Great Wall mentioned in the The Revelation of the Magi than the Chinese Wall and yields its terminus post quem. In short, it must have been written later.

The first person narrative claimed a prophecy of the eastern land had passed down for millennia foreseeing the birth of a god in a human form heralded by the reappearance of the star that had illuminated the tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. It had disappeared when Adam sinned, but would reappear when the world was about to be cleansed of sin. The Magi recognize the unusual star when they see it, for it did not pretend to be a natural phenomenon in any way, but descended to the Magi praying in the Cave of Treasures, whence are kept the ancient prophecies, revealing itself as “a small and humble human being”, yet not specifically an infant.

Landau says the Syriac text is unequivocal—the star is Jesus Christ himself, even though he observes explictly that the Magi in their first person plural tale do not refer to the savior by any familiar Christian name, but only indirectly! He must mean that the text speaks in terms of a savior, but not explicitly Christ.

There is a distinct biblical precedent for the Jewish messiah being a star that Christians habitually ignore because it destroys the notion that the Star of Bethlehem was ever a natural phenomenon. It is the Star Prophecy of Numbers:

There shall come a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth.

From several Qumran sources, one of their names for the messiah was “The Star”, and the Jewish rebel leader in the uprising against Rome in 132 AD, was given the messianic title, Bar Kokhba, Aramaic for “Son of the Star”. His critics, including early Christians for whom Jesus Christ was the messiah, changed the title to the pun, Bar Kosiba, “Son of Falsehood”.

So the basis of the Revelation of the Magi is distinctly different from that believed by early Christians. “The Star” is a metaphor for the messiah, or more ecumenically, the savior. It acts consciously, taking the Magi the immense journey to Bethlehem, painlessly and timelessly by miraculously levelling mountains and valleys, the very thing that happens to the world in Zoroastrian myth as part of its being restored to perfection.

In Bethlehem, the Star enters a cave, and becomes human again. Landau says this is the only early Christian text that explicitly identifies the Star of Bethlehem with Jesus Christ, though we noted he had already said that the savior is not identified by any Christian name or title. Dr Lisa Hess makes the same point in a critical review:

Landau praises the absence of Christ language in the majority of the Revelation of the Magi, suggesting that this absence makes the text a plausible document for religious pluralism conversations. Yet throughout his translation of the document, he adds titles into the translation with “Christ” as the focal point… At best, the text is confusing, at worst, a hidden colonial or imperialist presumption requiring the infinite diversity of the sacred to fall under Christianizing images—even idolatries—that come with the word Christ.

Rev Dr Lisa M Hess

The savior expected to return in the Persian religion was Zoroaster himself, or one of his sons. Zoroaster might have been named in the version of the story used as an original source in Matthew, but the reference was diluted in the canonical Matthew. In the present version, the Magi say (Mt 2.5) that the christ they are seeking will be born “in Bethlehem of Judaea, for thus it is written by the prophet”. Who is this prophet? The “prophet” of the Magi is Zoroaster, whose name is retained in another gospel. An Evangelium Infantiae (Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti edited by Ioannes Carolus Tbilo, Lipsiae, 1832), an “apocryphal gospel” excluded from their canon by the Fathers of the Church, says:

Magi came from the East to Jerusalem in conformity with the prophecy of Zoroaster, and they had with them gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and they worshipped him [Jesus].

The intention, of course, was to represent Jesus as the Savior (Saoshyant) whom Zoroaster expected to be his eventual successor. The christian form of the prophecy is preserved in the writings of Salomon, Bishop of Basra, and Theodore bar Konai:

Zoroaster said to his favorite disciples, “At the end of time and at the final dissolution, a child shall be conceived in the womb of a virgin… They will take him and crucify him upon a tree, and heaven and earth shall sit in mourning for his sake… He will come [again] with the armies of light, and be borne aloft on white clouds… He shall descend from my family, for I am he and he is I. He is in me and I am in him.”

The prophecy thus put into the mouth of Zoroaster originally referred to his son, to be born of a virgin in a miraculous way, which could not be fitted to a story that placed the birth in Judaea. Note also that the curious language here of “he” and “I”, which in Christianity becomes God the Father and God the Son, identifying the two, is actually the older and younger Zoroaster—Zoroaster is a reincarnating prophet.

Persian?

Though there are many Persian connexions, as the above remarks show, Landau dismisses the idea that the story has its roots in Iran, citing the manuscript’s own explanation that the Magi are not Persian priests, but ones who pray in silence—the Syriac authors describe the meaning of Magi as being “silent prayer”, but they do not specify what language it comes from. Yet, there is no doubt at all that the word “Magi” means Persian holy men, one of whose duties was to pray for others, notably whoever employed them to do it. Many Magi were in effect family priests, paid a stipend to keep the employer’s family practising the thoughts, words and deeds that God favored. The emphasis, though, is on the silence of the praying. Landau cites the reliable Zoroastrian scholars, Boyce and Grenet:

Zoroastrian priests never in fact pray silently. They have a form of nasal recitation, with closed lips, which they use respectfully for brief MP or colloquial utterances made between Av prayers, which are themselves said aloud…; but this unobtrusive usage is not silent nor is it likely to have been noticed by outsiders.

M Boyce and F Grenet

One has to take issue with noted scholars here. This seems to be an observation from Zoroastrian current practice, not one about Zoroastrianism over 2000 years ago. Boyce would be the first to accept that so much has been lost regarding the scriptures and practices of Zoroastrianism that one is surprised to read the word “never” used of any of their practices. It seems all the sillier when they go on immediately to describe “nasal repetition with closed lips”, apparently not used for prayers, yet used in the course of praying. Moreover, the point about it not being noticed by outsiders, while valid, is irrelevant here, because the source is meant to be by insiders, the Magi themselves, and if the thesis is true that the whole has come from a Magian original, somewhat amended by entropy over time, and deliberately when felt necessary by Christian redacters, the denial is incredible.

The reason the Magi were considered sorcerers and quacks is that the Macedonians destroyed their source of income and, as professional priests used to putting on a show, they were thrown on to their own resources. Some no doubt eventually went into other professions, some became conjurers and quacks, and others tried to spread types of Persian theology legitimately as wandering holy men, helping to create Gnosis and Christianity. The orthodox believers in established religions would call them devils and wizards, just as Christianity later did to Pagan priests and believers. They might have been obliged by persecution to extend their use of nasal closed mouthed mutterings to hide their prayers from their enemies. It is speculation, but the infallible assertion that the Magi never prayed silently—especially after Persia fell—is just more absurd, especially when these scholars simultaneously say outsiders could not know what they did!

The savior the Persians were expecting was the Saoshyant a word most Christians would not have been familiar with, though the root of the word is cognate with “Hosannah”, “Save Us!”. The Persian savior is sometimes identified with Mithras as the face of God, the way in which God reveals himself to ordinary people. In Judaism, God reveals Himself as the Angel of the Lord, as Michael or Gabriel, and subsequently in Christianity, as Christ.

Other significant curiosities in the original manuscript, besides the fact that it does not speak of Christ, are:

• the Magi have some sort of food supplied by the light of the star, reminding us of the manna[†]Manna. Shir-Khesht Manna can, as a matter of fact, be collected in Persia, and it was available in New York, though the sanctions on Iran might have cut the supply. of the exodus story in the Jewish scriptures, but this providential food has psychodelic properties, giving those partaking of it heavenly visions!
• The holy spirit in this work is grammatically feminine, a practice in Syriac Christianity that died out in the fifth century, thus dating it.

Highly relevantly, the Magi used a psychedelic drug called haoma to give themselves spiritual sustenance. In short, the food here that sustained them does so in a spiritual sense, not a nutritional one. Why would the travellors need nutrition for a journey that is depicted as a spiritual one that takes scarcely any time at all? The same metaphor is used of the mass or holy communion, in which a wafer biscuit gives the eater spiritual sustenance. The same is also surely true of the feeding miracles in the gospels. They were the equivalent of the holy communion, with tiny fragments of bread serving the same purpose of the communion wafer. John Allegro has suggested that early Christianity also used some sort of visionary drug.

The Syriac text is rather unkind to women, indeed misogynistic. Christianity on the other hand prides itself on its generosity to women at a time when women were regarded rather badly. Historically, however, 2000 years have passed and women in Christendom have throughout been treated badly, with few exceptions, like the attitude of the Albigenses, and those were hated by mainstream Christianity. In fact, the Essenes, from which Christianity sprang, considered women badly in the sense that their nature was that of the temptress as typified by Eve. They wanted to be angels, thought they were angels in embryo as long as they remained righteous, and so wanted no temptresses around. Senior Essenes lived a monastic type of existence, though, like medieval monks, they were a minority. But it meant that the leadership had to be male.

This attitude did not mean that they disregarded women, and they were not so stupid as to deny their necessity in procreating the race. Ordinary Essenes, like ordinary lay Christians lived family lives, and some of the women seemed to have considerable responsibility. Some indeed, were monastic themselves, to judge by the closely related Therapeutae. The Essenes seemed to have preserved most carefully the precepts of the Persian colonists of Yehud—who were set up as a priesthood, a Jewish caste akin to the Magi—and defended the traditional religion against those aiming to modernize it, the Sadducees most overtly, and the Pharisees more subtly. A text reflecting the Essene origins of Christianity can be expected to contain a degree of misogyny, reflecting certain passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and this does, particularly in Adam’s speech to his son, Seth.

Shepherds, Magi and Mithras

The presence of shepherds bearing gifts, in the Luke version of the Epiphany is a device to make it equal to the birth of Mithras, the Persian savior, which was observed by shepherds. For long Mithras was the main rival to Christ in the Roman empire.

Rather than merely equalling the rival savior, the editor who inserted the birth narrative into Matthew took a more positive tack. Matthew aimed to show the superiority of Christianity over the older, more easterly religions—the divine baby Jesus has to be superior to the divine Mithras, whose priests had brought gifts to their new god. Magi were Persian priests, so it seems to most scholars that the legend was introduced to symbolize that Christ was superior to Mithras. The arrival of Magi from Persia with gifts for Jesus at his birth proved that even the priests of Mithras preferred the Christian God.

Luke’s shepherds were right there on the step of the holy stable at Jesus’s birth. In Matthew, the child has been born when the Magi reach Judaea and seeks Herod’s help in directing them. Indeed, the implication of Herod seeking to kill all boys in Bethlehem up to two years of age is that he might have been up to two years old when they arrived. The assumption is that it took the Magi two years of travelling time.

Persian Magi

The Magi among the Persians were their philosophers and their priests. They were skilled in medicine and natural science. They were prophets, although Christians prefer to use the word “soothsayers” to keep the biblical prophets unique. The religion of the Magi was that of Zoroaster and, like its daughter, Judaism, forbade sorcery.

From the so called “return”, the fortunes of the Jewish nation had been intertwined with the Persians, the temple state of Yehud having been set up by them. Both then fell to Alexander and later regained their independence, the Jews under Maccabean leadership, and the Persians within the Parthian Empire, effectively a restored Persian empire. But one man’s religion is another man’s wizardry, and vice versa, so that the wonders that the Magi practiced came to be considered sorcery by others who could not understand it. Also, after the fall of Darius to Alexander, the Magi of the West had to compromise and corrupt their skills to make a living.

Herodotus (Histories 1:101) says the Magi were a tribe of the Medes—an Aryan race related to the modern day Kurds—by which he will have meant a caste, a tribe here not denoted by occupation of land by a clan, but being an hereditary unit within society—a caste. They were plainly a caste of administrators and priests, like the Indian Brahmins. They were credited with profound and extraordinary knowledge. They were scholars, and dealt in curious arts such as celestial phenomena (7:37) as well as divining the meaning of dreams (1:107).

Cyrus completely conquered the sacred caste, and his son Cambyses severely repressed it. The Magians revolted and set up Gaumata, their chief, as King of Persia under the name of Smerdis. He was, however, murdered (521 BC), and Darius became king. This downfall of the Magi was celebrated by a national Persian holiday called “magophonia” (Herodotus, Histories, 3:79), when the Magi had to stay out of sight for several days to remind them of their erstwhile treachery. Still, Ctesias tells us in Persica that the religious influence of this priestly caste continued throughout the rule of the Achæmenian dynasty in Persia.

Strabo says that the Magian priests formed one of the two councils of the Parthian empire. The Magi, in a dual capacity, were vested with both civil and political, and with religious authority, and became the supreme priestly caste of the Persian empire, continuing to be prominent during the subsequent Seleucid, Parthian, and Sassanian periods. In Persia no sacrifice could be offered unless one of the Magi was present. They were men of holiness and wisdom. To the head of this caste, Nergal Sharezar, Jeremiah gives the title “Rab-Mag”, Chief Magus (Jer 39:3, 39:13). One of the titles of Daniel, in the pseudepigraph written about 164 BC, was Rab-Mag. William Barclay in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, points out, without realizing the significance of his words, that the Magi were in Persia almost exactly what the Levites were in Israel.

In their dual priestly and governmental office, they composed the upper house of the Council of the Megistanes (whence our word “magistrate”) whose duties included choosing and appointing the king. Cicero in On Divination (1:19) says Persian kings had to be first enrolled among the Magi, who were their teachers and instructors, and so the king was technically chosen from among the Magi. Suetonius says Tiridates, King of Armenia, visited Nero at Rome with his Magi accompanying him. Seneca says Magi were in Athens sacrificing to the memory of Plato. If these were the “wise men” of Matthew, then they were not kings but makers of kings!

In later times the word Magus developed a much lower meaning, and came to mean little more than a fortune teller, a sorcerer, a magician, and a charlatan. In this way Christians from the outset denigrated Elymas, the sorcerer (Acts 13:6,8), and Simon Magus (Acts 8:9,11), while telling us they were actual contemporary Magi.

Jesus as Zurvan

Pahlavi books speak of the “coming of the four”, apparently meaning the four Saoshyants, saviors, Zoroaster being the first, and the others being successive sons. Some Sassanian gems and seals, and Pahlavi texts speak of “saved by the Three”, “saved by the Four” and “saved by the Seven”. Who these are is not known, but Zurvan was described as having four appearances, Zurvan the original or whole one and three aspects, rather like the Christian God being the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Here could be the Three, as the three aspects, and the Four as the three aspects and the whole being.

Perhaps the sets of four are connected, as the four quarters of the year, the four seasons and the four sectors of the zodiac, but the Saoshyants were a distinct four saviors. The Seven has often been considered the seven planets with no more justification than that there were seven of them, but the planets were most typically seven wicked aspects of Ahriman, so are unlikely agents of salvation. Ahuramazda was a Seven in that he had six aspects and the central one, essentially himself as the Holiest Spirit, the equivalent of the Christian Holy Ghost, and as Persian religion was dualist, it seems feasible that both Ahuramazda and Ahriman had seven aspects, one set good and one bad.

An aspect of the myth of Jesus not known by Christians but important in the cross cultural links with Iranian religion is revealed in the full eastern myth of the Magi. Marco Polo heard the story on his trip to China when he was in Iran. The story was that the Magi arrived at the stable in Bethlehem and were admitted one at a time. Later they spoke to each other about their experience. They had not found an infant! One had met a young man, one a mature man, and one an old man. Since the time of Marco Polo, this myth has been found widely but with slight variations:

1. In the Armenian Gospel of the Infancy, Jesus appears to the three Magi in different forms, as an infant, a prince and as Christ resurrected. Elsewhere in the same book, Christ miraculously changes himself into a child, and adult and an old man before resuming his usual form.
2. Photius says he did the same before his miracles.
3. In Acts of Peter, Jesus appears to an old woman as a child, a youth and an old man.
4. In Acts of John, Jesus appears as a handsome man, a bald old man, and, to James, as a child and a youth, four stages.
5. In the Martyrdom of Peter, Simon Magus did the same trick.
6. In the Apocryphon of John, Jesus appears to John as a child and an old man as well as his usual form.
7. In the Library of the Patriarchate in Jerusalem is an eleventh century illustrated MS (MS14 f106v) showing three Magi of different ages who saw Jesus respectively in the text, an homily of John of Euboea, as a child, a man of thirty and an old man, presumably according to their own ages.
8. An illustrated gospel, also eleventh century, in the Bibliotheque Nationale (MS gr74 f167) shows Jesus in three forms, as a youth, as an adult and as an old man, with the names respectively Emmanuel, Christ and Palaios ton Hemeron. The text is an homily of John of Damascus, and explains that Jesus appeared as a three year old to the Magus who offered gold, as a thirty year old to the Magus who offered frankincense, and as an old man with white hair to the Magus who offered myrrh.

L Olschki noted that this three or fourfold appearance matched the three or fourfold appearance of the Iranian god of time, Zurvan. Here was a possible source of the notion of the Trinity. The Ishmailis also thought their imam combined the three ages in his person. J Duchesne-Guillemin thought the trimorphic depiction of Jesus was a reflection of the Hellenistic cult of Aion, the god of time, rather than Zurvan, although he concedes that Zurvan might have influenced Aion—probably was Aion!

H Puech in 1967 agreed that the trimorphic depiction was an assimilation of Jesus to Aion, who in turn was a copy of Zurvan Akarana. The three forms stood for the past the present and the future, as old man, mature man, and youth or child, respectively, and these three stages constituted the whole, as the whole of time and the whole of a life, the whole sometimes being itself represented separately, or as Jesus as he is.

The birthday of the God, Aion, was celebrated on 6 January, which was also considered the birthday of Christ, and the day when the visit by the Magi was celebrated originally in the east. It was, of course, the old New Year’s day, and the end of the twelve days of the New Year celebration, which became the twelve days of Christmas in Christendom. Inasmuch as Aion or Zurvan represented the sun in its annual journey, the first day of the year was its birthday. Later, Roman Christians decided to assimilate the birth date of Christ to that of Mithras who was popular in Rome as the unconquered sun, whose birthday was 25 December, the beginning of the extended New Year celebration.

Now, Mithras was not born as an infant but as a youth called Saxigenus, or Petrogenes because he was “born of a rock”. The real origin of this is probably Iranian, for the nomadic Aryan tribes generated fire, among other ways, from rocks by striking sparks from flints and considered fire an earthly manifestation of the sun. Later the rock was considered a microcosm, a miniature cosmos. The Roman Mithras was worshiped inside the rock from which he sprang, in grottos, or caves, and the Magi in The Revelation of the Magi worshipped in the cave of Treasures!

The ceiling of the rock was decorated with the heavens, for the cosmos, to the gods, was the inside of a giant rock, and they saw it from the outside. It was the cosmic egg. So Mithras was a youth inside the cosmic egg, and as the inside of a cosmic egg was represented as a cave, Christ was also represented as being born in a grotto, the stable often being assumed to have been a cave. Mithraists considered the solar year to begin with the birth of Mithras, the sun, and the young son was an infant, in Egypt, for example, where Horus was born on 25 December, and was shown as an infant in his mother, Isis’s arms.

The Persians and the Babylonians transferred the idea of the cyclical year to a cyclical great year, possibly because they had, through their centuries of careful astronomy, discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and seem to have estimated it as lasting 23,000 years, not a bad guess. Four seasons of this great year lasted 6000 years each, and one of them manifested itself as the time experienced by people, the lifetime of the world.

At any rate, this became the Jewish belief. With it went the idea of periodic renewal in the return of a Golden Age, a solar king and an infant savior, all beliefs that got to Rome and were used by Virgil in his Fourth Eclogue, at the start of the empire under Augustus. Augustus was depicted as the infant savior, who would become the solar king of a new Golden Age. All of this preceded Christ’s crucifixion by over half a century.

The god, Aion, was the god of the year and therefore a type of sun god, but more particularly standing for time, and, by extension, the whole of time, effectively the great year. So, like the sun god, Aion was born as an infant, but on 6 January, and was most often represented as a child by Heraclitus and Euripides. These early Greeks most probably had their blueprint for Aion from Zurvan in Iran. Other, later, descriptions of him are as an adult and as an old man. The three ages of man go back to the Greeks of the same period, and was familiar by the time of Aristotle.

An ancient Mosaic at Antioch, described by D Levi, has Aion on a dais with three men sitting at a table before him, representing past, with a white beard, present with a black beard, and future with no beard. A much more ancient bronze plaque from Luristan, in Iran, dated to the eighth century BC and described by Ghirshman, has a figure before a congregation consisting of children, adults and old men. Ghirshman identified the figure as Zurvan for he had two faces and wings, and looked upon a manifestly aging audience. The two faces customarily look forward in time and back in time, like Janus.

The Antioch mosaic is significant because Antioch was a focus of the spread of Christianity, and, judging from its style and features, it dates from the fourth century, when Constantine made Christianity respectable. So, as a popular theme at Antioch when Christianity emerged, it offers a point of contact.

In old pictures of the Magi, they are given Phrygian caps like Mithras—considered as typical eastern head gear just as we now think a turban is—to denote, not that they were Phrygians but that they were Persians, no doubt because the Phrygians were the first peoples of the Persian empire next to Greece, especially the mainland Greeks. Phrygia was in Anatolia and was heavily colonized by Persians, doubtless because it was comfortably like their native land, being a high plateau. It was a source of Magian lore and magical cults long after Alexander had made it Greek.

In the version of the myth of the wise men in which the number of them is like the apostles, they were regarded as the apostles of the east. A reason for the number three in Matthew would be that the author saw Christ as the Aion, and so trimorphic. Then the three Magi will have been meant to correspond with the three ages represented in Christ—youth maturity and senescence, not merely of man but of the whole of creation.

We have noted that these were the three ages represented by the Goddess, maiden, mother and crone, and that the Holy Ghost in the middle Syriac period of this script is feminine. In many ways, Christ, in his gentleness has female characteristics, and has replaced the original Goddess. The Holy Ghost ought to have been God the Mother, but Christianity having lost the Goddess all together, her characteristics were given to the son.

Universalism

Landau reads an ecumenical message into the appearance of the savior as a star. The Magi are not mere bearers of extravagant gifts, but are commissioned rather like the twelve apostles in the gospels to spread the word back to their own people, and towards the end the appearance of the apostle Thomas reminds them of the task. Thus we read the savior:

• was to fulfil everything that was spoken about me in the entire world and in every land
• has worshipers in every country
• has been sent by his majesty for the salvation and redemption of every human being.

If the savior appears to Chinese sages to instruct them to proselytize back home, then he can appear to anyone anywhere, and did—if he appeared to Chinese, he could appear to Indians as Buddha, and to Moslems as Mohammed. Aiming to do nothing but good in appearing as savior to this people and that, God simply causes confusion in a sort of second Tower of Babel, but the fault lies with us for not recognizing that the savior is trying to save us all with the same message—we confuse it by our stubbornly exclusive interpretations. We are meant to seek inclusive interpretations, but too many refuse.

Now, this is quite interesting in itself, though it puts a too modern an interpretation on an ancient Christian work. In these pages, we have suggested that the Axial Age, when great new ideas seemed to crystallize, was nucleated by one great event—the emergence of Persia and Zoroastrianism as prime stimuli to new thinking in all the lands they touched, China via their control of the Silk Road, India as their immediate neighbours to the east, Judaea, their temple colony in Abarnahara, and Greece by their occupation of the dynamic Asian Greek colonies to the east of the Aegean Sea, and their employment of them in every field. The trading and diplomatic power of Persia was vital of course, but their incredibly original Zoroastrian religion, one with a strong universalist and missionizing spirit, triggered movements in all these lands.

The Persian word, Zarathrustra, is translated by scholars as having the mundane if not profane meaning of “many camels”, though the way the Greeks saw it was as something to do with a star (aster, astron), and if they recognized “zoro” as a Chaldaean word, they would be understanding “zoroaster” as something like a “mysterious star”, the “seed of a star” or the “son of a star”, the very title of the second century rival to Jesus! Indeed Zoroaster himself was supposed to be reincarnated several times to herald the end of the wicked world, so the whole Christian myth was a midrash on the Zoroastrian ones.

Obviously the outcome was not simply Chinese, Indian and Greek Zoroastrianism, if only because not all of the vast Zoroastrian enterprise could not have been bodily transferred, and the recipients would not have found it to their various tastes and traditions, but it stimulated whole new ways of thinking, creating Taoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism in India, Greek philosophy based on such concepts as the four elements, and Judaism as a manufactured religion based in Jerusalem for the non-Zoroastrian people of the Persian empire itself, and Christianity.

What Landau seems to be seeing in this text is a recognition of just what Zoroastrianism had achieved. The Revelation of the Magi is indeed a revelation of the Magi, not a revelation of the Christ. It is strong evidence for the thesis just expounded, that the Achaemenid empire altered the world by its adoption of the new Zoroastrian way of thinking. Its very success in the west has militated against its recognition, because so much of Judaism and Christianity are Zoroastrian, and the original Zoroastrian records have been destroyed so thoroughly at the hands of the Greeks, Jews and Christians determined to owe nothing to Persia, that few people have been able to see what is obvious. Only one world power could have brought about the Axial Age—Persia.

Conclusion

Landau is not blind to the Zoroastrian implications of this text because he mentions it with citations in his review of previous relevant literature. Specifically, he mentions E Kuhn (1893), W Bousset (1907), R Reitzenstein (1929), G Messina (1933), and undated articles by E Herzfeld, U Monneret de Villard, and F Bidez and F Cumont. He also mentions the Swedish scholar G Widengren, who, in books about Iranian religions (1965, 1968), considers the work to be loosely Christianized from an Iranian myth that a star would signal the birth of the Saoshyant, a savior figure descended from Zarathustra. Nevertheless, Landau can write:

There are no blatantly obvious Iranian features in the text other than the list of the Magi’s names in 2:3, and even this appears to be an interpolation

Many such features have been listed above as being either plainly Iranian in origin or pertaining to strongly Iranianized sources like the Essenes. Rather than objectively assessing the evidence before his eyes, the author prefers to accept the internal explanations of the document, a painfully sad tendency among Christian and Jewish scholars used to dogged adherence to any biblical text’s own accounts of themselves even though they glaringly contradict well established history or science.

The text does not claim the Magi to be Zoroastrian priests, to reside in Persia, or anything else that would distinctly mark its provenance as Iranian.

Is this a scholar? Did he collect a PhD for such reasoning? His devotion to Syriac translation is unquestionable, but beyond that his judgement is distorted by his Christian beliefs. To anyone with a broader perspective on the ANE, his own description of the contents of the document almost continually yells out “Persian”! It illustrates the extreme difficulty Christians have in being objective. They would rather be manifest liars than to compromise their faith with something called evidence. We simply cannot trust them. They want to be liars for God.

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