Real time

One Sunday time warped. Oliver Wright explores the conception of real time.

Oliver Wright

After 15 years as a lawyer in London, Oliver is currently doing a DPhil at the University of Oxford.

A sundial on a wall casts a small shadow on a painted list of numbers and symbols

The western sundial in the courtyard of the New Town Hall in Brno.

Kirk, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Time’s going really slowly today!”

“Golly – where’s that week gone?”

“It felt like time stood still for a moment…”

“Sorry, I lost track of the time.”

These expressions are common enough to be cliché. I’ve used each of them in the last few weeks. But do they actually make any sense? We all know that time is in seconds, minutes, days, weeks… very reliable, very constant, very scientific. We all know that time doesn’t stand still – how can it?! We know that, don’t we?

But us modern, scientific cultures can often forget how recent these regimental patterns are. Of course, people and cultures have been measuring time for millennia – Ancient Egyptian sundials, early Medieval monks needing to fit in seven services a day. But time, even in those examples, always said more than just ‘keeping time’… a sundial was especially meaningful in a world where it usually shone every day, and was itself held up as a God; for life in a monastery, worship was the time-keeping device, worship was the rhythm of life.

Time, and particularly our experience of it, doesn’t easily track onto our clocks. We are constantly experiencing time quickly, slowly, forgetfully, meaningfully. Could there be another account of time, not one governed by the Greenwich Meridian, which is – somehow – more real?

The Ancient people of Israel were some of the first to realise that there is more to life than clock-watching. It’s hard for us to imagine how revolutionary the idea of a Sabbath is. But when it became the norm for the Jews to observe the Sabbath every seventh day – to keep it holy – this wasn’t just about being religious. This was about justice and the avoidance of exploitation. In a world where slaves and workers in the field were expected to work every single day, the idea that there should be rest and restoration said something distinctive both about the nature of work, and about the nature of what it is to be human. And it also said something distinctive about hope.

For Christians, hope and the Sabbath are forever now held together in the story of Jesus’ resurrection – the very first Easter day. There’s much that could be said about this. But for our little topic of time, it’s quite explosive. The people of Israel had believed (we think) that death would be defeated by the return of God to his people at the end of time. But here was God – in the flesh – defeating death… and time is still marching on! What are we to make of this?

Something of the end has come in the middle. Time is now warped.

Well, one of many things is that, when Christians confess their belief that ‘on the third day Jesus Christ rose again from the dead’, they are saying that something of God’s ultimate future, his promise one day to be with us forever, what the Sabbath had always pointed towards like a signpost, had now happened once and for all. Something of the end has come in the middle. Time is now warped.

One of the first signs of this ‘warping’, was another day off. The early Christians by and large slotted into the ongoing Jewish observance of Sabbath. But then – treating it as the start of their week – they observed a second day off, a day of feasting and celebrating, and marching through the towns waving banners. The Lord’s day. Resurrection day. Day one – starting all over again, starting afresh, making something new out of the old.

A second sign was this. Time held a new power – a new potency if you like. It wasn’t that the days had somehow changed duration, or our lifespans were altered. No – Christians think that there is a new expectancy in the air. They are to live, Paul writes, as if the fixtures which hold them to this world now no longer hold the same power. ‘Time is contracted’ he goes on (not ‘shortened’ as it’s sometimes translated) – ready to pounce like a cat.

The third sign follows from the second. The Christian experience of time is constantly pulling backwards and forwards. In celebrations and worship, Christians look back and recite God’s mighty deeds from the past. In reciting them in the present, they re-present them. But the point of ‘re-presenting’ these mighty acts was not just to bring comfort to the present; it also reinvigorated hope for the future. Christians – as the Creed goes on – ‘look for his coming again’. The experience of time for a Christian (or, even, a philosophy of history) is not governed by a flat-line Hegelian aufhebung – that every day, every hour succeeds its predecessor. Instead, the past and the future works on the present in a constant swell of recall and expectation.

Christians see their lives held by God’s time. They’re not a clock-watching, ‘progress-reliant’ people. In the resurrection, Christians believe that God has changed the way we view time once and for all. On that, all their hope is founded.

That’s real time.

Article

Christmas culture

Creed

Middle East

Royalty

13 December 2024

6 min read

Magi: where did the wise men come from?

The origin story of the Middle East's ancient king makers.

Mark Gilbert

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

An arts and crafts image of the three kings adoring the new born Christ.

The Adoration of the Magi.

Edward Burne-Jones, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

You’ve probably heard they weren’t really kings, but the wise men or magi had some impressive royal connections. Far from being one-off royal visitors to the infant Jesus, the magi had a long history of involvement with monarchy, crossing paths with illustrious kings including Cyrus the Great of Persia, Alexander the Great and the Roman Emperor Nero.

Originally a tribe of the Medes who lived in Northern Iran 600 years before Jesus’ birth, the Persian magi were hereditary priests. Writing around 425BCE, Greek historian Herodotus tells us how these magi became known throughout the ancient Middle East for their ability to interpret dreams and knowledge of the stars. They were followers of the Zoroastrian religion, and were responsible for the holy fires central to Zoroastrian worship.

To the Greeks, the Zoroastrians and the magi were exotic objects of fascination. Many later Greek written philosophical and occult works claimed Zoroaster (or Zarathustra) as their author. Much like some twentieth century Western conceptions of Hinduism and Buddhism, the Greek and Roman conceptions of Persian religion often had only a passing resemblance to the original. This may have included the "mystery cult" of Mithras that would become popular throughout the Roman Empire in the first century. This also means that references to 'magi' may not refer to the Persian magi, but to other astrologers or dream interpreters who lived to the east of the Mediterranean.

A hundred years before Herodotus, we find the first mention of magi in the bible, in the Book of Daniel. This was the period of Jewish exile and captivity in Babylon. Jehoikim, King of Judea and descendent of Kings David and Solomon, was defeated in battle and killed by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed, and many Judean nobles were taken as prisoners. Daniel was one of these hostages and is taken to the Babylonian court, where God gives him the ability to interpret the king’s dreams. Impressed by his abilities, Nebuchadnezzar puts Daniel in charge over all his wise men. It’s unclear what relationship these Babylonian ‘magi’ had with the Medean ones, but strong Medean influence on the Babylonian court suggests that the Babylonian wise men could well have included Zoroastrian magi.

Daniel remained in the Babylonian court, until the Babylonians were invaded by Cyrus the Great, who allowed the Jews to return from exile and to begin restoring Jerusalem.

Cyrus' Persian Empire lasted for two hundred years, until it was invaded by Alexander the Great and his army in 331BCE. Alexander sought the advice of magi, but had many of them violently killed and extinguished their holy fires when he razed the Persian capital, Persepolis in revenge for the Persian destruction of the Acropolis by Xerxes 150 years earlier. Alexander’s Greek successors were characterised by bloody rivalries and in-fighting and were later overthrown by the Parthian empire, which would become Rome’s most formidable rival to the east. The magi consolidated their king-making reputation during the Parthian period, with a council of magi (the Megistanes) responsible for choosing Parthian kings.

The knowledge they have is broken, it’s a messy blend of wacky occultism, astronomy, maths topped up with an unhealthy obsession with royalty. The knowledge we have is broken too.

By Jesus' day, there were ‘magi’ throughout the Middle East, and it was in this context that Roman historian Pliny the Elder records the journey of Armenian magi to visit Emperor Nero in 66CE. By this time Parthia and Rome were a century into their protracted struggle and had just fought a five-year war over the Armenian succession. Despite suffering a humiliating defeat, Rome saved some face through a very one-sided treaty that had Parthia choose the next Armenian king, but with the Roman Emperor getting to place the crown on his head! Nero turned this to his advantage by having the new King Tridates I come to Rome to receive his crown. Tridates, who was a Zoroastrian priest as well as a king, came with a huge retinue including other magi and thousands of horsemen to receive his crown. The huge procession culminated in the magi king bowing before the emperor and acknowledging him as his god.

The visit of the Armenian magi has clear resonances with the familiar account of magi visiting the infant Jesus found in Matthew’s gospel. Given the many embellishments added to the magi story over the centuries, it's hardly surprising that some have suggested that the magi story was a fabrication and a remixed version of King Tridates’ visit to Emperor Nero. It’s a compelling theory, but I’m not convinced by this. If magi were stock characters in the ancient near east, and were also really interested in monarchs (who were often also treated as gods), then it wouldn’t be that surprising that there’d be more than one royal magi visit with emotionally charged religious overtones. What makes a fabricated magi story less likely to me is what the gospel writer Matthew’s Jewish audience would have thought of the magi. Although the Greeks and Romans were enthusiastic about foreign gods and exotic wisdom, first century Jews were not. To them and to early Christians, the magi would have been charlatans and followers of a false foreign god. A visit from some foreign astrologers would have been an embarrassment rather than the type of story you'd choose to make up.

So, who were the magi in Matthew's gospel? The two dominant theories have been that they were either Persian or else they were a later fiction. More fanciful theories include origins in India, China and even Mongolia. Another perhaps more realistic possibility, convincingly argued by Fr Dwight Longernecker in The Mystery of the Magi is that the magi were from the Arabian kingdom of Nabatea. The Nabateans were known for using irrigation to farm the desert and for controlling the trade routes across the Arabian desert. Two cash crops in which Nabatea dominated trade were frankincense and myrrh. The wealth generated from this lucrative trade was used to build Petra, the world-famous valley city of rock-face monuments. The Nabateans had close connections with Israel and may have been familiar with the prophecies of Daniel and Isaiah. They would also have been interested in the Judean monarchy and would have been natural visitors to the paranoid king Herod. Herod's mother was a Nabatean princess and the Nabatean king Aretas IV needed to shore up favour with Herod so the Nabateans would have had an interest in any new King of the Jews.

Barring some improbable Indiana Jones style archaeological discoveries, we’ll never know for sure who the wise men from the east were. But to me there’s something deeply fascinating about these mysterious visitors to the infant Jesus. Partly they seem to represent higher things – with their wisdom and wealth correctly put in divine service. It can seem as though their excellent learning and astronomical skills have cracked a cosmic puzzle, with the magi following the star and dodging a despot to find the baby at the end of the treasure hunt. This doesn’t hold up - the magi’s knowledge isn’t the object of wonder. The knowledge they have is broken, it’s a messy blend of wacky occultism, astronomy, maths topped up with an unhealthy obsession with royalty. The knowledge we have is broken too. But God uses the foolish things to confound the wise, and inside the crackpot mess of horoscopes and divination, God leaves the magi an invitation. To accept the invitation is to take a risk – to risk the long journey, the wrath of Herod and even to risk being wrong. But as they accept this invitation, they realise its an invitation to meet God Himself.