Christianity
Superstition, Hellenistic Magic and Jesus
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, December 20, 2001
Superstition
Words like magic, sorcery, and superstition we usually distinguish today clearly from words like religion or piety. The distinction might, though, be simply prejudice and unexamined assumption.
Jesus tells his followers that they can only get to heaven by being children (Mt 18:3-4). Though this sounds like a request for childlike innocence, its side effects are not. Innocence presumes credulity allowing the early Christians to be savagely exploited. Even the Jesuit, Herbert Thurston recognized this in his monograph, Superstition. He thought no Christians could give an unqualified denial of this, his point being that credulity led on to superstition.
Thurston notes that superstition is a perversion and a deviation from true religions, a view that pious Romans like Cicero held. The same Romans commonly called Christianity a superstition. Christians are never allowed to consider that the Romans might have been right and Christianity wrong because most of them are told as children that Christianity is right, and thereafter it is imprinted on their brains so firmly that they cannot escape from it, however clever they are. Such is innocence, or credulity, as the case may be.
Thomas Aquinas thought superstition deviated from true religion because it was either directed at the wrong thing or at the right thing in the wrong manner. By the thirteenth century, Christianity had forcefully been established as the right thing though it is hard to understand what sure criteria had undermined the earlier view of pious Romans. Father Thurston is honest about this, and admits that superstition is relative, depending on preconceived religious convictions. To introduce into the definition an element of irrationality, most people today holding that there is an irrational element in superstition, does not really let accepted religions off the hook, as it is intended to do. All “belief” is irrational when it is not based on anything objective, so touching wood for good luck is no more irrational and a lot less trouble than attending mass every day and three times on Sunday, in the hopes of attracting the grace of God.
Ultimately superstition is simply a deviation from accepted norms, rational or otherwise. Until the scientific method was developed, norms tended to be arbitrary, and, in fields considered outside the realms of science like religion, they still are. Modern Christians will not accept that they are superstitious because Christianity is an accepted norm of our society, but it is still an arbitrary one, and many of the aspects of Christianity are pure superstition, albeit, these days cloaked in respectability. It was not always so, and the original involvement of Christianity with the superstitions of Hellenistic times is hidden, like most Christian history, from the faithful.
Hellenistic Superstitions
So it is that John Martin Hull, in Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition states “a relationship between magic and the early Christian tradition has never been fully explored”, implying that there might have been such a relationship and it has been studiously avoided.
Magic and religion are so similar, Graeco-Roman writers could not agree on the difference between them, but did use the words to refer to different things. Most surviving descriptions of magic in the ancient world were written by aristocrats and disapproving onlookers, who show their disdain for it. But magic was not exclusively characteristic of the lower classes, though it largely was, and many of the upper classes came to accept it too, especially as it grew more popular toward the fourth century. Mary Douglas suggested that magic is directed toward specific goals, and works by coercion, while religion is directed toward general goals, and works by petition.
Christian missionaries meet supposed magicians in Acts, and the Christians recruited among the ignorant masses who were impressed above all by magic in the early centuries of our era. In the magical papyri edited by Preisendanz, the authors are not ashamed to be magicians. Under the Roman republic, belief in magic was already getting so obsessive, that severe laws against it were introduced, but the strength of superstitions grew during with the introduction of the imperial regime, and it had already begun much earlier in Greece.
Theophrastus, Aristotle’s younger colleague and his successor as head of the Lyceum, about 300 BC, described superstitious men who carried a ceremonial oil flask with them to allow them ritual anointings when they thought they had offended a god or spirit:
The superstitious man is one who will wash his hands at a fountain, sprinkle himself from a temple font, put a bit of laurel leaf into his mouth, and so go about the day. If a weasel run across his path, he will not pursue his walk until someone has traversed the road, or until he has thrown some stones across it. He will pour oil from his flask on the smooth stones at the cross roads as he goes by, and will fall on his knees and worship them before he departs. If a mouse gnaws through his slipper, he will go to the expounder of the sacred law and ask what is to be done. And if the answer is “Give it to the cobbler to be stitched”, he will disregard the counsel, and go his way to expiate the omen by sacrifice.
Cicero spoke of a man who thought it portentous that he had found a snake coiled round the bolt of his door. The skeptic replied that it would have been much more portentous if the bolt had coiled round the snake! Plutarch says that superstition is a craven fear of god, and comments:
Better not believe in a deity at all than cringe before gods who are worse than the worst of men.
Chrysostom, some centuries later, also commented on the superstitious nature of the Greeks who would not put on their left shoe before their right and would not step out of the house left foot first. Such commonplace things as an ass’s bray, a cock crow or a sneeze were all considered unlucky.
These crazy people… trouble at every sound, and are more abject in their misery than a marketful of slaves.
Yet Christianity grew up in the middle of all this mania for superstition and depended on it. In the first gospel written, Mark feels it necessary to refute an allegation that Jesus was a magician getting his power from Beelzebub. The Jewish Encyclopaedia (sub voce “Jesus”) implies Jesus was a magician, and the Talmud says he was executed as a sorcerer. Joseph Klausner, in Jesus of Nazareth, and others think that the objections that were said to have been raised against Jesus curing on the sabbath were really objections to his use of magic. Again, in Mark, Jesus is shown as feeling the loss of his magical power (“dynamis”) when a sick woman touches the hem of his robe. Many of the Gnostic Christian sects treated Jesus as a magician.
Information on Hellenistic Magic
The writings of Lucian were the main literary source of information on classical magic until the Greek magic papyri were discovered. The magic papyri is the best starting point to see how the Hellenistic world defined magic. The magical papyri should not be judged by their name, which is a modern one, based on a Christian religious point of view. Christian presuppositions have created difficulties of perception and interpretation. Although the documents do contain magic, the word itself appears infrequently, and then often proudly. The magical papyri express a religious viewpoint.
They use the term “magic”, and the practitioners call themselves “magicians”. A D Nock in 1929 thought of the papyri as being Graeco-Egyptian. Egypt was proverbially the land of sorcery, of witchcraft and of magic. The Talmud says, “Ten measures of sorcery descended into the world; Egypt received nine, the rest of the world one”. Critics of Jesus said he had learned magic and sorcery which made him able to work miracles, and to deceive men in Egypt. When the Pagan philosopher, Celsus, directed his attack against Christianity in the second century, he said that Jesus was brought up as an illegitimate child, that he served for hire in Egypt, that he came to the knowledge of “certain miraculous powers, and returned to his own country and used these powers to proclaim himself God” A rabbi, Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, said that Jesus had magical formulæ tattooed upon his body so that he would not forget them.
Much of this magical tradition derived from Egyptian religion, with an overlay of Persian features and syncretistic modifications from Hellenistic society but otherwise was similar to magic in classical Greece. But, though the religious and magical hymns and rituals were taken from a variety of different sources, they were interpreted in a new, imaginative, and coherent way, based on an informing mythology.
Many of the papyri, having been bought by prestigious museums, like the British Museum, were left to deteriorate in drawers in cellars. One, purchased in 1857, was not published until 1931, when most of the discoveries of magic papyri up to 1930 were published by Karl Preisendanz. Over 150 had been published by the last quarter of the twentieth century, though an unkown but “considerable” number of fragments remained unpublished in various collections.
The greatest volume of magical papyri are from about the time when Christianity became established in the third to fourth centuries, but the New Testament is first to second centuries. The content of the later papyri was not newly composed, and much of it was ancient, but similarities between whatever is found in the fourth century, and what is first century, cannot be taken to prove that the first century work was influenced by the now missing original of the fourth century texts. Even if the probability is high, Christians will reject it! Christians in the third and fourth centuries were already using verses from the gospels in amulets and spells. Yet lines from Homer (800 BC), regarded by Greeks as sacred, were used in a magical papyrus from the third century AD.
In one case elements of a magical ceremony described in Egypt of the nineteenth century AD were identified in a magical papyrus from Hellenistic times. It was a divination involving a small boy aged seven or eight made to scry a pool of black ink, illuminated by a flame, a technique described by Apuleius and before him, he tells us, by Varro. Many of the payri show that they are copies, and even copies of copies in that they contain alternative readings and even references to earlier versions.
The Great Paris papyrus is from the time of Constantine, but has few Christian allusions, though it has Pagan ones, suggesting it is mainly pre-Christian, but allusions to Neoplatonism dates it to about 200 AD. Similarities with the Chaldaean Logia date it to about that time, as does the Mithraist hymn, suggesting a time when Mithras was popular. The consensus is that Graeco-Egyptian magic was fully developed by 150 AD at the latest, and might have been by the birth of Christ.
Another source of magic formulæ are the “tabellæ defixionum”, usually thin sheets of lead, though other materials of all kinds are found, inscribed with a curse invoked through a god and nailed into place, often at a place of execution or a grave. Many have been discovered in excavations of Greek and Roman sites all across Europe. They are usually directed at thieves, unfaithful spouses or lovers, and business rivals. These tabellæ go back to the fifth century BC, and are very common in the Hellenistic period, whereas the magical papyri are nearly all in the period from the time of Christ to about the sixth century AD. The peak of magical activity judging from the popularity of the curses was in the third and fourth centuries AD, thus coming to a peak just as Christianity was made the state religion of Rome.
Early classic examples call upon chthonic deities like Hades, Kore, Hecate and Hermes but, later, oriental names were called upon including Ereshkigal, Serapis, Nephthys, El and Iao (Yehouah)! It was the frequency that Iao occurred in papyri that first attracted the attention of Semitic phlilologists.
Amulets are another source of magical formulæ, and the name Abraxis is popular on them, according to Irenæus, the name of the Basilidian ruler of the 365 heavens. C W King studies them and concluded that the so-called Gnostic stones were originally pre-Gnostic and had been adopted by Gnosticism because the Gnostics were keen on pre-existent magic. If so, Gnosticism influenced magic less than it was influenced by magic.
Metal rings were also popular in magic. The ancient Aryan gods sealed a covenant with earthly monarchs with a proffered ring or coronet, and the rings exchanged at the marriage ceremony is used in the same magical way of sealing a contract.
E R Goodenough noted that only one god is worshipped, other deities being reduced to the level of angels and demons. He thought it reflected a sectarian Judaism, and might have done indeed, if the Essenes were meant. But it could have simply been the Zoroastrian stamp. The Mithrasliturgie is the part of the Great Paris Magical Papyrus covering lines 475-723, considered by Albrecht Dieterich to have been an initiation hymn of the cult of Mithras.
E Peterson in 1948 analyzed several of the texts, and found a celebrant who longed to escape from Fate to return to the spiritual state from which he has fallen by mystically identifying himself with the primal man. In the Mithras Liturgy, the celebrant refers to himself as the first man, having a perfect body and rising to the right hand of God, and addressing himself to an intermediary divinity who himself has been exalted through the heavens. This is obviously Zoroastrian not Jewish, though by this time, a Jewish overlay might have been put on it.
Such texts presuppose a myth of an ascending and descending redeemer, the vice-regent of God, whose function is to grant absolution from the bonds of Fate. One purpose of the texts appears to be to assist the adept to gain immortality by appeasing the various tutelary divinites, rising in a an ecstatic heavenly journey through the heavens, and restoring his soul. In short, the papyri contain a kind of religiosity which we have been calling the gnostic salvation myth. The payri are nominally magical, yet which is religious in character.
All this suggests that in the Hellenistic world, the definition of magic was not firmly fixed. Sometimes magic and religion could be viewed as antagonistic, while at other times magic could be viewed as a kind of religion. When an accusation of magic is made, it is obvious that the accuser is distinguishing between magic and legitimate forms of religion, but it is not obvious that the accuser would say that magic is not religion at all, only that it was aggressive or primitive. The defendant in such an accusation would have different views.
Christians accused magicians of worshipping demons, while religion was worship of God. Since both were invisible, it was hard to tell which was at work. Daimones were simply the Pagan gods, accepted even by Pagans like Celsus as being agents of the High God. In the context of Jewish or Christian orthodoxy, worship of demons was considered evil, by others it was simply inferior worship, akin to Catholics praying to saints as intermediaries with God. Magic was a social classifier, with no universal definition.
It is in this context that we should put the disputes about Jesus in Mark 2 and 3, Acts 10, John 7. No clear criteria separate Jesus’s works from magic, and the ambiguity of his actions are subject to different interpretation by different social and political perspectives. Under what conditions would accusations of magic be levied. Perhaps, against those who are viewed as threatening the social order!
The celebrants of the rites described in PGM conceived the world as a cosmology of two tiers, the first that of the lesser spirits and the second that of the supreme being, like the Aladura cult studied in Africa by Robin Horton. The former is involved in the microcosm of the local community; the latter in the macrocosm of the world as a whole. For small things, in the microcosm, the demons would do, but for the meaning of processes in the macrocosm, a greater kind of deity was needed. A rich plethora of spirits and techniques sufficed for the everyday affairs of the local community. Most of the rites in the PGM are important to the local community, but as individuals find themselves in the larger world of the empire, they begin to evolve a higher moral code and spirituality for the governance of the wider life.
The theme of the heavenly journey of the soul seemed fundamental in late Hellenistic religion. The religious experience of the magical papyri is dependent on such a myth in two ways:
- there is a variety of stories about ascent and descent motifs
- an ecstatic trance is involved.
Such an ecstatic journey is, among other things, the anticipation of the heavenly journey of the soul after death, and the angel or divine hypostasis which descends and ascends is often an explicit psychopomp. Even when it is not so, the journey of the intermediary creature becomes the pattern or guarantor of the immortality of the believer. Alan Segal declares that besides being found in Jewish and Christian magical syncretism, this myth is implied in the mysteries of Mithras, Persian religion, apocalyptic literature, and the traditions of the Mandeans.
The structure of the myth is the same in each case. In late Hellenistic culture, we get a characteristic form of high religion involving the astral journey and its meaning for overcoming Fate. All of the versions stem from Persian religion emerging transfigured after the fall of Persia and three hundred years of Hellenism in different places from Egypt to Anatolia.
Roots of Hellenistic Magic
The main influence in it was Persia. Magic is not so called for nothing. Its exponents were the Magi, who were said to have taken up Assyrian and Babylonian magic. Lucian in Menippus identifies the Zoroastrian magicians (Magi) with the Chaldaeans, Babylonian priests. Zoroaster was, indeed, considered the father of the Magi, though the Zoroastrian priesthood seem originally to have been a separate order of priests called Zoroasters, presumanbly after their founder. They seem to have merged with the Magi, unless they always stayed a variety of them until the fall of Persia. The supreme reputation of Zoroaster was illustrated by Pliny, who in his Natural History, attributed ten million words to him, dealing with astrology, natural science, religion and magic.
The Babylonian and Persian concept of magic was as a defence against evil spirits, of which there were many. The denigrating of Pagan gods as demons extended the scope of demonic magic under Christianity, but the dualism of Persian religion, inherited by Christianity through the Essenes, laid the foundation of it. Ahuramazda was opposed by Angra Mainyu in his acts of creation, and human beings had a duty to oppose the evil creation. Magic was a way of controlling demonic spirits. Ostanes was the Persian magus who accompanied Xerxes, and he became prominent in magical literature. Ostanes is said to have taught Democritus (c 400 BC) who introduced magic to the west. The Egyptian connexion seems to be that Bolos of Mendes in Egypt collected the works of Ostanes about 200 BC. Thus it was that in Egypt, about this time, parallel traditions of sympathetic magic arose connected with Zoroaster-Ostanes and Hermes-Thoth. The astrological connexions also came from Persia, the first personal horoscope being dateable to 410 BC.
Another source was Judaism, but this is really an indirect influence of Zoroastrianism. The true name of God came from Judaism, and Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, claimed that only the name of the Jewish god would exorcise demons:
But though you exorcise in the name of any of those who were among you—either kings, or righteous men or prophets or patriarchs—it will not be subject to you. But if any of you exorcise it in the name of the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, it will perhaps be subject to you.
The Hebrew language itself was considered magical, and Celsus thought the Jews were all magicians taught by Moses, a revealing idea, since the Persians appointed them as priests of the temple state of Yehud, and Moses is most likely a corruption of Mazda. The Jews were a nation of priests under the Persian rulers whose priests were the Magi, later called magicians. According to Origen in Contra Celsus:
They worship angels, and were addicted to sorcery, of which Moses was their teacher.
It was the use of Ia, Iao and other forms of Yehouah that was the main influence of Judaism. It might have been that, in later Hellenism, the adoption by the Jews of a taboo on pronouncing their god’s name made it seem particularly magical, but this was not the case earlier when the Jews happily used Yehouah in everyday speech. It was however, composed of vowels and that was considered magical.
Moses was another sacred name, not surprisingly when its identity with Ormuzd is realized. Artapanus, in the second cenry BC, equated Moses with Hermes-Thoth. In this tradition, Moses is the teacher of mankind, and the inventer of philosophy, writing and religion, Egyptian animal worship and hieroglyphics—so says Eusebius quoting Alexander Polyhistor. The victory of Moses over the Egyptian priests dominates this tradition, and Moses came to be seen as the master magician—the man in possession of the name of the Hebrew God. Conceivably, here is a mythologization of the conquest of Egypt by Persia and the subsuming of Egyptian religion to Persian political needs. The Persians took over the Houses of Life and they will surely have been run by Magi.
The Demotic Magic Papyrus has spells cast in the name of Moses and the god of the Jews. Amulet stones, inscribed with the name “Moses”, associate him with Egyptian and solar pantheism. Thus Moses provided a third magical literature parallel to Hermes-Thoth and Zoroaster-Ostanes. Moses was closely associated with angels and especially the archangel Michael, as Jude 1:9—derived from the Assumption of Moses—shows:
Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.
These parallel traditions will ultimately derive from the Persian interest in using religion as a political means of control. Having conquered countries, they took control of their religion under the pretence of restoring it. They then imposed Mazdayasnaism through the supposedly restored religion. thus it was that Persian religion began to pop up in different guises in different pasrts of the near east in Hellenistic times, and profoundly altered the world subsequently in many ways.
Solomon, supposedly an Israelite king of 1000 BC is presented as a leading magus. The Wisdom of Solomon of the first century BC shows him as all wise:
For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world, and the activity of the elements, the beginning and end and middle of times, the alternation of the solstices, and the changes of the seasons, the cycle of the years and the constellations of the stars, the nature of animals and the tempers of the wild beasts, the powers of spirits and the reasonings of man, the varieties of plants and the virtue of roots. I have learned both what is secrest and what is manifest.
It sounds Essene and the work was likely an Essene one. Essenes derived from the Hasidim who were the Chasdim and thence the Chaldaeans! The testament of Solomon is a large magical work extant from the Middle Ages, but judged by scholars to have been copied from works of the third century AD, the zenith of Hellenistic magic. So, Chester Charlton McCown, who edited the critical text, thought. This date puts it firmly in the time of early Christian tradition, and within a shout of the Essenes themselves. The demonology in it is similar to that assumed in Contra celsum and yet the magic is too unrefined to be later. F C Conybeare thought it was originally Jewish but with Christian additions made in the first and second centuries. Hypotheses like this allow it to have been Essene, the Essenes being the point at which Christianity sprouts from Judaism.
Solomon’s ring described in the Testament is well known in the magical papyri. It controlled evil spirits and its source can be seen on ancient murals of Persian and Assyrian gods, being handed by the god to earthly rulers Then it was a symbol of a bond, a contract or covenant. On amulets Solomon is commonly shown on horseback as a mighty king transfixing a woman with his lance! It is like S George and the dragon, except that it is the woman who is pierced, not the dragon. Who could this woman be? Possibly the ideas are comon to each legend and to the imagery of the Garden of Eden. The woman is both herself, Eve, and the serpent. Both were evil, and in the Solomon pictures she is lanced directly while in the S George and the dragon, it is the serpent or dragon which is pierced. The Essenes too had a poor idea of women.
The final influence on Hellenistic magic was that of the Greeks themselves. Hellenistic magic is said to have been a product of the Greek spirit, even though ancient Persian, Jewish and Egyptian religions were a prominent part of it. The central idea of magic—compelling the gods to do what the magician wants—was Egyptian. The idea of the magician claiming to be a god was also Egyptian, “I am Horus” because “I am the begetter and the destroyer”.
Hermes, Selene, Hecate and Apollo are most often cited on the papyri and in that order of preference.The origin of the papyri in the Greek milieu meant that the names of the foreign gods were Graecized, and often identified with Greek nature gods. Jewish angels are also classified as gods and called gods on the papyri, as of course they are despite the protestations of Christians. The prayer to Apollo of the papyri calls upon Zeus, Iao, Raphael, Michael, Sabaoth, and Adonoi. Another payer to the sun speaks of the god Iao, the god, Adonoi, the god Michael, the god, Souriel, the god Gabriel, the god Raphael, the god Abraxas, and so on. Helios is the archangel of God and Iao sits upon Helios.
Sympathy and Ritual
The basis of this magic is that the invisible world of spirits is linked to and reflected in the visible world, so that things in the visible world are “symbols” of invisible power. This is the central theology of “sympathetic” magic. A knowledge of symbols and the power they represent, their sympathies and antipathies, allows the magician to influence or even compel the supernatural world. Magic is the collection and application of this knowledge to change the world, and in this practical sense it is the precursor of the modern sciences.“
Sympathy was the linkages of the elements to the cosmos. It was represented as a ladder or staircase of knowledge leading up from stones to gods, but the qualities of material things linked them with the hidden world, or sometimes the name did. Each hour of the day had a letter from the Greek alphabet, and was associated with a god. Each letter therefore had with it the number of the hour of the day, leading to numerology, which then itself developed into isopsia or gematria, a whole magical field of its own.
The form of a magic ritual is that of the normal religious service. Both derive from the suzerain-vassal treaties imposed by the Persians on their conquered subkects, and already in a fixed form from antiquity when they were thus used. The objective of the Persian administration was propaganda or what we might call publicity. They wanted people to be constantly reminded that they were subject to the law of a God of All, whose regent on earth was the Persian Shah. Thus the treaty came to be recited in the temples, the place where people regularly gathered together respectfully, and priests became agents of the ruling government. Ever since then, the form of religious service has been this. The Magi were the priests who led the services and they used the same form in magical ritual too, as if it had been prescribed by god.
- The god is called by name, or names
- He is praised or thanked using complimentary epithets
- His many titles are read out
- The benefits he has conferred are listed
- Any objects being used in the reitual, such as herbs or stones, are themselves praised in their own right
- Finally, the favours required are stated.
These are not, of course, the full list of the clauses or elements of a vassal and suzerain treaty, but they are certainly the first ones, presumed to be the ones that put the god in a good frame of mind.
The Christian Legend of the Magi
The visit of the Magi was an embarrassment. “Magi” was the word from which we get “magician” and in the first century had largely taken on that meaning, although originally the Magi had been priests of the Persian religion. Origen dealt with it by adding another layer of mythology. The Magi were indeed agents of the “daimones” but the advent of Jesus had 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! The story is based on Origen’s belief in magic.
In Matthew 2:1-12, the wise men from the East (“magoi apo anatolon”) came to adore Jesus in Bethlehem. Christians insist it is true, supported by all manuscripts and versions, and by the Fathers of the Church, but critics say the existence of many copies of the original is not evidence, admit only internal evidence, and regard the gospel account as a fairy tale. The other gospels are silent about it, but Christians say it is because Mark and John do not recount the birth narratives, so could not include it, and, although Luke does not include it, he includes many other stories that the others do not include, and chose to omit it.
They are called Magi from a famous sect of Persian priests, who were incorporated into the Zoroastrian priesthood about the time of Darius the Great and became renowned for their knowledge of astrology and magic (the name of which originated with them). Zoroaster might have been named in the original versions of the story, 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 loannes 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 Saviour (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.
The Greek for “magi” is “magoi” but is usually translated as “magicians”, 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). Justin, Origen, Augustine and Jerome use “magicians” to translate Matthew 2, and the old but well known Matthew Henry Commentary on Matthew follows them. Philo uses Magi both in the sense of philosopher priests and in the sense of magicians.
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, then both falling to Alexander and later regaining 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. Doubtless, also, after the fall of Darius to Alexander, the Magi of the West compromised and corrupted 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).
Historical Situation: Rome and Persia
Jews and Christians simply do not recognize that the sympathies of Jews around the turn of the era was with the Persians not the Romans.
Pompey, the first Roman conqueror of Jerusalem in 63 BC, had attacked the Armenian outpost of Parthia (Persia). In 55 BC Crassus led Roman legions in sacking Jerusalem and in a subsequent attack on Parthia proper. The Romans were decisively defeated at the battle of Carrhæ (Harran) with the loss of 30,000 troops, including their commander. The Parthians counter attacked with an invasion of Armenia, Syria, and Palestine. Nominal Roman rule was re-established under Antipater, the father of Herod, who, in his turn, retreated before another Parthian invasion in 40 BC.
Mark Antony re-established Roman sovereignty in 37 BC and, like Crassus before him, embarked on an ill-fated Parthian expedition. His retreat was followed by another wave of invading Parthians, which swept all Roman opposition completely out of Palestine, including Herod himself, who fled to Alexandria and then to Rome. With Parthian help, Jewish sovereignty was restored, and Jerusalem was fortified with a Jewish garrison.
Herod secured from Augustus Cæsar the title of King of the Jews, but it took him three more years, and a five months’ siege of Jerusalem by Roman troops, for Herod to occupy his own capital city. Herod was the Roman puppet king of a pro-Parthian state situated at the frontier of these two rival empires. His subjects disliked him and the Romans, and were ready to conspire in bringing back the Persians.
At the time of the birth of Christ, Rome, since the retirement of Tiberius, was without an experienced military commander, and pro-Parthian Armenia was fomenting a revolt against Rome, which succeeded a few years later. But Parthia was racked by internal dissension. Phraates IV, the unpopular and aging king, had once been deposed and the Persian Magi were probably maneuvering to choose his successor. Within two years of the birth of Jesus, Phraataces, the parricide son of Phraates IV, was installed by the Magi as the new ruler of Parthia.
Expectation of a Deliverer
Medo-Persian history was studded with Jewish nobles, ministers, and counselors, showing that the Zoroastrian Persian nobility thoroughly accepted Judaism as a form of their own religion. The messianic prophecies of the Jewish Scriptures, especially in the pseudepigraphs of Daniel, who purported to be a Magian, were profoundly motivating to the Jews opposed to Rome at this time. When, in the pseudepigraph, Darius appointed Daniel, a Jew, over the previously hereditary Median priesthood, the resulting repercussions led to the plots involving the ordeal of the lion’s den.
The Septuagint uses “magoi” in Daniel to mean the class of interpreters of dreams and visions. The Zoroastrians began the idea of an eschatological redeemer in their idea of a Saoshyant. Daniel inspired the messianic vision to be announced in due time by a star, and, in Matthew, it was fulfilled in Jesus, to whom the Magi paid homage, the aim being to imply that Jesus was not merely the Jewish messiah but also the Persian Saoshyant. This promise that a divinely imposed Jewish king would rule the world inspired rebellion against the unpopular Romans.
So, about the time Jesus was born, the Jews were expecting the arrival of this divine Jewish king of the world:
About that time one from their country should become governor of the habitable earth.Josephus, Jewish War 6:5:4
It had spread elsewhere in the east, and even the Roman historians knew about it. Not so very much later than this, in the days of Vespasian, Suetonius could write:
There had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief, that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judæa to rule the world.Suetonius, Vespasian 4:5
Tacitus tells of the same belief:
A persuasion existed in the minds of many that some ancient writings of the priests contained a prediction that about that time an eastern power would prevail, and that persons proceeding from Judæa would obtain dominion.Tacitus, Histories 5:13
Augustus, the Roman Emperor, was hailed as the saviour of the world, and Virgil, the Roman poet, in his Fourth Eclogue, known as the Messianic Eclogue, wrote about it.
Star of Bethlehem
The story about the Star of Bethlehem and the visit of the Magi was being used to justify astrology, as Tertullian realized. Everyone believed in astrology. They believed that they could foretell the future from the stars, and they believed that a man’s destiny was settled by the star under which he was born. Christ foretold signs in the heavens. Some Pagans worshipped the stars as the host of heaven, especially the eastern nations, whence the planets have the names of their gods. Amos 5:26 tells of a particular star they had in veneration. The stars pursue their unvarying courses. They represent the order of the universe. If the unvarying order of the heavens was broken by some special phenomenon, if some brilliant or unusual star appeared, it seemed as if God was breaking into His own order, and announcing some special thing.
Magian astrology postulated a heavenly counterpart to complement man’s earthly self and make up the complete human personality. His double (the “fravashi” of the Parsi) developed together with every good man until death united the two. For ancient astrologers, all sorts of celestial curiosities had meaning. The sudden appearance of an unusual star suggested to the Magi the birth of an important person. What star did these ancient Magi see? Many suggestions have been made. About 11 BC, Halley’s comet was visible shooting brilliantly across the skies, but comets were signs of doom, not hope. Signs were not often spectacular events in the heavens, rather infrequent conjunctions of stars, or phenomena in particular constellations. About 7 BC, there was a brilliant conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. In the years 5 to 2 BC, on the first day of the Egyptian month, Mesorl, Sirius, the dog star, rose heliacally, that is at sunrise, and shone with extraordinary brilliance. Mesori means the birth of a prince, and to those ancient astrologers such a star would mean the birth of some great king.
The astronomer, Michael Molnar, found the star of Bethlehem mentioned in a fourth century manuscript of the Roman astrologer, Firmicus Maternus, a Christian. Molnar decided it was a double eclipse by the moon of Jupiter in Aries on 20 March, 6 BC, and on 17 April, 6 BC, signifying the birth of a divine king in Judæa, as Firmicus Maternus confirmed in The Mathesis (334 AD)—the moon eclipsed Jupiter in Aries. The divine king could only be Jesus Christ to any Christian. If that celestial sign always meant the birth of a king, like the Old Testament prophesies of the Messiah, Christians interpreted it as meaning their Jesus. It was another post hoc justification of Christian belief. In later times, Christian authority counted against astrology and such explicit astrological signs were forbidden and forgotten.
Anyway, the Magi watched the heavens, and some heavenly brilliance spoke to them of the entry of a king into the world. Or did it? Some of the Church Fathers like S Irenæus, thought the Magi saw in the star a fulfilment of the prophesy of Balaam:
A star shall rise out of Jacob and a sceptre shall spring up from Israel.Num 24:17
The parallelism of the verse shows the Star of Balaam is a great prince, not a heavenly body, and all talk of an actual star leading philosophers around like a dog on a lead is simply metaphorical. When the wise men found their way to Bethlehem, William Barclay sensibly comments:
We need not think that the star literally moved like a guide across the sky. There is poetry here, and we must not turn lovely poetry into crude and lifeless prose.
The story might just be an allegorization of the prophecy. But the astrological reasoning alluded to would have perhaps allowed the Magi to deduce the confirmation of the Balaam prophecy from the celestial event, had it occurred. Magi were probably familiar with messianic prophesies. They created Judaism at the time of the colonization of Yehud from Persia in the fifth century BC, and the idea of a saviour or messiah was a Zoroastrian concept—the Saoshyant. Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, and Suetonius bear witness that, at the time of the nativity, there was throughout the Roman Empire a general unrest and expectation of a Golden Age and a great deliverer.
Extensions to the Myth
From the brevity of Matthew, the myth is magnified in early church traditions. In the early days Oriental tradition said that there were twelve of them, but now the tradition that there were three of them is almost universal, because they brought three named gifts, though there could have been other unnamed ones. There is no certain tradition in this matter. Early Christian art is no consistent witness, a painting in the cemetery of S Peter and S Marcellinus shows two, one in the Lateran Museum, three, one in the cemetery of Domitilla, four, a vase in the Kircher Museum, eight.
No Father of the Church holds the Magi to have been kings. Tertullian (Adv Marcion 3:13) says that they were “nearly kings”, and soon after, they were. The Church says in its liturgy:
The kings of Tharsis and the islands shall offer presents; the kings of the Arabians and of Saba shall bring him gifts: and all the kings of the earth shall adore him.Psalms 71:10
But this is not evidence, simply a liturgical accommodation. Neither were they magicians in the wicked sense it eventually had. The good meaning of “magoi”, though found nowhere else in the Bible, is demanded by the context of Matthew 2. These Magians must have been meant to be members of the Persian priestly caste. It suggests that Jesus was meant to be the Persian Saoshyant.
The names of the Magi are as uncertain as is their number. Some associated them with Shem, Ham and Japheth—the three sons of Noah—and thus with Asia, Africa, and Europe. Latins, from the seventh century, have variants of the names, Balthasar, Melchior, and Caspar, such as Bithisarea, Melichior and Gathaspa. Syrians have Larvandad, Hormisdas, Gushnasaph. Armenians have Badadilma, Kagba, etc. A fourteenth century Armenian tradition identifies them as Balthasar, King of Arabia, Melchior, King of Persia, and Gasper, King of India. Judging by elements in the names, they are derived from Babylonian Persian. Hormisdas could be nothing other than Ormudz, the Persian High God, Ahuramazda, and Melchior means “King Ormudz”. Gathas are the oldest verses of the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta, considered to have been written by Zoroaster himself, and “aspa” ends names like Vishtaspa in Persian.
Still later legend assigned to each a personal description, and distinguished the gift which each of them gave to Jesus. Melchior was an old man, grey haired, and with a long beard, and it was he who brought the gift of gold. Caspar was young and beardless, and ruddy in countenance and it was he who brought the gift of frankincense. Balthasar was swarthy, with the beard newly grown.
They supposedly came from the east (Mt 2:1-2,9). Arabia is called the land of the east (Gen 25:6), and the Arabians are called men of the east (Jg 6:3). Balaam came from the mountains of the east, and was one of their wise men. The presents they brought were the products of that country. S Justin, Tertullian, and S Epiphanius, confirm it is Arabia, but, east of Palestine, only Media, Persia, Assyria, and Babylonia had a Magian priesthood at the time of the birth of Christ, and, according to S Maximus and Theodotus of Ancyra, the east is Babylon. According to Clement of Alexandria and S Cyril of Alexandria, it is Persia.
The gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh stood for Jesus’s offices respectively of king, priest, and prophet. Gold is the gift for a king. Seneca tells us that in Parthia it was the custom that no one could ever approach the king without a gift. And gold, the king of metals, is the fit gift for a king of men. Frankincense is the gift for a Priest. It was in the temple worship and at the temple sacrifices that the sweet perfume of frankincense was used. The function of a priest is to open the way to God for men. The Latin word for priest is pontifex, which means a bridge-builder. The priest builds a bridge between men and God. Myrrh is the gift for one who is to die. Myrrh was used to embalm the bodies of the dead.
The remains of the Magi discovered in Persia, emerged in the fourth century, brought to Constantinople by S Helena, Constantine’s mother, who was an expert in finding what did not exist, were transferred to Milan in the fifth century and to Cologne in 1163, where they remain enshrined.
