Frank Greenall: Wise after the event

Bethlehem bound: Mary and Joseph head for a barn birth and an encounter with three wise guys. Photo/AP

ANOTHER season of jolly holly, Christmas trees, shopping sprees and all that stuff has flashed by.

We recycle the detritus of demented gift-giving, tend the wounds inflicted by razor-sharp edges of plastic packaging as best we can, and wonder again what it was all about.

Different cultures have all sorts of ways of doing the Christmas thing, but for whatever wonky reasons, December 25 consolidates as an increasingly common international day of formalised goodwill — much as the English language has become an unlikely international lingua franca.

But I liked the reason someone used recently in trying to explain the mix of myth, madness and magic that we call Christmas. It went something like ... "We need an excuse to be nice to one another, at least for a little while."

We've even developed a specialised vocabulary to help get the magic of Christmas over the line. Take the word "merry" — apart from yuletide, seldom used these days except when talking about someone a bit far gone on the turps.

Or take the word "magic" itself, derived from the same source denoting a particular clique of sages known in biblical times as magi. Ancient Babylonians, it seems, were dab hands at not only astronomy but a spot of prestidigitation, too.

However, the Christian culture has added a bit of zizz as all good storytellers do.
The Bible nowhere actually mentions just how many Magi followed the star to the manger in Bethlehem (incidentally, many sources from the general region reported the presence for several months of a conspicuous new star — the prolonged death flash of a verifiable supernova explosion at that particular time).

But the story has decided, for convenience's sake, that there were just three wise men — convenient, because this provides a tidy match-up with the number of gifts the delegation was purportedly packing: the iconic gold, myrrh and frankincense.

But given the Bible has undergone several major translations from its original Aramaic, a few nuances — as well as miscellaneous facts and figures — may have also gone astray in the process.

For instance, the original Aramaic version may have designated the legendary camel jockeys not as "wise men" but as "wise guys" — a little semantical distinction that could easily have been smudged in translation and changed the whole tenor of the story.

It wasn't until the second century AD that someone decided that the emissaries were not only three in number, but kings to boot. And it took another four centuries for someone to remember their names ... apparently Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar.

However, the New Testament's Book of Matthew simply mentions an indeterminate number of wise men on a mission from "the east" to worship a newborn King of the Jews.

Equally possibly, then, the wise ones could have just been conventioneers off to a hi-tech expo in Bethlehem to sell franchises for the latest Babylonian Smart Astrolabe featuring new apps. What's more, the astrolabes in question could well have fallen off the back of a camel — the sort of deal tailor-made for a bunch of wise guys able to flog off shonky perfumes on the side.

Frank Greenall

Advance bookings were problematic back then. They took their chances vis-a-vis accommodation, but maybe ended up having to share a barn with a nice quiet couple and their new bubba, plus animals.

It was the couple's first-born, so to mark the happy occasion the conventioneers had a bit of a whip-around — a spot of gold, a phial of myrrh and a cone of frankincense were the result.

Not a bad little offering, but with what they were saving on hotel bills, you'd think they could have at least shouted the young fella an Xbox for His future edification.