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Magi

6 Episodes

The Magi are the eastern visitors in Matthew’s birth narrative who recognize Jesus’s significance through a star and bring costly gifts. In critical scholarship, they are less a fixed set of three crowned kings than a deliberately enigmatic group whose identity, status, and motives were expanded dramatically in later Christian tradition.

Redirected from: Three Kings, Three Wise Men

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Quotes from Data

“These later, these apocryphal stories are almost like kind of like fan fiction, right? They take the story that doesn't have a whole lot of detail and then they kind of fill it out and they retell it.”

Eric Vanden Eykel Episode 38

“I took the easy route in this book and I just said, let's just keep them as magoi and let's just say that word's complicated and we're gonna embrace that.”

Eric Vanden Eykel Episode 38

“In my read of this story, it's actually less about validating the divinity of Jesus and more about validating Jesus's royal lineage.”

Eric Vanden Eykel Episode 38

“The magoi, the wise men. This term kind of gets confused in antiquity, where the original word magoi is coming from a caste of priests in modern day Iran, ancient Persia, it becomes a bit broader to basically mean any sort of magician or charlatan in the West.”

Aaron Adair Episode 37

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