One of the most familiar and celebrated parts of the traditional Christmas story is the tale of the visitors who brought gifts to the baby Jesus at his birth. If you were raised anywhere in North America or Europe you surely at least know of this tale, even if you have no Christian background. More than any other part of the Christmas story, this tale may have served to create Christmas as we know it today – since few things are more central to modern Christmas than the giving of gifts, and that giving is usually held to commemorate the story of these visitors. The famous Christmas carol “We Three Kings” is entirely about them, and several other beloved carols refer to their story (“The First Noël”, “What Child Is This?”)

Yet there is something enigmatic about these visitors. Biblical scholar Eric Vanden Eykel wrote an interesting book on them (which also serves as an engaging introduction to the methods of biblical scholarship). Vanden Eykel doesn’t even try to ask the question of whether they historically existed, because we have so little evidence on which to base an answer. Within the Bible, they are not mentioned outside of one short passage in chapter 2 of the Gospel of Matthew, and there are no other texts from a similar time period that mention them either. There are apocryphal Christian texts – texts outside the Bible – that mention them, and I was hoping these might tell an alternate story, but Vanden Eykel points out that that these are significantly later and draw on the Matthew story themselves; they are not independent witnesses. That means that if they ever existed historically – Vanden Eykel never asks that question, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was because he believes they didn’t – Matthew is by far the closest thing to a witness that we have.

So let’s take a look at what Matthew says about Jesus’s visitors. I’m taking this translation from the New Revised Standard Version, which I understand to be the most historically accurate – though leaving a couple words in the original Greek because we’ll talk about them later. I’m leaving out the part in the middle about their encounter with King Herod for space, but providing everything it says about them and their encounter with Jesus:

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, magoi from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, Where is the child who has been born king of the Ioudaioi? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’… There, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Perhaps the most striking thing about that passage is what isn’t in it. For one thing: how many of these magoi were there? I know what number came to your mind, but it is nowhere in the text. The gifts they give are of three types, sure, but nowhere does it say that each type was given by one person. And nothing else about the number of magoi is ever mentioned, beyond referring to them in the plural. As far as Matthew is concerned, there could have just as easily been seven magoi, or twelve. Still less are they given names, or any other details like the specific places they come from. And there’s no mention whatsoever of them being kings of any kind.

Then there are those Greek words, which can mean more and less than their common translations. The word Ioudaioi is the root of our modern words “Jews” and “Judaism”. But at this point in history, “Jews” and “Christians” were not separate groups. The Ioudaioi of this era are the people of Judea – most, but not all, of whom trace themselves back to the lineage of the more ancient Hebrews and Israelites and maintain their traditional practices. So scholars debate now whether that word should be rendered as “Jews”, or merely as “Judeans” to emphasize the geographical sense.

That brings us, in turn, to what we’re going to call the visitors themselves. In spoken English we often call them “MADGE-eye”, an anglicization of the Latin magi (“MAH-ghee”) – which is in turn a Latinization of the original Greek word we saw above, magoi (“MAH-goy”). And it’s that term that I find most interesting of all, the one that piqued my interest as a historian of ideas.

The term magoi or magi has a long history. It isn’t originally Greek or Latin, but Persian. If Wikipedia is to be believed, our first record of the term is very old: from the fifth century BCE in an inscription by the Persian king Darius. In that earliest meaning, it refers to Zoroastrian priests. In its most literal meaning, the term would suggest that Jesus’s visitors (whether historically existing ones, or ones in Matthew’s imagination) were Zoroastrians. That’s not impossible, since their origin in “the East” could easily have included Persia, where Zoroastrianism was still widespread.

But by Matthew’s time, five centuries after Darius, the Greek term magoi had also come to receive a wider meaning, a functional meaning not limited to the Zoroastrian origin. It referred to people who learned and practised techniques like alchemy and astrology, attempting to achieve supernatural effects in the world, as Persian priests had done – and also to charlatans who didn’t really achieve those effects but pretended to do so by slight of hand.

The word referred, that is, to people who practised magic – in all senses of that English word. Which should make perfect sense – because, it turns out, the Greek magoi and variant grammatical forms of it are themselves the root of the word “magic”, in English and other later European languages. Magoi or magi are people who do magic.

And so, when it comes to translating magoi, the term not to use is the most familiar one, “wise men”. (This English rendering may have been due to King James’s suspicion of anything magical.) Magoi would probably have been considered wise, yes, in that they were learned men, but they were learned in a very specific way – namely, about magic. Leaving the Latin magi untranslated in English hints at this point, but only hints. I think it’s more accurate to describe Jesus’s visitors as something like “magicians”, or “magical people”. Since the specific kind of magic that they do is finding a portent in a star, it wouldn’t be out of place to refer to them more specifically as “astrologers”. But for me, after so much life spent with fantasy games, my preferred term for them is mages.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!