The Wise Men of Christian Tradition

We are likely familiar with the story of the Three Wise Men in the Christian cultural tradition — the visitors from the east whom the Gospel of Matthew says visited the infant Jesus to honor him with gifts. We might not realize, though, that the Gospel writer never indicated the number of _Magi_ (a Greek term for Persian prognosticators) nor the names of the visitors. But by the twelfth century, a tradition of the kings who hailed from Europe, Asia, and Africa had developed, and this is the story most known today.

In the early Middle Ages, the magus from Africa became known as “Balthazar,” and scholars believed he brought the valuable fragrance myrrh to Jesus as an acknowledgement of the infant’s royal (divine) destiny. Despite the common assumption of Balthazar’s African homeland, the Biblical figure was frequently painted as a white person in art (see the third image from an 11-century manuscript). In fact, it wasn’t until the 1400s that Balthazar’s skin was painted dark. (See the first image from the late 1400s). This is not a random change. As Kristen Collins and Bryan Keene have recently discussed, in the 1400s, Europeans began to develop an African slave trade, with Portugal leading the way. The third slide, from around the late 1300s, shows a sort of mid-step in the artistic rendition of Balthazar – he is still white, but his attendant is black.

On the one hand, we might well interpret depictions of a dark-skinned African king positively: after all, once the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was in full swing, far fewer images of powerful black Africans featured prominently in Western culture. However, the greater European familiarity with African people in the late 15th century and afterwards — as shown by the paintings of Balthazar — came about because of the new economies in human trafficking that largely benefited the Western world.