'We have seen his star in the East': Who are the Magi and why did they travel?

The Magi are those famous but rather misunderstood figures who appear in the Nativity story. But who are they, and why did they visit Judaea at the time of Jesus’ birth? George van Kooten, author of Reverberations of Good News: The Gospels in Context, Then and Now, explains.

IMAGE: Configuration of the five planets with the sun and the moon in the sign of Aries (Syria’s sign) on 17 April 6 BC, an event that occurs only once in approximately 3,000 years. (Design: Peter Barthel; drawing: Anne Mérat; © George van Kooten)

The Magi not only functioned as priests of the Parthians, the rulers of Babylonia since the second century BC. They also became their kingmakers, were thus involved in the Parthian royal succession, and were closely connected to the Chaldeans, who were the astronomers. When the Romans made their appearance in the ancient Near East in the first century BC, they were met by a Parthian embassy, which included Magi. Forty years after this encounter, however, Parthian–Roman relations plunged into a crisis due to three unsuccessful Roman attempts to attack the Parthians. In 41/40 BC, Parthian influence even extended over Jerusalem; to ward off this influence, the Roman Senate appointed Herod the Great as their client king to rule over Judaea in 40 BC. It took Herod three years to reconquer Jerusalem and establish himself as king of the Jews. In 23 BC, the Roman emperor Augustus managed to agree a Parthian–Augustan peace treaty with the Parthian king Phraates IV, who ruled during the time of Jesus’ birth.

The peace treaty between Augustus and Phraates IV was not implemented until 20 BC, when the Romans received back the military standards they had lost to the Parthians, on the condition that Rome would renounce its Eastern offensive. Although this was a diplomatic rather than a military achievement, on the coinage Augustus issued, the return of the standards was portrayed as an act of obeisance on the part of the Parthians, who were depicted prostrating themselves before the Romans.

It was, however, the peace treaty of 23-20 BC that allowed the Parthians to travel in the West and the Romans to explore the East. This treaty is immediately relevant to our understanding of Matthew. His depiction of the Magi’s visit to Jesus (Matthew 2.1–12) is entirely consistent with their role as kingmakers to the Parthians and with the phenomenon of Parthian political delegations that explored the West and were interested in the fate of its political rulers. It is also entirely understandable that despite the Roman–Parthian peace treaty, ‘King Herod … was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him’, when the Parthians related their expectations of a newborn king of the Jews (2.1–3).

But why did the Magi travel? The best explanation for Matthew’s Magi travelling to Judaea and Bethlehem is a contemporary model from the ancient world that could shed light on the Magi’s journey from A (‘the East’) to B (Syria-Judaea). Recent research has shown that no such models are found in Mesopotamian–Babylonian astronomy and astrology, but that they became available in the East with the arrival of Greek astronomy, with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the ancient Near East in the 330s BC. According to this Greek astronomy and astrology, which links astronomical phenomena to events in specific territories on earth, the following phenomenon indicated the birth of a royal ruler in Syria: the alignment of all five known planets with the sun and the moon in the zodiacal sign of Aries (the sign allocated to Syria) on 17 April 6 BC. This phenomenon, described by Greek astronomers such as Ptolemy and Antiogonus of Nicaea, occurs only once in approximately 3,000 years and is therefore very rare indeed (see the image).

The detection of this phenomenon in antiquity was based on long observation and theorization. Modern explanations for the Star of Bethlehem often focus on spectacular astronomical phenomena, but this is the only explanation that would have been significant in antiquity and would have caught the attention of the Parthians, their Magi, and their astronomers, the Chaldeans. In its description of this phenomenon, the Gospel of Matthew focuses on the leading planet in this unique planetary constellation, the royal planet Jupiter, but the full phenomenon included a constellation of all the known planets that occurred in the sign of Aries (seen as representing Syria) on 17 April 6 BC.

Magi travelling in Parthian embassies would have been very interested in this as they surveilled developments in the Roman Near East. Judaea was regarded as part of Syria, and the Parthians themselves were well acquainted with Judaea and Jerusalem because in 41/40 BC, in the time before they made peace with Augustus, they had temporarily occupied the area and supported a particular Jewish ruler—so their interest in Judaean politics is well established. It is very plausible that a Parthian embassy exploring Syria would also have visited Jerusalem as well as the original birthplace of the Davidic royal house in nearby Bethlehem, nine kilometres south of Jerusalem. From the inscriptions found in Jerusalem, we know that members of the House of David were indeed still living in the first centuries BC/AD. An ossuary from this period was found with two inscriptions on it: the inscription on the front consists of a female name and a male name: ‘Shalom. Hillel’, while the other, tiny inscription on the right rim of the ossuary reads: ‘Of the House of David’. During the truce with Augustus, Parthians and Romans could travel in each other’s territories, and such a reconnaissance as the Parthian Magi made to monitor political developments in 6 BC is entirely possible. The uniqueness of the event on 17 April 6 BC would certainly have triggered the Magi’s interest. Their motivation was political. But as T. S. Eliot already surmised in his ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927), they returned to Parthia, ‘no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation’.

George van Kooten is the Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity (1502) at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Clare Hall.

This is a revised, adapted excerpt from George's new book that contextualizes all four Gospels within the larger Graeco-Roman world: Reverberations of Good News: The Gospels in Context, Then and Now. This is out this month and available to order here, with 20% off all orders before the end of December.