Book Review: The Magi in History and Tradition

Home > Magazines > BAR > Winter 2023

One of the many funny set pieces in John Irving’s spectacular novel A Prayer for Owen Meany is a Christmas pageant at a small New England church. After a children’s choir rehearses the carol “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” a boy in the choir asks, “Where are ‘Ory’ and ‘R’?” It’s been 20 years since I last read Owen Meany, and remembering the scene still makes me giggle. But are they kings, the Magi of the New Testament? (No.) Are there three of them? (There are three gifts, but the precise number of gift-givers is not stated.) “R” they […]

You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.

Join the BAS Library!

Already a library member? Log in here.

Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username

Footnotes

1. See Megan Sauter, “Rome’s Queen Catacomb,” BAR, Fall 2023.

2. Related to our word “magic,” the term in Matthew has been translated in a bewildering number of ways: “magi,” “wise men,” “astrologers,” and more. Vanden Eykel wisely leaves magoi untranslated in the book. When discussing the Christian literary characters, he uses the calque Magi.

Endnotes

1. See my book Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: Family Trouble in the Infancy Gospels (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).