didymus said:
Getting back to pagan prophecy. I haven;\t read all the posts but has anyone mentioned the three wisemen who supposedly went to see Jesus when he was born. They were from the east, possibly persian zoroastrians?
I'm not saying they were pagan because they were zoroastrian, as one pointed out ,pagan originally referred to country folk. This definition has changed and some think of pagans as anyone who dabbles in what some may see as occultish or mystic.
What is more mystic and even occultish than christianity? Before you jump on me look up the word. Better yet I'll do it for you.
occult:1> not revealed, secret 2. abstruse, mysterious 3>of or relating to supernatural agencies, their effects or knowledge of them.
Sounds like christianity to me. I mean this in a good way.
Hello Did,
Even most of the non-religious (or non-Christian) among us recognize the symbolism of the nativity scene: it depicts the biblical account of three wise men from the east who rode atop camels and followed a star to Bethlehem, bearing gifts for the newborn Christ child who lay in a manger.
The truth is, the Bible contains virtually none of these details. They have all been added over the years from sources outside the Bible.
Mathew 2:1 tells us:
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem . . .
That's it. Matthew doesn't say how
many wise men came from the east, doesn't mention their names, and doesn't provide any details about
how they made their journey.
It has generally been assumed that the wise men (or magi) were three in number because Matthew 2:11 makes mention of three gifts: " . . . they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh." The number of wise men is not specified in the Bible, however, and some Eastern religions have claimed up to twelve of them made the journey to Bethlehem. The names of the wise men, Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, do not come from the Bible and did not appear in Christian literature until over five hundred years after the birth of Jesus. Nothing in the Bible says the wise men rode camels (or any other animal); they may have made their journey from the east on foot for all we know. And despite the familiar lyrics of the Christmas carol "We Three Kings," no biblical source depicts the three wise men as kings. (They were most likely learned men, perhaps astrologers.)
However many wise men there were, and however they got to Bethlehem, the Bible tells us they arrived just after the birth and found the baby Jesus in a manger, right?
Not quite. Matthew 2:11 states:
And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him . . .
The wise men came "into the house," not the stable, and they saw a "young child," not a newborn. This passage indicates that the wise men didn't arrive until quite some time after Jesus' birth. (According to Luke 2, it was shepherds, not wise men, who visited the infant Jesus in the manger.)
To sum up: we know from the Bible that wise men came from the east, that they followed a star to Bethlehem to find the Christ child, and that they brought him gold, and frankincense and myrrh. We must look to sources external to the Bible to find the origins of any of the other familiar details, however.
Neither their names nor their gender nor their number are given: the Greek text of Matthew refers to them merely as μαγοι απο ανατολων, "Magi from the East". μαγοι should probably be interpreted as Persian-style (Zoroastrian) seers, philosophers, astrologers, and maybe even strictly as members of the sect of Magi (see the many references throughout Pliny, for example). Greek grammar makes it not inconceivable that one or more of them may have been women, while the traditional reference to "three" seems to derive from the number of gifts mentioned in the Gospel.
v/r
Q