The Magi: Who They Were, What They Believed, and Where the Nativity Story Took a Strange Turn
One of my favorite times of year at the little country church where I was raised was Christmas. The season unfolded slowly and predictably, beginning with rehearsals for the Christmas play, moving into the annual tree decorating and church dinner, and finally cresting with the play itself, complete with a gift exchange and those legendary candy bags. I can still smell the pungent evergreen scent of the giant cedar the men of the church cut down and hauled inside. I can still feel the fluttering excitement of waiting in the darkened stage wings, heart pounding, listening for my cue to make a grand entrance. And I still think, to this day, that those brown paper candy bags, stuffed with peanut clusters, sticky sweet orange slices, and fresh fruit, held some of the best candy ever!
In almost every one of those plays during my Midwestern evangelical childhood, the Three Wise Men arrived on a cold night, bowed reverently in a stable, presented their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and then quietly faded into the warm glow of the manger scene. It was tidy. Comforting. Very picture-book.
As I grew and learned, I realized that though warm and beautiful, something was off. First, how did we know there were three of them? Nowhere in the Bible does it say three. I also discovered they were definitely not at the stable, because the timing was all wrong. If they saw the star when Jesus was born, traveled great distances to make inquiries about the location of said birth, and then finally traveled even further to that location, the baby Jesus was no longer in the stable but long gone from Bethlehem. In fact, I’ve since learned that most ancient church writings indicate that it was months later that the men actually arrived.
Lately, after listening to a podcast about Zoroastrianism in ancient Persia, my brain wandered down a new path, and the neatly woven story of the wise men unraveled completely for me. The men Matthew calls Magi were not likely “kings”, as the song goes, nor were they just “wise”. They most likely came from a priestly tradition that belonged to the Iranian cultural world, a world with a religious imagination very different from (and yet surprisingly resonant with) early Christianity.
So, what does the primary biblical source, Matthew 2, tell us? It is short and specific. It says “Magi from the east” saw a star and came to Jerusalem asking, “Where is he who was born king of the Jews?” Matthew describes them as worshiping the child and offering three gifts. Crucially, Matthew does not specify the number of magi, their exact origin, whether they were kings or wise men, or where they visited Baby Jesus. Those later details, which we all associate with the story, are developments from centuries of various traditions.
That leads to the question of what magi are. Perhaps naively, I grew up thinking it was just whatever foreign word that meant “wise men”. However, that is not the case, nor is “magi” a fanciful title invented for the nativity scene. It was a term used in antiquity by Greek authors, in Persian inscriptions, and later by Roman writers to indicate a specific historical group. In Iranian writings, the magi are described as a priestly group connected to Zoroastrianism and earlier Iranian religious practices; classical Greek sources often describe them as a hereditary priestly caste, interpreters of omens, and practitioners of ritual. Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, mentions the magi both as a people and as a priestly class, and Persian administrative records confirm they held courtly roles.
Now, on to the next intriguing aspect of the magi. Scholars typically include the magi within the broader Iranian priestly social context, which encompasses Zoroastrianism and related Mazdean traditions. By the time of the late Persian and Parthian worlds, the term "magi" was widely associated with Zoroastrian priests and ritual specialists, who were keepers of fire cults, calendar rites, divinatory practices, and learned ritual knowledge.
Here’s where it gets fascinating. Given all the above information and the fact that these men “followed a star” to find Jesus, can we assume the magi were Zoroastrian priests who practiced astrology? Probably yes, at least to some extent. The magi’s world included priestly rituals centered on sacred fires, an interest in sacred time (as evidenced by calendars and seasonal rites), and learned practices that likely included astrology and omens. In the Greco-Roman imagination, these practices were grouped under the terms “magos / mageia”, from which our English word “magic” ultimately derives its roots. However, the magi weren’t our modern-day performers or illusionists; they were respected and sometimes mistrusted religious professionals with deep ties to royal courts in the ancient world.
So, why did this catch my attention, aside from the fact that it answered several questions I’d long had about nativity scenes? It was the deep irony of this story. Despite being pagan priests, God invited them to Jesus’s birth! In the narrow religious world of my upbringing, “pagans” were always complete villains: deceived, dangerous, and dabbling in demonic things. Yet in Matthew’s Gospel, it is pagan priests, learned astrologers from a foreign religion, who are given the privilege of worshipping Jesus, the incarnation of God’s Son, when most of the religious establishment missed it entirely! Long before most Jews recognized Him, and before Christianity even existed, these men read the sky through the lens of their own tradition, followed its signs with sincerity, and found themselves kneeling before Christ ahead of nearly everyone else. It’s almost as if God is quietly saying, “You don’t have to have the right label to hear Me. You just have to listen.” And for someone raised with a strict insider–outsider divide, that realization feels both subversive and profoundly hopeful!
Finally, why does it matter? In my mind, understanding who the Magi really were invites a richer reading of the Christmas story and Epiphany:
It’s an image of a non-Jewish, priestly, learned religious world recognizing the significance of a Jewish child, an early pointer to the Gospel’s claim to be for the healing of all nations. We are all one, regardless of our color, culture, or beliefs.
It reminds us that wisdom travels across borders; the Magi are not generic “wise men” but members of an ancient priestly tradition. Just because someone is not from a Protestant Evangelical background, or even a Christian background, does not mean they are inherently evil or completely devoid of God’s wisdom or blessing.
It gently corrects triumphalist or simplistic retellings: these visitors weren’t there to decorate a nativity tableau. Instead, they were to bear witness to an event that disrupted the entire cosmic order, an order they had studied so carefully their whole lives.
As a seeker, the story shifts from a quaint tradition to a doorway for me. Like the Magi, I stand on the threshold between the old world I grew up in and a new understanding of the true cosmic order, curious, learning, and open to signs in places I once never thought to look. I like the idea of the Magi not as perfect, distant wise men or kings, but as earnest travelers, as deeply spiritual seekers who read heaven and earth, and who left home because something luminous called to them. There’s humility in that image: educated people at the pinnacle of their culture who are still humble learners, who follow a star not knowing where it will lead, and then find themselves on bended knee before the King of All Creation!
From one seeker to another, I offer a small prayer. May our own seeking be like theirs: curious, disciplined, and wide open to the Creator’s signs, however they come! Sending love and light to you all.