212. Who Were The Three Wise Men?

0:00If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast add free listening and a weekly newsletter sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com We were led by a star No, no, no, no, no First we're going to do an introduction then I'm going to give you a preface, okay I thought we were going to go straight in No, no, no Like I said, you don't listen It's alright, just follow Okay

0:43Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durimple. We're taking a little break from our Mughal Empress season for something festive. And we are joined by, I think, the Angel of Christmas. Professor of Ancient History Lloyd Llewellyn Jones is here. A.K.A. the very Reverend Lloyd Llewellyn Jones. The right Reverend. Which he wasn't when he was last on the pod. What's happened, Lloyd? Well, I found God. Or God found me, I should say. What's a good scholar of Persian history doing finding God like this? I know. Well, he comes in all unexpected places. Never seen ever. You are properly, properly frocked now.

1:23Well and truly frocked. He's completely frocked. Absolutely. Yeah, fully licensed to baptise and bury and marry and all of that. This is very handy to know. Absolutely. If any of our listeners are after a good priest in, where was the wonderful church called again? Let me tell you. He is at Egloistoisant, in fact, in Wales. That's where he is. That was very good. I thought that was very good. Yes, St. David's Church. Any opportunity to show off. Right. So, I mean, is it pretty? Is it one of those old pretty ones? Oh, it's lovely. It's a Victorian church, but smack bang in the middle of Cardiff.

1:55And it's a Welsh-speaking church. So we cater for the Welsh community, the Welsh-speaking community in Cardiff. So it makes us quite unique in that respect. So yes, I preach and pray in Welsh in my mother tongue. Well, how beautiful. Can you say happy Christmas to all of our Empire Pod listeners in Welsh? We'd love it. Yes, I will say. Ndolig Llewyn, ich i gyd. Happy Christmas to you all. Ndolig Llewyn. N 'yay! We call it Iaitha niwvoith, the language of heaven. Oh, well, that's perfect. We got the right guy on then. Exactly. The speaker of the language of heaven, because what you're here to discuss is the Magi.

2:30Otherwise known as the three kings, otherwise known as always my brothers during the nativity play because we're Indian and we have the clothes. Of course, absolutely. And my children because they have the clothes. And these are the three wise men who visit the baby Jesus after his birth. And according to the stories, but we're going to get down to the truth of all of this, you know, they bring him those three gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. And to that effect, William and I, and Lloyd, you're going to have to fasten your seatbelt and hold your nose for this. We are going to perform a little Christmas play for you.

3:01This is courtesy of the boys at Monty Python. Welcome to the Empire Porn Christmas play. It's our nativity. I'm really sick of the children doing every nativity every year. And I'm just desperate, desperate to perform. I'm even watching them going, oh, no, that's not how she'd say it. Well, William's going to be all three wise men. and I'm going to be Mandy, mother of Brian in the life of Brian. Because I think this is instructive. This is such a bad idea. No, it's a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea, but it's one of the many terrible ideas we've had on this program. So let me see in set. Okay.

3:33So just imagine this. We are around a humble stable in which a babe lies in a manger crying. The mother, Mandy, turns to the baby, Brian, and says maternally, Shut up! Shut up! And suddenly there is a sort of a scrambling by the door. And three wise men appear. And Mandy is not impressed. She asks them what they're doing creeping around at this time of night. Back of a cow shed. Back of a cow shed, what are you doing? You're all drunk, it's disgusting. To which the wise men reply. We were led by a star. Or led by a bottle more light. Go on, get out! Well, we must see him. We have brought presents.

4:17Out! Gold, frankincense and myrrh. Oh, well, why didn't you say? He's over here. Sorry, the place is a bit of a mess. What is myrrh anyway? It's a valuable bomb. A bomb? What are you doing giving him a bomb? It might bite him. What? It's a dangerous animal. Quick, throw it in the trough. No, it isn't. Yeah, it is. It's a big um, um, um. No, no, no. It's an ointment. Yeah. Oh, there was an animal called a balm. Oh, did I dream it? Oh, right. So you're astrologers, are you? Well, what is he then? Hmm? What star sign is he? Oh, Capricorn. Oh, Capricorn, eh? What are they like then? Oh, but he is the son of God, our Messiah.

5:05You're all three wise men, so you've got to do one of them. Sorry. Wise men number one. King of the Jews. And that's a Capricorn, is it? No, no. That's just him. It goes on and on and on like this. It does. With many jokes about myrrh, which I find particularly hilarious this time of year, because every child carrying the box of myrrh is the sulkiest wise man on that. It's like, oh, gold I get. Frankincense, that's been explained. But I'm bringing myrrh. Anyway, so Lloyd, we have this idea. Well, actually more and more three kings coming to the baby Jesus and giving these lavish gifts and myrrh to the baby Jesus.

5:45And Life of Brian lampoons it brilliantly. But the story of the Magi is not the story that we do in our schools and our nativity plays every year. It's much more complicated than that, isn't it? It's a lot more complicated. And that's essentially because if you look at the history of the Nativity stories themselves, there are two versions of the Nativity told in the New Testament, just in two Gospels, that's all. So the first one is in the Gospel of Matthew, which includes the wise men. And then the second one is in the Gospel of Luke, which leaves out the wise men entirely, but instead has the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary.

6:31It has the shepherds, the angels and the hills outside of Bethlehem, and never the two shall meet. So, in fact, when we put together our Christmas cribs every year and we bung in the wise men and the shepherds and the oxen and the angels altogether, that is no way representative of what the early evangelists wanted us to have. So there are two completely different birth traditions in our gospel accounts, completely different. And then two gospels don't mention it at all. Yeah, and then Mark has nothing about it whatsoever. Mark is the very earliest gospel written, and he just gets on with the job the minute that Jesus is baptised.

7:11That's where Mark picks up. No mention whatsoever of Mary and Joseph, nothing at all. And John, of course, goes his other way entirely and is a very philosophical kind of gospel where Jesus is the Word, of course, the Word made flesh. So no little baby in a crib in any way, shape or form there with John. Okay, right. Let's start with absolute basics. So it's St. Matthew's Gospel that we have to thank for even the notion of the Magi. Who was he? When was he writing? Okay, well, we mustn't confuse the evangelist Matthew, that is the gospel writer Matthew, with the disciple Matthew. They're very unlikely to be the same person.

7:52So this Matthew who writes the gospel is not the same person who follows Jesus around, that was once a tax collector and so forth. So this Matthew, our evangelist, is writing around about 80 CD. So that would make it about 50 years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, of the historical Jesus, for about 50 years. So that's a, you know, that's a generation. And so what Matthew must be doing is working on old oral traditions, stories that were going around about Jesus. But we also know that he was utilizing in a big way, the Gospel of Mark, which was already about 10 to 15 years been circulating.

8:36And I think one thing that Matthew saw was, well, look, Mark doesn't mention anything about Jesus's birth. And, you know, if we read a biography today, we all start our biographies with birth and childhood stories, because now we believe that, you know, what happens in our childhood really is kind of endemic to what we will become in later life. And I think Matthew had that same kind of idea. You know, there was obviously a need amongst early Christians to hear about, well, where does Jesus come from? Who was he then? So Matthew, I think, sets the record straight in that. But Matthew has a particular agenda when he's writing his gospel.

9:14We need to remember that in the early century of Christianity, the first century, Christianity was essentially a Jewish movement. And the majority of people who were converting to Christianity were converting from Judaism. And the way that they could understand the Jesus story best was by locating it in Judaism, in Judaic practices. And Jewish tradition and Jewish prophecies. Yes, and completely in Jewish traditions. I'm guessing and I'm feeling waves of this with Empire listeners going, yes, okay, very interesting. Why the hell are you lot talking about it? Now, the reason we are talking about it is because there is a fascinating and not often talked about overlap with the Persian empire.

9:58And that is why this is of supreme interest to us. I mean, you're looking at your dog going, what are they doing? What are they doing? Could have got this on something about religion. It's not about that. It is about traditions which are dragged into that early story in Matthew's gospel, which cannot have come from anywhere other than the Persian experience of Jews who are living in the Persian empire. I mean, that is the premise, isn't it? I think so. I mean, I think that, you know, the Persian Empire that we're dealing with here, of course, in the beginning of the first century is the Parthian Empire.

10:35The Parthians dominated the whole of the Iranian plateau right up to the borders of Syria, and even at some points actually invaded into the territories we now think of as Israel and Palestine as well. So the Parthians were the biggest threat to the Roman Empire. So actually what we have with Matthew's story of the wise men is this little area of Palestine, Israel, caught between two superpowers, in fact, two great empires, the Romans in the west and the Parthians in the east. And I think Matthew's story about the birth of Jesus actually comments on both of these empires simultaneously. And that's the important thing.

11:17Now, Lloyd, when we talk about the wise men and people sing carols and you hear it in popular speech, there's a lot of talk about kings, a lot of talk about wise men. You yourself have used the phrase wise men. But I understand that the Greek in the original gospel says magoi, which is magus in English. That's right. And a magus is something quite specific. It's not wise men. It's not a king. What is it? Well, if we really want to go deeper into the meaning and extract from it its Persian-ness, I suppose, then what we would have to translate that as is a cast of priests, really. So we're dealing here with a priestly hierarchy of the Zoroastrian faith.

12:05Zoroastrianism at this point had been developing for some 250 years into a religion which we can now actually pinpoint and say, oh, this is a kind of recognisable Zoroastrian faith that we can now say is emerging in the first century. You know, when we've spoken about Zoroastrians before, when we've looked at the Achaemenid Empire, for instance, I was a bit reluctant to say that the Achaemenids were Zoroastrians. I remember. Stop, remember. But now we can see in the Parthian period that Zoroastrianism, as we understand it, is now discernible. So what Matthew had in mind when he uses that very specific term, and he could have used any term after all, but he goes for a very specific Persian term, magos, magi, to emphasize, I think, first of all, the sanctity of these visitors, that these were holy men, and that they were trained in holiness, if you like.

13:04So according to traditions, The Zoroastrian priests, this caste of priests, were the repositories of knowledge, of tradition, of faith, and even kind of maintained within their minds a kind of library of the Zoroastrian faith, the Avesta and so forth. The great scriptures of Zoroastrianism were passed down word of mouth at this point. There were no writings at this point. So I think Matthew is very keen for his readers or listeners to understand that these people are a, you know, exotic. They come from far away, from a huge empire. And also that these are men of profound faith who have received a truth already, because that's what Zoroastrianism is all about, is about Arta.

13:55It's about truth. So I think Matthew's use of these wise men is very, very specific indeed in the term that he uses, magi, very specific. Now, Lloyd, we're very lucky to have you with us today because this is actually something which you are uniquely well qualified to answer. Explain to our listeners why St. Matthew, sitting presumably somewhere in Judea, should be aware of the Persians at all. What is the connection between the people of Israel and the empires of Persia, which you've studied all your life? Yes. Well, when Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, and the Jews went into exile, after 70 years, many of them were released and many of them chose to go back home to Jerusalem.

14:45But many thousands of Jewish families didn't. They decided to stay in Babylonia and expanded, in fact, into more eastern parts of the Persian Empire as well. Which was then a far richer region than Judea. Oh, absolutely, by far, by far. And so what we have essentially is an assimilation, a mix of Jewish and Mesopotamian Persian cultural influences. And some of the really great Jewish scholarship of antiquity and indeed of the Middle Ages, such as the writing of the Talmud, the great commentaries, rabbinic commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, were created in that Persian milieu. So, in fact, the synergy between Persia and Israel, Judaism, is very, very deep and very, very strong and powerful.

15:37And Matthew would have known that because he would have known that there were thousands upon thousands of influential Jews living in the Persian Empire at this point. How can we see Persian influence in the familiar stories of the Bible? I've read, for example, that the very idea of a Messiah is something that first appears in Zoroastrianism. Is that right? Well, certainly ideas of things like the invisibility of God is a huge concept. If you look at the Hebrew Bible and the stories that take place where God walks on earth and speaks to people, that's very ancient Bronze Age stories. But the Bible editors intermixed those with newer theologies that arose from this intermingling with Zoroastrians.

16:30And the idea of God the creator is certainly coming from the concept of Ahura Mazda, who was by foremost the creator God par excellence. In Zoroastrianism. In Zoroastrianism. the ideas of good and evil are absolutely embedded in Zoroastrian theology, which is basically a kind of religion of polar opposites. There has to be good, there has to be bad. The truth and the lie you talked about last time. Truth and the lie, essentially, and Arta and Drauga, these are the things that matter. What we get steadily over about a 300-year period from the time of the exile to the time of Matthew's writing is a filtering of Zoroastrian ideas of Godhead in particular into the Jewish tradition.

17:20And that really is quite astounding. The Jewish God changes quite considerably in this 300-year period. So now the all-knowing, all-aware, omnipresent God of Judaism is born for the first And the seeds of that birth are sown in Zoroastrian theology. Well, let's take a break here. And after the break, I want to talk more about sort of the cultural exchange and influence. Particularly, you've done some amazing work on a book called The Book of Esther, which tells a very Persian story. And I want to talk about that and a little bit more about how the story that we have today and that my kids will be performing or have performed very recently on a stage.

18:03those gifts that that idea of frankincense myrrh and especially the gold if you ask my son but you know how they come to be as weighty and have the longevity that they do so just join us after the break welcome back so just before the break i mentioned a book which lloyd knows all about because he's written a book par excellence about it it really is a very very good read and a story I wasn't familiar with until I came across your book, The Book of Esther. First of all, a book written by a woman, which is very interesting indeed. And it almost reads like a tale that could have come out of the Arabian Nights of this sort of Persian king who's sick of his wife, gives her the heave-ho and is looking for a new woman.

18:49Just pick up the story there of Esther, who is a Jewish woman. That's what's important. We're talking about that sort of cross-cultural merging as we're talking about the Magi story. I think this is a really interesting bit of that. I think in a way the Esther story really does tell the background to all of this. It's set in the city of Susa, the great Achaemenid capital of Susa. The king is looking for a new bride. He has a kind of beauty contest, which is really typical of the Alphalela Wa Leila, you know, the thousand and one night stories. Wait, wait, wait. Don't let him off the hook first.

19:20He's a git. Can't just hear my femininity. He's an utter, utter, I'm sorry, it's not very Christmassy. He's a total git. He has a wife. Absolutely. He's drunk. He's saying, display your beauty to my guests. And she's like, I don't want to. I'm not menna. She says, I rather not. I'd rather not. I don't want to do that. And he says, all right, hop it then. I'll find another wife. Dreadful, dreadful, dreadful. Absolutely. Many commentators have said we should find the Persian king, Xerxes in this case, something of a comic character. I don't find him much to laugh at myself, to be honest. He's a class one shite bag, if you don't mind me saying.

19:55It gets worse because he then has this huge Miss Persia pageant to choose the next queen of Persia. And one of the contendants happens to be a girl from Susa, the local girl, who is Jewish. And this really tells us a lot about the Jewish situation in Iran in that period, because there were thousands of settled Jewish families living in the great cities and also in the towns and villages of the Persian Empire. And, you know, the Book of Esther is really fascinating because essentially it is a Persian fairy story inserted into the Bible. There is no mention in the whole of the Book of Esther of God, of the temple, of Jewish traditions.

20:40Nothing whatsoever. Food, kosher, the stuff that comes up all the time. The things that we are most familiar with in the Bible is conspicuous by its absence in the Book of Esther. So what we are dealing with here is a group of diaspora Jews who have completely Persianized. They are very happy. Thank you very much. Being Persian Jews, we're not looking for the Temple of Jerusalem. We're not going home. We have made very good lives for ourselves here. And I think that says a lot about the synergy that was going on between the Persians and the Jews in this period and went on for the next 600, 700 years, in fact.

21:20Quite remarkable. So, Lloyd, when we come back now to the Gospel story in Matthew, it's in Matthew 2, verses 1 to 12, there's nothing surprising about finding Persians turning up, specifically Persian magi. This is something the Jewish people were very familiar with. Yes, they were very familiar with the traditions. You know, even families who were kind of split between Galilee and Persia, they would have been in constant touch. I mean, the Matthew chapter and verses that you've just given us, they do tell the story, just in case, you know, you're not a Bible reader. The story is that, you know, first the Magi arrive, they meet Herod.

21:59Herod sees them and says, oh, you're here to see a baby. I'd be quite interested in that said baby. Could you please come and let me know if you find the baby? because, as we know later, Herod wants to kill that baby who may end up dethroning him. Now, Herod, just again, just to place this, those who are not from a Judeo-Christian history, is a very important figure, even in Jerusalem today. You've got the Herod's gate. I mean, just place him for us in history. Herod the Great was a Roman-backed dictator, essentially, in Jerusalem, masquerading as a king and really kind of masquerading his Jewishness as well.

22:41He actually was of Nabatean background, so the area of Jordan today. Would we call him an Arab today? An Arab Jew? Absolutely, an Arab Jew today. He was hated by his people, by the Jews themselves, because he kowtowed to Rome so constantly. And he was truly one of the villains of history. I mean, he was mentally very, very unstable. He had one of his many wives murdered. He murdered two of his sons. And we know this from history or just biblical sources? This is actual historical records. No, this is all history. The best source we have on him, of course, is the histories of Josephus, second century Jewish Roman writer.

23:23So yes, we can place him in his historical setting. Now, what's interesting about the Matthew story is that these magi come from Persia and they go to the court of Herod. Now, that's a natural thing to do because, of course, diplomacy was all about that. So these weren't the first Parthian Iranians that Herod would have met in his long career on the Judean throne. You know, this was something which was going on all the time. But I want to interject into that another element, of course, of Matthew's story, and that is he's very specific in saying that they were led to Jerusalem by a star. Oh, now that's very important.

24:01Yes, let's focus exactly on that. So, of course, within the Babylonian Persian tradition, astronomy had always been a huge matter. The Babylonians themselves were brilliant astronomers, probably the world-leading astronomers, and the Persians had picked up that tradition. So here is Matthew actually knowing something about the Magi tradition as astronomers, the star searchers, of course, looking for the heavens for omens and so forth so he incorporates that into the tale but the star also gives Matthew a raison d 'etre to criticize the other great empire of the day and that is Rome because at the time that Matthew sets the story of the birth of Jesus in Rome a comet appeared and the emperor Augustus had said, ah, this comet is clearly a sign that my uncle, Julius Caesar, has now become a god in heaven.

25:03And at the same time, Augustus said, well, therefore, I must be the son of God. Okay, so there is a contender to the throne of heaven at this point. What's the source for that? Mainly we have Suetonius, and we also have a whole series of coins which were struck by Augustus showing the head of the deified Julius Caesar with this comet hanging above his head. Suetonius was a very sort of respected, sometimes very arch contemporary historian of the time, who gives us a huge amount of work which is verifiable from archaeological... Personal detail in particular. That's right. Exactly. He's quite bitchy.

25:41Oh, yeah, yeah. He really gets down to it. He does, yeah. So Augustus starts calling himself son of God. Well, of course, Matthew has a greater truth about all of this, which can also be backed up by Rome's archenemy, the Parthians as well. So throughout the Gospel of Matthew, the term Son of God is used more than any other evangelist for Jesus. And he's saying, look, don't look to Rome for the Son of God. The Son of God is here in this stable, and these Parthians have recognized it, and that's why they've come here. This is the only star that should be followed is the one that will bring you to the real son of God.

26:22So what he's saying is Roman Empire, liars, Persian Empire, quite trustworthy. I've got the magi to prove it. I mean, that's fascinating. This is a complete confluence of empires in that case. But also think about this as well. The one way in which the Roman Empire loved to show its grandeur was in the spectacle of tribute scenes and triumph scenes and all of this kind of thing. So if you go and you look at imperial arches in Rome, or even in Thessaloniki, you will see time and time again, and also on Roman coins struck in this period, Parthians on their knees before Caesar. Okay, they are the ultimate show of Roman triumph is to have Parthian diplomats wearing their distinctive Persian trousers and their funny Phrygian caps on their knees, offering homage to Caesar.

27:15And that's often an inverse of the reality, because the Parthians quite often defeat Rome. Precisely, precisely. The Battle of Carre, was that right? The Battle of Carre is a really good example of that, absolutely. The Romans claim that as a victory. It's a Parthian victory, and we know that the Roman envoys were on their knees in front of the Parthian king. So what Matthew does with that image is, if any Parthians are going to go on their knees and offer homage to anybody. It's going to be to the true Son of God, Jesus Christ, who is born in this stable. So can you see how Matthew takes all the symbols of empire and completely turns them on their head for his own usage there?

27:56Lloyd, when I studied my biblical studies at age 15 or something, I remember always being taught that Matthew was the most Judaic or Hebraic of all the gospel writers, and that he's often looking to see in the events of Jesus's life an echo of things that had happened in the Old Testament and the fulfillment of prophecies. So following that up, tell us about this figure, Balaam, who's in, I think, the book of Numbers. That's one of the things that Matthew might be thinking about at this point, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. So in the book of Numbers, this character, this prophet, a seer, called Balaam has a vision in which a star appears in the heavens, which will foretell the coming of the Messiah.