The Pope on the Magi

Pope Benedict XVI’s latest book, entitled Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives (New York: Image Books, 2012), translated by Philip J. Whitmore, shows us, once again, how brilliant an intellectual the current head of the Roman Catholic Church is.

The Pope takes seriously the scholarship that has gone into a study of the Scriptures and finds a way to make it illuminate the Catholic faith.

I will use his treatment of the Magi to show how profound a thinker he is. I will quote him extensively, because as the representative of Christ on earth, the Pope may be assumed to be speaking with the authority of the Lord. Who am I to paraphrase God or the Pope?

“First,” the Pope writes, “we have to ask what sort of people they were, these ‘Magi’ from the ‘land of the sunrise,’ as Matthew calls them. In the relevant sources, the concept of Magi encompasses a wide range of meanings, from the wholly positive to the wholly negative.

“According to the first of the four principal meanings, Magi are understood to be members of the Persian priestly caste. In Hellenistic culture they were regarded as ‘rulers of a distinctive religion,’ but at the same time their religious ideas were thought to be ‘strongly influenced by philosophy,’ so that the Greek philosophers have often been portrayed as their pupils. No doubt this view contains some not easily definable element of truth: after all, Aristotle himself spoke of the philosophical work of the Magi.

“The other meanings are as follows: possessors and users of supernatural knowledge and ability, magicians, and finally deceivers and seducers. In the Acts of the Apostles we find an example of this final meaning: a Magus named Bar-Jesus is described by Paul as ‘son of the devil, enemy of all righteousness’ and he suffers a corresponding fate.

“The ambivalence of the concept of Magi that we find here illustrates the ambivalence of religion in general. It can become the path to the true knowledge, the path to Jesus Christ. But when it fails, in his presence, to open up to him and actually opposes the one God and Saviour, it becomes demonic and destructive.”

This is an important insight coming from the Pope. Religion is not automatically a good thing. It can be “demonic and destructive” if it actually opposes God. In another part of the book, the Pope argues that God is always on the side of the poor. I cannot help but wonder if those that want to deny the poor free access to a better quality of life are actually on the side of God.

The Pope continues: “Clearly, for the Magi in Mt. 2, it is the first of the four meanings that applies, at least in a broad sense. Even if they were not exactly members of the Persian priesthood, they were nevertheless custodians of religious and philosophical knowledge that had developed in the area and continued to be cultivated there.

“Naturally, attempts have been made to establish more precisely who they were. The Viennese astronomer Konradin Ferrari d’Occhieppo has shown that in the city of Babylon — which had once been a center of scientific astronomy but was already in decline by the time of Jesus — there was still ‘a small group of astronomers who were gradually dying out. Earthenware tablets, covered in cuneiform signs with astronomical calculations, are clear proof of this.’ He goes on to say that the conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Pisces in the years 7-6 B.C. — now believed to be the actual time of Jesus’ birth — is something that the Babylonian astronomers could have calculated, and it may well have pointed them toward the land of Judea and to a newborn ‘king of the Jews.’”

The Pope continues, “The men of whom Matthew speaks were not just astronomers. They were ‘wise.’ They represent the inner dynamic of religion toward self-transcendence, which involves a search for truth, a search for the true God and hence ‘philosophy’ in the original sense of the word. Wisdom, then, serves to purify the message of ‘science’: the rationality of that message does not remain at the level of intellectual knowledge, but seeks understanding in its fullness, and so raises reason to its loftiest possibilities.”

What about the popular tradition that the Magi were three kings, riding on camels and bearing gifts, coming from three different continents (Africa, Asia, Europe)? This is where the wisdom of the Pope shows brilliantly. Instead of saying outright that the tradition misread the Scriptures (which it does), he just says that the later stories mean no harm, though we should never forget what really happened.

The Pope ends his discussion of the Magi by stressing what the point of the Scriptures really is. He writes, “The key point is this: the wise men from the east are a new beginning. They represent the journeying of humanity toward Christ. They initiate a procession that continues throughout history. Not only do they represent the people who have found their way to Christ: they represent the inner aspiration of the human spirit, the dynamism of religions and human reason toward him.”

When you see a belen with three kings, remember what the Pope has written.