There Were Three Wise Men At His Birth
The Three Wise Men, or the Three Kings, have become a major part of the Nativity. We see them every Christmas in window displays and Nativity pageants, but little of what we know about them is from the Bible.
Matthew 2:1 says: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem…”, but that’s all we get by way of description. Scholars have often assumed there were three of them because Jesus receives three gifts, but the Bible doesn’t say for sure. There may have been dozens, there may have been two. In addition, the idea that they were kings is a later addition. There’s no evidence they followed a star, and absolutely zero indication they rode camels.
Despite these additions, surely the wise men at least visited the newborn baby in a manger? Maybe not. Matthew tells us the wise men went “into the house” to meet Jesus. Not only that, the text says they came to meet “a young child.” This would seem to indicate the visitation did not take place on the night of Jesus’s birth, and that Jesus may have been several years old by the time he received those gifts.
