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travelled south from Jerusalem must be a matter of conjecture.⁵⁷ They
already knew from Herod that Bethlehem (a mere five or six miles from
Jerusalem) was their destination, so that they did not need the star to tell
them that; their extravagantly expressed joy (see p. 60, n. 9) is hard to
explain unless the star somehow indicated the actual house rather than just
the village as a whole.⁵⁸ It seems then that the star’s movement gave them
the final supernatural direction they needed to the specific house “where the
child was.”⁵
11 The mention of a “house” is often supposed either to contradict Luke’s
account of Jesus’ birth in a stable or to indicate a sufficient time-lapse to
allow the family to relocate to better quarters in Bethlehem. It is, however,
becoming increasingly recognized that the “stable” owes more to Western
misunderstanding than to Luke, who speaks only of a “manger.” In a
normal Palestinian home of the period the mangers would be found not in a
separate building but on the edge of the raised family living area where the
animals, who were brought into the lower section of the one-room house at
night, could conveniently reach them. The point of Luke’s mention of the
manger is not therefore that Jesus’ birth took place outside a normal house,
but that in that particular house the “guest-room” ¹ was already occupied
(by other census visitors?) so that the baby was placed in the most
comfortable remaining area, a manger on the living-room floor. There is
therefore no reason why they should not be in the same “house” when
Matthew’s magi arrive.
In view of the prominence of Joseph throughout the rest of Matthew’s infancy
stories, it is remarkable that here only Mary is mentioned as being with the child
—indeed Joseph is not mentioned in the story of the magi at all. This suggests
that this pericope does not come from the same source as 1:18–25 and 2:13–23,
all of which is told as Joseph’s story, but from an independent tradition, even
though it provides the essential basis for the family’s flight and Herod’s
infanticide in the following pericopes. Note that the phrase “the child and his
mother” will recur in 2:13, 14, 20, 21, in each case with the child mentioned
first, as here, but in all those other cases they are the object of Joseph’s action,
not mentioned independently of him as here.
We do not know what social position these magi held, but it was sufficient for
them to have felt it appropriate to go to visit a new-born king, and to have been
given an audience with the king in Jerusalem. For these foreign dignitaries to
prostrate themselves in homage before a child in an ordinary house in Bethlehem
is a remarkable illustration of the reversal of the world’s values which will
become such a prominent feature of the Messiah’s proclamation of the kingdom
of heaven (18:1–5; 20:25–28 etc.). Their gifts are those of the affluent: gold then
as now the symbol of ultimate value, and exotic spices which would not
normally come within the budget of an ordinary Jewish family. Frankincense
(which came from Southern Arabia and Somalia) was an expensive perfume, and
was burned not only in worship but at important social occasions; for its non-
religious use (with myrrh) see Song 3:6; 4:6, 14; cf. Sir 24:15. Despite the
symbolism traditionally discerned in the gifts of the magi since the time of
Irenaeus (gold for royalty, frankincense for divinity and myrrh for death and
burial—the latter based on John 19:39) myrrh too was primarily used as a
luxurious cosmetic fragrance (Esth 2:12; Ps 45:8; Prov 7:17; Song 1:13; 5:1,5).
These are luxury gifts, fit for a king. The reader who knows the OT stories
cannot fail to be reminded of the visit of the Queen of Sheba with her gifts of
“gold and a great quantity of spices” to the son of David in Jerusalem (1 Kgs
10:1–10), and of the imagery which that visit provided for subsequent depictions
of the homage of the nations to the Jewish Messiah (Ps 72:10–11, 15; Isa 60:5–
6). ²
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