Where Did the Three Kings Come From Anyway?

Last Saturday afternoon, which was grey and cold in Providence, I had the pleasure of listening to Martin Smith, an Episcopal priest and author - "A Season for the Spirit" (Seabury Classics 2004) and "The Word is Very Near You" (Cowley 1989) - give a short talk in front of a roaring fire at my church (St. Martin's Episcopal). He began by illustrating the great extent to which the New Testament relied upon language and particular phraseology which would have been very familiar and have had special resonance to the audience to which it was first addressed, an audience which was largely Jewish and largely oppressed, economically and otherwise. According to Martin, the language employed by the writers of what has become known as "The Gospel" portray Jesus as a radical teacher who vehemently opposed the prevailing political order dominated by the Roman empire, which we all know ruled with an iron fist. And I put “The Gospel” in quotes to differentiate the accounts blessed by the Roman Catholic Church - which were written between 50 and 65 years after the death of Jesus by unknown authors who we refer to as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – from the more recently-discovered gospels, such as that of Thomas and Judas, which have not received the Roman Catholic seal of approval.

That the message of Jesus was radical and political is agreed-upon by most respected scholars and has been discussed, at length by, among others, John Dominic Crossan, see, e.g., “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (HarperCollins 1992) and John Shelby Spong. See, e.g., “Liberating the Gospels, Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes" (Harper Collins 1997). As Crossan has noted, the concepts of divine righteousness, social justice and ritual purity are present throughout Jewish history "like three strands of one and the same rope."

As Martin noted, contemplating the view that Christianity was born in opposition to a military domination system turns our modern-day belief as to the possibility of neatly separating religion from politics on its head. Indeed, although I recognize that there are sound practical reasons for adhering to the policy that one's politics should be left at the church house door (a policy that is implicitly followed by most churches in my neck of the woods), the Jesus portrayed in the gospels does not seem to me to be overly concerned with practicality, nor with social convention for that matter. As an aside, in those churches where mixing politics with coffee hour chit-chat is not considered to be in bad taste, the political "talk" that is encouraged is decidedly one-sided and writers like Crossan and Spong are considered heretics.

In any event, in its first few hundred years Christianity morphed from a radical political movement that the Roman empire tried its best to stamp out to the empire's official religion. Most of us know little about this astounding transformation. As Martin suggested, most of us think of religion in rather childish terms. For many practicing Christians, if they have any knowledge about how and why Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire it likely is limited to a vague notion that it involved the Emperor Constantine and a miraculous vision of a cross. And to pick a more topical example, most practicing Christians I know believe that the quaint Christmas pageants performed by our children each year represent historical fact. Yet, as Martin pointed out, only two of the four "approved" gospel writers even mention Jesus' birth and these two accounts differ markedly and in fact starkly contradict each other on material issues, a rather obvious but nonetheless rarely mentioned point most famously made by Raymond Brown in "The Birth of the Messiah" (Anchor Bible 1999); see also "The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Birth" by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan (HarperCollins 2007).

For example, in Luke, Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth and only moved to Bethlehem briefly for the census whereas Matthew implies that they lived in Bethlehem and only moved to Nazareth on their return from Egypt; and the two accounts provide two different genealogies of Jesus and use a contradictory time frame (Matthew's account places the birth during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BC, but Luke dates it to the census of Quirinius in 6 AD). And, as Martin pointed out, there is no support for the notion that the three kings were kings or that they showed up in the days or weeks following the birth of Jesus, which, by the way, was not in a manger.

As I sat listening to Martin last Saturday I pondered a question that has puzzled me for some time. Why was it that so many smart people I knew who go to church every Sunday - people with advanced degrees in the liberal arts and active reading lives - were so ignorant about the basic facts surrounding Scripture and the bible stories they professed to believe?

And as I pondered this question and listened to Martin it occurred to me what a joy and relief it was to hear an educated member of the clergy with a sense of humor apply his intellect to scripture in a frankly inquisitive and open-minded manner, a manner which is characteristic of the Anglican tradition at its best. It then dawned on me that like many others I know, I had spent most of my life - and all of my formative years - being indoctrinated by a highly effective intellectual domination system, i.e., the Roman Catholic Church. (For others I know, the domination system was run by fundamentalists of one stripe or another). In that moment of recognition, I may have glimpsed something of what occurred in those few hundred years after the death of Jesus when Christianity morphed from radical political movement to official state religion. It seemed to me especially significant that the Nicean Creed, which we obediently repeat every Sunday, was only agreed-upon after Constantine - who guaranteed himself the status of sole and absolute Caesar by essentially co-opting the Church – had ordered that no bishop could leave the assembly he had convened until agreement had been reached and threatened to permanently exile any bishop who disagreed, a threat he carried out.

Granted, it may seem that many, many years have passed since the days of the Nicean Creed, but it is well to remember that, as Martin pointed out, measured in lifetimes, the time passed amounts only to some thirty generations. Admittedly, there has not been a straight line from Constantine's physical bullying to the intellectual tyranny of the Baltimore catechism, but it may not be too much of a stretch to say that a seed was planted by Constantine which eventually grew into the blasphemy that a religion's authenticity should be measured by the degree to which it adhered to and enforced dogma, which then led to the widespread but nonetheless mistaken belief that authentic spirituality is essentially intellectual, rather than experiential, in nature. It may also not be too far of a stretch to say that the physical threats which made adoption of the Nicean Creed possible and the other quieter forms of intellectual bullying which have characterized the autocratic modus operandi of the Roman Catholic Church over the centuries are characteristic of the very type of domination system which Jesus stood against. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church has a history of persecuting the very people - peasants, women, and theological and cultural outsiders - whom Jesus made a point of embracing. The Church’s recent sexual abuse scandals are in that sense only one part of a long history and culture of institutional brutality.

Thus, many of us raised as good Catholics have internalized the mideaval notion that to be dogmatically incorrect was intrinsically evil, rather than merely a necessary step along everyone's spiritual and intellectual journey. This may be why so many of my well-educated friends haven't shown much interest in separating spiritual fact from fiction. They correctly intuited at an early age that applying one's intellect to what they heard in church was dangerous business and certainly not the way to get ahead in their crowd, especially since what they heard in church likely could not withstand even mild intellectual scrutiny.

The funny thing is that after I learned a few things about the history surrounding the gospels and about how, when, why and for whom they were written, none of the textual inconsistencies or the numerous factual debates one can engage in amounted to a hill of beans, at least to me. What I concluded did matter was what I learned of a non-factual nature in the process of trying to learn all the facts, which is ironic and kind of funny. (One of those non-factual things I learned is never to trust a cleric who lacked a sense of humor).

It seems to me that if more Christians would take the time to read critically about scripture maybe we would have a chance of reclaiming Christianity from what it has morphed into, which is something which I have little doubt would be more recognizable to Constantine than to Jesus. Although I have the sense Jesus has a pretty good sense of humor, I would guess he is troubled by how is name has been used over the centuries and is now invoked and used, by everybody from major league baseball players in the habit of crossing themselves prior to getting up to bat to those members of the U.S. Air Force who, I would not doubt, made the sign of the cross just prior to opening their bay doors and dropping hydrogen bombs on crowded Japanese cities not so long ago.

For at least twenty-five of the thirty lifetimes that have passsed since the death of Christ, Christians have been under the thumb of one domination system or another, whether it be the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church or some more modern, fundamentalist analogue. It would do well now and again to remember that there was a Jesus before there ever was "Christianity" and his words, or the words attributed to him, have not lost their meaning or their importance just because they have been misconstrued and ill-used. In fact, getting ourselves out from under the various thumbs we have been under and preventing the words of Jesus from being manipulated and his message trivialized are the reasons, and probably the only reasons, why it is important to know that the story of the “Three Kings of Orient” was probably made up, even though it is a good hymn. As far as the story’s origin, I haven't the foggiest. But I intend to find out.

Copyright @ 2008 Anthony F. Cottone.