Hurlbut's Life of Christ For Young and Old / A Complete Life of Christ Written in Simple Language, Based on the Gospel Narrative

by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut

WHILE JOSEPH and Mary with the child Jesus were still staying in Bethlehem, the city of Jerusalem was stirred by the coming of some men from a land far away, with a strange question. These men were not Jews, but were Gentiles, which was the name that the Jews gave to all people except themselves. All Romans and Greeks and Egyptians and all others who were not of their own race, the Jews called by the name "Gentiles." These Gentile strangers who came to Jerusalem were asking of everybody whom they met this question:

"Can you tell us where is to be found the little child who is born to be the King of the Jews? We have seen his star in the east, and we have come to do him honor?"

Who were these men, and what was the star that they had seen?

We are not certain as to their land, but it is generally thought to have been the country now called Persia, then known as Parthia, a land about a thousand miles to the east of Judea. Although some Jews lived in that land—for Jews were to be found then as now in all lands, especially in large cities—the people of Parthia were not Jews, but, as the Jews called them, Gentiles. Although not of the Jewish race, these people were like the Jews in one respect—they never bowed down to worship images which men had made. They worshipped the One God of all the earth; and they prayed with their faces toward the sun. They said that they did not worship the sun, but the One God who was like the sun, the light of the world.

Among these Parthian people were many men who at night studied the stars in the sky. They did not have telescopes, as those who look at the stars now have, to bring the heavenly bodies, the moon, the planets, and the stars nearer to them; they could only use their own eyes, but by long study they had learned much about the stars, could tell of their movements and where in the sky to find each one of them. The men who gave their lives to this study of the stars were called Magi, a word meaning "Wise Men"; and these strangers who were seeking the child-king in Jerusalem are sometimes spoken of as "the Wise Men," sometimes as "the Magi."

The Wise Men on their journey

The people of that time believed that when great kings were born, or before they died, strange stars suddenly appeared in the heavens, shone for a time and then as suddenly passed out of sight. A year or perhaps two years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem, such a star, very bright, that had never before been seen, began to shine. In some way it came to the minds of these men that this star pointed to the coming of a great king who was to rule over all the lands, and who was to be found in the land of Judea.

These Wise Men at once made up their minds to go to the land of Judea and see this child-king. It was a long and hard journey of more than a thousand miles. They must pass from the high plains of Parthia down to the lowlands of Babylonia, must find some way to cross two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Then they would come to a vast trackless desert, where nothing grew and there was no water. If they went around this desert they must follow up the Euphrates River far to the north, and then traveling southward under the shadow of lofty mountains, they would come at last to Judea, and to Jerusalem, its largest city. Through all that long and trying journey, which would last a year, traveling most of the way on camels, they saw the wonderful star in the sky seeming to lead the way.

From the story as told in the Gospel by St. Matthew it appears that when these men came to Jerusalem the star was no longer shining. However, the loss of the star would not matter so much, now that they were in the King's own land, for they supposed that everybody in that country, and especially in the city of Jerusalem, would know that their Prince was born. But to their surprise, nobody seemed to have heard about the newly-born King. They did not meet the shepherds of Bethlehem, who had seen the angel on the night of Jesus' birth, nor did they hear of old Simeon and Anna who a month or more before had seen the Christ-child. Very, very few were those who knew that the King had come, and none of these few people did these strangers chance to meet.