Joseph, the baby Jesus, and US … and the three wise men of course.
Of course they’re not technically a part of the nativity scene as such, but we like to include them there anyway. The wise men came later – probably about a year later – by which time we assume the family had moved beyond the stable. The normal estimates are that the baby Jesus was between six and twenty months old when the wise men appeared on the scene – hence Herod’s targetting of all children two years old and under.
The other mistake we regularly make is to assume that they were kings. The kings tradition goes back to the early church father Tertullian (who died 225). Old Testament passages said that ‘kings would come and worship him’ (eg. Isaiah 49:7), hence the tradition. By the end of 6th century, the kings all had names: Melkon (later Melchior), Balthasar, and Gasper.
In truth, we don’t know that they were kings. Indeed there’s lots we don’t know about these guys:
We don’t really know that they were wise.
We can’t be completely sure that they were men.
And we’ve really got no idea of where there were three of them or not!
We are told they brought three gifts, so we assume that there were three givers, but the gifts might have distributed between a group of 20 for all we know.
It is possible that the three wise men were actually a dozen silly women! We will never know for sure. To say that we don’t know this and that about them though is not to say that we don’t know anything about them. For what we are told is that they are ‘magi’, and this tells us plenty!
Magi is the word from which we get our word ‘magic’. These people were