THE birth of Jesus the Messiah in Bethlehem, my commentary on Matthew says, may owe “more to apologetics than history”. Perhaps the Gospel has been adjusted to Micah’s prophecy (Micah 5.2). Bethlehem’s historic link with Ruth and, later, David is attested within the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. But Jesus’s birth there leaves each Matthew and Luke with some explaining to do: why and the way did the birth occur away from Nazareth, which was Jesus’s home town (Mark 6.1)?
There can also be an issue of timing. King Herod (Herod “the Great”, not Herod Antipas, Luke, 23.7) died in 4 BC. Something doesn’t add up. Theories about how one can reconcile Matthew and Luke on the timing of the nativity and epiphany are plentiful, but convincing ones are few.
Herod was a tyrant and a murderer. The Jewish historian Josephus, within the generation after Herod, said that he not only plundered the bodies of slaughtered enemies, but he even had a youth, Aristobulus, murdered by drowning, simply because the people liked him. So the massacre of the holy innocents has the ring of authentic characterisation.
Josephus explored one other characteristic of Herod, which corroborates Matthew’s Gospel: his mistrust of individuals of talent. Rather than appoint the very best men, Herod selected second-raters, for fear that somebody of real ability would gain power and overthrow him. So, Josephus condemned him, not only as a multiple murderer, but as a person consumed with suspicion, hostile to anyone who might change into a threat.
Herod didn’t idiot the Magi. Even before they met him, they knew enough to not approach Herod asking him for help of their seek for this recent king of the Jews. It was Herod, along with his intelligence network of spies and informants, who should have got wind of the exotic Eastern visitors, and had them brought before him in secret. Perhaps he was afraid of rumours a couple of recent king spreading further. Perhaps he was planning to take care of the Magi as he had with so many others whom he saw as a threat. It will not be difficult to give you names of comparable rulers on the earth today.
Thank goodness the Magi were indeed “clever” men within the face of such machinations. By giving these characters the label magoi, Matthew has not made the story much clearer to his Greek readers and listeners than it’s to us; for it’s a word for members of a priestly caste from Persia (but not confined solely to that land: see Acts 8.9). From it, our modern word “magic” is derived. The fact of their journey, and their expectations of what they might find once they arrived in Jerusalem, show that one in all their skills was reading the long run. The proven fact that they turned up in Jerusalem, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, shows that even Magi weren’t infallible in reading the signs.
Two contests for mastery stand side by side on this Gospel. One is between Herod and the Magi: he tries to bend them to his purposes by secrecy and deceit: “When you might have found him, bring me word in order that I may go and worship him” (NRSV has “pay him homage”, which seems unnecessarily archaic).
The other is between Herod the king of the Jews and Jesus the king of the Jews. There can’t be two kings in a single nation. Only one could be the true king. One rules by force, wiles, and ultimately murder; he ferrets out threats to neutralise them. The other, at the moment within the Gospel, seems incapable of rule. The frequency with which young children in a dynastic line of succession are expunged from the pages of history points to the fragility of the Magi’s expectation. The remainder of Matthew’s Gospel reveals what weakness can achieve.
There is a funny side to the otherwise dark story of Herod. Despite all his efforts to thwart the Magi’s seek for the infant king, he actually finally ends up making the epiphany occur. After all, the Magi had turned up within the unsuitable city, Jerusalem; and it was Herod himself who sent them on to the proper place. He made it possible for them to provide their beauty-full, meaning-full gifts, and to worship, and (for his or her reading of character was higher than their orienteering skills) to return to their very own country by one other road.
