The mysterious Magi: outsiders, outlandish, Uyghur?

Many claimed the Wise Men, wherever the story was heard.

Benjamin Sharkey

Benjamin is a DPhil student in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. He is researching the experience of Christian communities in medieval Central Asia.

Silhouttes of three wise men approach the Virgin and Child, painted on stone.

The Magi, Catacombs of Priscilla, 250AD.

Public Domain.

Our nativities are full of familiar figures. Mary and the angel Gabriel, Joseph and the landlords of Bethlehem (of varying hospitality), the shepherds above the town and the heavenly host. Finally, there come the three gift-bearers. While familiar, these perhaps remain the most mysterious guests at the manger. Are they three kings? ‘Wise men’? ‘Magi’? What indeed is a ‘magi’?

Most of the features of our nativity come from the first two chapters of Luke’s gospel, but the magi (along with their counterpart, King Herod) are the primary contribution of Matthew’s gospel, appearing in the second chapter. The word used in Matthew is magi (magoi), a term that was often used for the priests of the Persian religion, today known as Zoroastrianism but in Antiquity known to outsiders simply as ‘magianism’. However, in the gospel it is perhaps intended to carry less specific meaning, instead indicating more broadly those learned in esoteric knowledge, hence our common translation of ‘wise men’. We might be reminded of the class of experts who Nebuchadnezzar summoned to help interpret his dreams, over whom he promoted Daniel to be chief. These were people both knowledgeable and practiced in observing the patterns of nature, experts in hidden knowledge and science, propitiating and interpreting the divine, ‘magic’, alchemy, and astrology. Indeed, this is where we get our word magic from. It is someone of this kind who is intended by the other use of ‘magic’ in the New Testament, when in the book of Acts Simon the ‘magi’, having believed and been baptised, asks to buy the power of the Holy Spirit from Peter and John. Whichever definition is intended in Matthew, these are unexpected guests in Bethlehem.

We learn very little further about them besides that they came from ‘the east’, to which they return as mysteriously as they arrived. Might they perhaps have been from one of the neighbouring eastern states that lay just outside the borders of the Roman Empire, such as Osroene, Adiabene, or Armenia, or even from the great Persian Parthian Empire? Parthia and its provinces were named specifically in the Book of Acts, but Matthew’s is a far more ambiguous reference. Indeed, many scholars would question the historicity of the episode of the magi’s visit, seemingly unrooted in time and place in contrast to the historical and geographical grounding of the rest of the gospels, and so clearly serving as a fulfilment of prophecy about the messiah. The old song of Psalm 72 says: “May the kings of Tarshish and of distant shores bring tribute to him. May the kings of Sheba and Seba present him gifts. May all kings bow down to him and all nations serve him.” Elswhere the book of Isaiah records: “The nations will come to your light, Kings to the brightness of your dawn… young camels will come bearing gold and incense, proclaiming the praise of the Lord.” When you see the gift-bearing magi represented as camel-riding kings on your Christmas cards, they are being shown as the fulfilment of these prophecies.

Christians in medieval Europe were dimly aware of just how widespread Christianity was, and they represented this in their stories about the magi.

What is crucially important in their role as prophecy-fulfillers is that they are gentiles. Indeed, they are the first of those outside of God’s chosen people to recognise the Messiah. While Luke shows Jesus announced to the poor and humble among the Jews, rather than the priestly or royal, Matthew shows him recognised by the gentiles, the first trickle of a mighty torrent prophesied throughout the Old Testament: “All the nations you have made will come and worship before you, Lord,” sings the Psalmist. “In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established… and all nations will stream to it,” records Isaiah once more. This is echoed also in Micah, the book quoted in Matthew by the chief priests to the magi: “The mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established, and many nations will come and say – let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.” These were outlandish claims and the magi represented the outlandish start of their fulfilment.

Nevertheless, the magi in Matthew don’t float entirely untethered from historical reality, as they act out a story within the solidly historical setting of Herod’s final paranoia. His anxiety about the title ‘king of the Jews’, and his desperate massacre of the innocents both fit with what we know of his last days. For Herod, an Idumean (or Edomite), his questionable Jewishness had been a source of anxiety throughout his life, and he had become deeply unpopular by the end of his life, perceived as far too close to the Romans. Some scholars have suggested that Herod would have found fewer than a dozen infant boys around Bethlehem, as such it is unsurprising that his order is otherwise absent from the historical record. One of the few authors to cover this place and time was Josephus but writing almost a century later, he is much hazier on this period. He does, however, note that at this time Herod’s paranoia had driven him to kill three of his own sons, including his heir, historically much more significant and shocking. Josephus also claims, that on his deathbed Herod gave orders to have all the principal men of the entire Jewish nation killed when he died, to increase the mourning of the people, orders which were not carried out.

That one day people of all nations and tongues would come to worship the God of Israel is one of the more outlandish claims recorded in the Old Testament. Even for early Christians, who were more actively seeking its fulfilment, it must have remained somewhat unimaginable, given they were still a minority in a corner of the Roman and Persian Empires who knew very well that human societies stretched on beyond their known horizons. By the Middle Ages, it was appearing a lot less outlandish. There were now Christians as far flung as Iceland, China, and Ethiopia. Christians in medieval Europe were dimly aware of just how widespread Christianity was, and they represented this in their stories about the magi. They imagined them as three kings (echoing prophecy and expounding scripture) from the three ‘petals’ of the world which connected at Jerusalem, representatives of the many gentile nations who would embrace the gospel. One for Europe, one for Asia, one for Africa; even in medieval Europe the church was understood as encompassing all three, and the magi were the first indication that it would.

In Asia, ‘east’ of Jerusalem, the magi assumed different significance. Whether in Persia or China, claims were frequently made that the magi had come from their own place or people. Among the Christians of Mesopotamia (covering present-day Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey), where Christianity had first arrived under the Parthian Empire, various legends were written about them in Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic). Here they often numbered twelve and were claimed as the founders of various churches and villages. Further east, and later, in the thirteenth century, an Armenian Christian lord, Smbat Sparapet, recorded in a letter that, while travelling across the Mongol Empire and visiting Christians in Central Asia and China, he had noticed they all decorated their churches with images of the magi. He recorded that the magi were believed to have originally come from China, from the region corresponding to present-day Gansu province. His brother, the Armenian king of Cilicia (south-east Turkey), who later made the same journey alternatively recorded that the magi had rather come from among the Uyghurs.

The Turfan Oasis, lying to the north of the great Taklamakan desert in today’s Xinjiang province in China, also known as the Uyghur Autonomous Region, was home to a community of Uyghur Christians between at least the eighth to fourteenth centuries. One of the few surviving indications of their presence is a large collection of fragmentary manuscripts, preserved by the dry desert conditions. Among these is a unique legend concerning the magi, originally written in Syriac, but here translated into Uyghur. It preserves the account from Matthew but with some additions. For instance, the identification of the magi with the Zoroastrian priesthood is made explicit, probably owing to the original Syriac authors’ own familiarity living among the ‘magians’ of Mesopotamia. Most striking of all though is the word choice of the Uyghur translator. Approaching the infant Jesus, the magi hail him as ‘Khan Messiah, the son of Tengri.’ The magi’s royal gift of gold recognises Jesus as ‘khan’, a straightforward translation of ‘lord’ but one which carries local cultural resonance. Tengri, however, was the high God of the Uyghurs and Mongols. He was the creator, present everywhere, but associated particularly with the heavens. To see Tengri in Jesus was to see the mighty God who forged their own sky and steppe come to earth as infant and man.

The popular legend that the magi had come from among the Uyghurs, which perhaps motivated this translation, connected their immediate reality to the distant settings of the gospel stories. Like the legends of the medieval west, this too served to communicate the truth that in the recognition of Jesus by the first gentiles, the magi, could be seen the start of the gospel’s journey to all gentiles, all nations, tongues, and petals.

This Christmas, when you see the magi on your cards and in your nativity scenes, or you sing carols about three kings, think about the deep traditions that have formed these images, representations of prophecies fulfilled in Jesus, of the inclusion in the kingdom of all nations and of you too.

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Article

Art

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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