The Nativity Decoded
Shepherds and wise men
Today, the shepherds give the nativity scene a rustic charm, but the people who first heard Luke’s account of the story – Jews living in Palestine under Roman occupation – would have drawn several conclusions from the ‘picture language’ depicting the visit of the shepherds to the baby.
Firstly, the shepherds tending their sheep on the hills around Bethlehem would have been Jews. This indicates that the story was written for fellow Jews, not with the aim of creating a new religion, but in order to reform Judaism. Indeed, throughout the life of Jesus, he was seen as a Tzaddik, a righteous Jew and a teacher who wanted to create a new and more just code of ethics.
The wise men or Magi, says Robert Beckford, represent the flipside of this story. They were not local but, according to Matthew’s Gospel, came ‘from the East’, on a divine quest, guided by a star.
One theory is that they were Zoroastrians, a religion which originated 500 years before Christianity in what is now Iran, where it is still practised today. Another theory is that the wise men represent the world beyond the Jewish community that Jesus came from. Matthew does not say how many there were and nor does he give their names or status – but he does say that they brought three gifts.
The notion that there were three people (as opposed to three gifts), their names – Balthazar, Caspar and Melchior – and the tradition that one of them was black, evolved over 800 years after Jesus’s birth . This scenario, says Robert Beckford, was ‘retrofitted’ on to the Bible story in a different era and for a different audience.
