What if I told you that there were parts of the Christmas story that you've never heard, and that everything you know about those three Wise Men is probably wrong.

Wait until you hear the historic reality all on this very special Arroyo Grande.

Come on, I'm Raymond Arroyo.

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The Christmas story is so familiar that I think we take it for granted.

Mary and Joseph, the Manger, the Shepherds, the Star, the Wise Men.

A few years ago I wrote a book called The Wise Men Who Found Christmas, and I came across a researcher who revealed to me historic insights that truly blew my mind.

The magi, the three Wise Men, we have gotten entirely wrong.

Who are the three Kings?

They were likely not kings at all.

Margaret Barker has spent decades researching the ancient First Temple traditions that shaped early Christianity.

She was the former president of the Society for Old Testament Study at Cambridge and in two thousand and eight she wrote an amazing book, Christmas, The Original Story.

It absolutely up ends so much of what we take for granted about the Nativity.

She joins me.

Now, Margaret Barker, I'm so glad you're here.

You've spent your entire career digging into Temple theology and First Temple traditions.

I want to start with the Magi.

They are among the most popular and well known characters, if you will, of the Christmas season.

We call them three wise men.

We sing about three kings from the Orient.

But none of that is true, is it?

Well, it might not be true.

With everything we see say about the Christmas story, we can't be certain.

All we can be certain of is the words we have in the New Testament, and we can be pretty sure that the way we read those words is not the way they were intended to be read.

So those are the certainties.

What do you make of this idea that they were Persians?

We always heard that, oh, they're from Babylonian Babylonia, they're Persians, or they're from the far East.

Because we three men, you know, wise men from the Orient.

They took that as being the far East.

Explain that to us, is that true.

Well, it might be, but on the other hand, it's more likely not to be.

A lot of the early Christian writers said they came from the East, and as late as the Middle Ages, the European Middle Ages.

Marco Polo, when he was on his travels, he saw the tombs of the Majori on his travels in Central Asia.

But at the same time the tombs of the Magi were being erected in Cologne Cathedral in Germany.

So clearly there were quite a lot of places where the Magi were buried, and this means there were lots of stories.

But if you had the bodies of the Magii, you had a major investment in the tourist industry.

But they called it pilgrimage in those days, and it was in your interest to keep the maji.

Tell me about the thing that fascinated me most.

And I know when I was writing My Wise Men Who Found Christmas Picture Book, I sort of used a lot of this research and others.

You mentioned early Christian writers.

Justin Martyr early popes, they mentioned the wise men coming from Arabia.

So it's east of Jerusalem, not the Farias.

Why do you think that has merit or do you.

Arabia in the time of Jesus was not the Arabia we know now.

It's just a word that means the desert, and the Arabia in the time of Jesus would have been the area that is now the Kingdom of Jordan, and perhaps land to the south of that.

And there is a lot of evidence that the people who appear in Matthew's Gospel as the Magi came from somewhere in southern Jordan that sort of area.

Lots lots of reasons to think this, and.

The king that would be the Kingdom of Nabatia correct at the time.

It would be the land of the Naboteans, and possibly a bit further to the south as well.

But it's very difficult.

We can only speculate.

We can do the best we can with a little evidence that we've got.

One of the most exciting things for me in the development of my study of this over the last what fifteen or twenty years, has been discovering a little known text that survives in Syria.

It is available online in an English translation, so you don't have to learn Syriac to be able to read it.

And this says that the wise men were in fact a group of twelve, and these twelve wise men came from a land which in this manuscript is described as Shia, which seems to me to be the old biblical territory of say Ea spelled s i R.

Now, if that is the case, that manuscript locates the Magi, the twelfth Magi in the south of the Kingdom of Jordan, around the area that is now called Petra.

Furthermore, that Syriac text tells us these magi were priestly characters, high priestly characters, descendants of the royal high priests to all of the House of David.

Wow.

So they weren't just they weren't just wise men from the east.

If we think back into the language of the first Christians, and I think the first Christians around Jerusalem and in Galilee would almost certainly have spoken a form of Hebrew, and in Hebrew the word from the east is the same as the word from ancient times mikdem Wow.

So we have this wonderful Syriac text, quite an early Syriac text, which says that there were twelve people from ancient times who had been guarding all sorts of old traditions and old books and were looking for a star and when they saw it, they set off.

Now that's a wonderful story, and that raises all sorts of questions because Matthew doesn't tell us there were three of them.

Yeah, that's right.

We assume there are three because they're three gifts mentioned.

Right, that's right.

Is uhhah.

But there may have been twelve.

There was another text I read where I think there was something like sixteen or sixty.

You know, there are a number of texts that they're certainly more than three.

But here's the question.

I loved that your research revealed this because it makes sense, Margaret, you contend that these were Jewish priests of that first temple.

Okay, how did they get to Arabia?

Walk me through what happened here seven hundred years before Christ comes along?

I think there was, well, I know there was some sort of cultural revolution in the temple in Jerusalem dated to about six twenty three BCE in the time of King Josiah, and a modernizing group a bit like Protestants actually gained power in the temple and they wanted to be rid of all the old equivalent of high church practices, all the smells and bell stuff.

They wanted a much more modern, let's just keep the rules, refreshed religion.

Shortly after they came to power, the political powers of the day, the Babylonians at this time moved in, conquered Jerusalem, deported the leading characters to Babylon and so forth.

And the remnants of the Old Temple were lost as a result of the Cultural Revolution and then the military disaster.

And at a lot of these the priestly elite who were the victims of the Cultural Revolution had already fled, and they had fled first of all east and then south.

And it looks as though these expulsions had begun in the time of the prophet isaiahs.

So we're looking about seven fifty to seven hundred BC.

Wow.

So just to summarize this, So what you're saying is they're these first Temple priests, if you will, the Royal High priesthood, the Order of Malkisa deck that those who you know attend those who go to Mass, will you know, Catholics certainly hear that term all the time.

The Order of Malchiza deck explain to us.

So they're expelled.

This priestly kept class is expelled and they scattered.

Do they become advisors to the royalty.

I mean they're very educated men.

Obviously they some of them seem to have stayed in Jerusalem, but life got very difficult for them, and as far as I can see, they gradually withdrew themselves.

The end, they were all living in an exile that wasn't the exile in Babylon.

It was an exile in what is now the Kingdom of Jordan, in the Nabertean area.

And from there they kept their first temple traditions, so Solomon's Temple.

They kept those traditions alive.

Now, the leader of this group was the Great Isaiah, And if you think about it, the Christmas prophecies that we use in our church services, the main ones are from Isaiah.

The others in his group were the prophets Micah, Habakuk and Joel.

Now Joel gives us the Wits and Pentecost prophecies.

Micah gives us one of the other great Christmas prophecies Bethley hem ephretar from usual come forth for me, etc.

And then not used in the Western Church, but used in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

There is the prophecy at the beginning of a backup chapter three about the Lord coming and coming from just that part of the world.

MM.

Sot me Margaret this When I first read your research, it all made sense, because you know, there are mosaics of you know, three Babylonian kings wearing little red hats in some church, and that became kind of the visual, if you will, That became part of the tradition.

Then they assign names to them, all those three names Balthasar, Caspar, and what's the other one?

I forget, Melchior.

Those three names simply mean king in different languages.

Why do you think they they assigned a kingship to them?

And where did this tradition of they were three kings come from?

If they were really royal priests of the first Temple.

I suspect it was a half Mariam.

But tradition they were certainly kings, and they were certainly royal.

But in Solomon's temple, the Melchizedek priesthood had belonged to the royal family.

They were the priests what we call the sacral kings, that's what they were called.

And Solomon presided at the consecration of the temple.

We read that story in the first Book of Kings.

So he was also a high priest, and there's a story recorded that in the time of King Ziah.

You remember, Isaiah was called to be a prophet.

In the year that King Oziah died.

Ziah had a great fight, literally a great fight with the other priesthood that was trying to gain power, and he was thrown out at the temple, and the stories he became a leper.

But Zire, as far as I can see, was the last Melchizedek priest who functioned as a Melchizedek in Solomon's temple, And so there was a big change in the way things were done in Jerusalem, and Melchizedek emerges again in Christian tradition.

Just Jesus.

One of the things I love here is it never made sense to me that non believers from the far East, non Jews or Babylonian Pagans, would suddenly be interested in Jewish prophecies.

None of that made sense to me.

But in reading your research, it all falls into place.

If you had these members of the royal priesthood, this expelled class, the descendants of that royal caste thrown out seven hundred years before, who had been studying these prophecies, and they see the star rise, it makes sense that they would go seek out this Messiah.

It doesn't make sense for the others.

It makes absolutely perfect sense.

And if you read this story, it emphasizes that they handed down these traditions farther to some through the generations.

That idea of handing them down through the generations appears in traditional Nativity art, even in the Western Church, because when you see a picture of the three maje Eye, there's always one old man, one middle aged man, and one young man, and that symbolizes handing it down through the generations.

And even the even a supermarket Christmas card that has the Nativity seen on it will have an old man, a middle aged man, and a young man.

That's just a little trace of this tradition.

Yes, I now believe they were likely on a diplomatic mission from the king of Namatia.

Possibly, do you share that idea that that they may have been part of a formal diplomatic mission of a kingdom?

Otherwise, how could they pass into this territory into Judea.

Well, they could have been people of very great influence, so they could have had people still in Jerusalem who supported them.

You remember the story that's told in Luke's Gossible about Anna, the old woman who was hanging around the temple.

She was waiting for the liberation of the people.

The freedom of the people.

Now, this was not, as far as I can see it, freedom from the Romans, although that was the practical manifestation of it.

This was freedom from the current regime in the Temple, which had virtually obliterated the traditions of Solomon's Temple, and they were wanting to go back to the old ways.

That was very important.

So there were people in Jerusalem who were ready to and so Anna, when she sees the child coming to the temple and realizes what has happened, she goes off and does what old ladies do very well.

She tells everybody, everybody she knows he's come.

That's a lovely story.

Ah Well, here's the thing that that I am fascinated by, and I wanted to bring this to people because we often overlook the long history of waiting that the Jewish people had waiting for that Messiah, particularly these members of that first Temple royal priesthood.

If anybody's waiting.

They're really waiting, and they're attentive to these prophecies.

And that we read and hear about the prophecies, we sort of put them out of mind, but they are really central to what's happening here.

Because as your research brings out, Margaret, I have to tell you, it totally reoriented the way I look at the Wise Men and the entire Nativity itself.

And as I said, it's really what provoked me to write this children's book because I wanted to at least plant the seeds of this idea that the wise men and the gifts they brought, this was not a housewarming gift.

There was an intention here.

The wise men brought gold and frankensens and merder.

That's what the scriptures tell on lockfores what each of these gifts revealed about their intentions and who these people might be the wise men.

Let's start with the gold.

How is that tied to the First Temple?

Well, how's that tied to the first Temple?

In the temple, if you look at the descriptions of it, the interior of the temple, the Holy of Holies, that's the central well, the most holy part, the most the inner part of the Temple was completely lined with gold, so it was a golden space.

It was hidden behind the Great Curtain, but it was a golden space.

All the vessels used in the Golden Space were made of gold.

And so the essence of the teaching of the First Temple was represented by gold.

And since the teaching of the First Temple was known as wisdom, wisdom was represented by gold.

And if you look, if you look at the robes of the High Priest, when the Book of Exodus describes the ephod that the High Priest wears, he wears that ephod when he's out in the world, when he's outside the petew heaven that's represented by the temple, and he wears an ephod woven from the four colors of the temple veil, and they represent matter and the creation, but they are interwoven with gold.

And this means that the high priest role was to weave the wisdom of heaven through the fabric of creation.

And that is a lovely sermon in a piece of cloth.

The High Priest wore it.

And you cite Philo of Alexandria in your book.

I remember about talking about the gold in the priestly vestments.

So these, let's assume these are members of that first temple royal priestood.

Seven hundred years later, finally seeing the rise of the Messiah, they go to seek him out.

They find him in Bethlehem.

Why are they giving him that gold?

They are bringing it back as a sign that the essence of the original temple, Solomon's temple is going to be restored by this baby.

Wow.

What about the frankincense, Margaret?

Now well, the frankincense was the dominant element of the incense, and the temple incense was only offered by the high priest.

And when you were made a high priest, the term in Hebrew was they filled his hands.

In other words, when the literal Hebrew, when you read in the English, he was consecrated and made a high priest.

It literally so says they filled his hand and made him a high priest.

So this was it was the burning of the incense that was the prerogative of the high priest.

This is what happened to poor Uziah.

He went in the last Melchizedek priest.

He thought he had the right to burn incense, and these upstart new priests said no, you're not.

You know, it's our turn now, and they threw him out.

So the incense was the sign of the return of the office or the role of the royal high priest.

That was very very important.

Yes, yeah, so, and and then let's talk about the murrhor oil.

So we went through the gold, the frankencense.

Now there's mr Now, murr oil, like frankencense, is from the sap of a tree, and those trees only grew in that Nabateean region to modern day Jordan or Petra.

But this one always seemed odd to me.

Murror oil was used for embalming, we're told, but you say it had another purpose.

In the first temple, murrh oil was the dominant ingredient, the main ingredient of the holy annoyed oil that's described also in the Book of Exodus, and they give you a recipe for it, and they tell you what it's made of, and the dominant ingredient the major agreement is muh oil.

Now, when this myuh oil had been made, it was kept, it was very sacred, and it was used to impart holiness.

So there are three degrees of holiness in the temple.

There's ordinary holiness, which you can catch and you can't pass on.

And then there is holy holiness, which is infectious holiness, and you can pass on.

And then there is the highest level, which is holy holy holiness, and that can only be imparted by the sacred oil.

So if the sacred oil anointed you, you became an infectiously holy person or an infectiously holy thing, and it cut you.

It or he or she could imp heart holiness of all these degrees, and the temple oil was the most sacred part, and the bringing it back was a sign.

That the.

Essence or the means of the old Temple holiness had been restored.

And that is a very very important element of the Magei's gifts.

So that the mirror oil was kept in the Holy of Holies, and it was used to anoint the members of this royal high priesthood after the order of Melchizedek.

Guess yes, And tradition is that it disappeared after the First Temple.

There was no holy oil in the Second Temple, and so the priests of the Second Temple were not anointed high priests, the priests of many garments.

They were given the extra garments of high priesthood.

But they weren't anointed.

And so when the Christians come back and say we have the annoy pointed high priest, this was not only a revolutionary statement.

It was also a statement that this was the Melchizedek priesthood coming back.

The oil had returned.

That's all very important.

So, Margaret, these wise men were not just bringing this child some goodies.

They were actually anointing him with this mirror oil to restore the priesthood and acknowledge this is the final high priest of the Old Temple.

Well, we don't know that they anointed him.

We just told that they brought the oil.

But what is important is that the Christians believed that Jesus was the restorer.

Now've got to take you now to John's Gospel.

John's Gospel, John's account of the Crucifixion.

We're going a long way from the Nativity story now, but it's necessary.

If you read John's account of the crucifixion.

He says that Pilot put on the notice over Jesus' cross.

He said, Jesus, apparently Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews.

Now, the other gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke just say king of the Jews.

But John gives us this extra information, Jesus of Nazareth.

Now, if you read his Greek carefully, he doesn't say Jesus of Nazareth.

He uses the word Nazios with an omeger in the middle, and Nasarios imitates the Hebrew word nsah, which means the restorer or the preserver.

And so Pilot writes on the cross using the words to Saint John, Jesus the restorer or the guardian or the preserver, the king of the Jews.

Jesus dies as the restoring king.

This is the logical end of the story of the wise Men.

The oil has been brought and then the Melchizedek king dies and rises again.

Believable now, because what we always think of these we always think of these wise men as sort of side characters.

In fact, they're crucially important not only to underscoring who Jesus is, but why he came and the significance of him in salvation history.

Oh, yes, absolutely, they are the key.

And Matthew tells us this, and he makes it quite clear, but he uses symbolism, and he talks about the fulfillment of prophecy.

Matthew chapter one before the mage I arrive, and we have the story of Joseph and him discovering that Mary was pregnant, and so forth, and he is told that she is going to fulfill the prophecy of the Virgin.

She'll conceive and bear a child Isaiah seventh.

Now what is interesting there, and this might surprise you, is that if you look in the Dead Sea Scrolls copy of Isaiah, the Great Isaiah Scroll, it doesn't say, ask a sign from the Lord your God, behold the Virgin shall conceive from bear a child.

It says, ask a sign from the Mother of the Lord your God, behold, the virgin Calledness shall conceive and bear a child.

And it's quite clear in the scroll.

It's not in the present Hebrew text.

It's just one letter difference.

One letter.

The Isaiah scroll has an Aleph, and the current Hebrew text, the Massoretic text, we call it that as Ryan.

But if you read that word as it is written, not in the transcriptions.

You've got to look at the photographs or even the scroll itself, and it's quite clear.

It says, ask a sign from the Mother of the Lord your God, behold the Virgin shall conceive and bear a child.

And what do you think that means, Margaret.

It means that.

The mother of the Lord was part of the First Temple expectation.

They believed that the Lord had a heavenly mother, and that is very important.

And she's not called a virgin.

Look at the English translations handles Messiah.

They're all wrong.

It doesn't say a virgin shall conceive.

It says the virgin shall conceive.

Wow.

So this is a very special female figure, the mother of the Lord.

You've written about the astronomical significance of that star, the star that guided the wise men.

We've seen the planetarium show suggesting that Jupiter and Saturn may have been an alignment, or there was a comet in this guy.

Nobody really knows what that is, what that star phenomena was.

But what does your research indicate, Margaret, And how is that tied to these First Temple traditions.

Well, my research here has produced no conclusions.

I keep reading all the new theories and thinking, well, that's another one, isn't it interesting?

I wonder which one is true.

We've probably mild We're probably miles away from the truth on that one, because we've got too many experts and they're always a problem, but the star was an important part of the Messianic tradition.

Now many years ago, I was looking particularly at the when I was writing a little commentary on the Book of Isaiah.

I was looking at this phenomenon of the virgins you'll conceive and bear a son.

And I wondered if this was anything to do with or the timing was anything to do with a particular sign of astronomical sign.

And I was working in the university library and Cambridge, and through a friend who introduced me, I had an amazing mind blowing session with a paleo astronomer in the university.

And I met him in the university team which is what they call the cafe, and he had his laptop there and he was tapping away and he produced for me the night sky as it would have been in Jerusalem, looking east, and I said, I'm looking for a sign that could be the sign of the woman clothed with the sun, so something in the sign of the sun, the constellation Virgo, and something else.

And he found it.

He found exactly what I needed.

He found the sign of the Messiah, which is the planet Venus in the morning star in Hebrew astronomy, and it was passing through the sign of the Sun, and it was visible looking east from Jerusalem, and I said, could you give me a date?

And he kind of potted around and said autumn of seventy three one BC.

And I said, thank you very much.

Indeed, because that was exactly what I was hoping he would say, I hadn't given him this date at all, and I suspect there was a particular astronomical configuration that the mage I were looking for.

Now I'm not an astronomer.

I couldn't possibly check that out.

I was immensely grateful because this was useful information fitted my theory.

What we know from the magi is that they were expecting to see a mighty star, and then the legend that developed around it was that within that star they would see a small child.

And we know that.

A summary of that strange Syriac text was available in Latin in a commentary on Matthew's Gospel that was known in Europe in the Middle Ages, and it was just a summary of this story of the magi and star with the little person side it.

And this inspired some Dutch artists, and there are actually artists who have depicted, meaning the magi, the magi looking up and seeing this amazing star with a little man in the middle of it, and this was the sign of the Messiah.

So there are all these things that come together from across so many cultures and signs, and you think he is a practiced margaret.

Just from my own clarity.

The prophecy is in Isaiah, is it the separable rise from Jerusalem?

Is that the you know that?

No, that's the prophecy in Bilab, the prophecy of the vision of Baylam, that's in numbers twenty three and numbers twenty four.

A startiall rise out of Jacob and so forth.

Now that was recognized very early on as a Messianic prophecy.

And in some early Christian frescoes there is a male figure, possibly a prophet, we don't know, and Mary and the child and the male figure is pointing towards the star.

And we don't know who this male figure is, but he could be Blam because he has this vision of a Messiah and he's going to be the star who rises, but we just don't know.

The star is deeply rooted in the Christian nativity tradition.

If you just go saying is it a conjunction of planets or is it a common or all the rest of it?

That's fine.

That's rather like asking what sort of salt Lot's wife turned into when she turned into a pillar.

We don't actually need to know that.

We need to know why the star was significant.

Right, Yeah, tell me about that journey.

I mean, let's assume they did.

From the early Christian from the first and second century, you have Christian writers saying that the wise men came from Arabia.

Let's assume it is Nabata, the present day Petra.

What is that journey like from present day Petra to Bethelhem.

What kind of danger were these wise men facing?

Well, I don't know.

I've only done it in a tourist bus, to be honest.

It's pretty dry, and even now it's pretty bumpy.

It's pretty daunting territory.

I wouldn't like to have done it.

Although if these maje I really were twelve and they would have come with an entourage and various things.

If they were the remnants of royalty, I imagine they wouldn't have been loan travelers.

But it's pretty arid desert.

It's not the sort of, well, we go to see it because it's biblical scenery, but it's not something we would choose to do.

I think, well, Margaret, your work on this First Temple theology has really been quite revolutionary for people who haven't read your books.

Explain what we've been talking about here all along.

What is First Temple theology and why does it matter to understanding Christianity.

It matters to understanding Christianity because Christianity is rooted in the theology of the First Temple, Solomon's Temple, not in the theology of the Second Temple.

If you assume there is a direct link with or move from Second Temple theology into Christianity, you have to write very long books of very complicated arguments and footnotes, and those are always suspect.

If you assume that Jesus was the preserver and the restorer of the ways of Solomon's Temple, and that Christianity is rooted in the First Temple, which which had royal high priests all those things, and also was the source, of course, of all the prophecies that the Christians picked up.

If you assume that is, he's a much easier case to argue.

And then For example, if you look in Saint John's Gospel, quite fascinating what John is doing when he has Jesus in debate with the Jews, the group he calls the Jews.

And this doesn't render Jesus anti Semitic, as some people are our saying.

What he's doing is comparing the Jews of his time, and they only had that name according to Josephus after the exile.

Before that they're known as the Hebrews, and he is What John is doing is comparing the teaching Jesus and his teaching from the First Temple with the current teaching of the Jews, and he shows how difference it is.

Yeah, Margaret, your work, and I know your exploration of the Nativity and the Christmas story.

It doesn't just rely on the canonical gospels of Matthew and Luke.

You have studied the so called Infancy Gospel of James, which is a you know, outside the canon of the gospel accounts, but it's a tradition from the Coptic Church, even material from the Koran.

You've consulted.

Why and what do these extra biblical sources tell us that Matthew and Luke don't or perhaps they're implied, but don't fully embrace.

Well, if you look at the story in the Infancy Gospel of James, that tells us a lot about the childhood of Mary.

And if you decode that, it shows us that Mary as the little three year old girl who is given to the temple as a gift.

She is symbolic of wisdom and the female figure returning to the temple.

And she stays in the temple.

And then when she is twelve and begins to menstruate, she becomes unclean, and so she has to leave the temple, and she is entrusted to Joseph, who ultimately will marry her, but not until she has given birth to Jesus.

So all this story is highly symbolic.

There are lots of things in it which are symbolic that I tell.

Us about the veil.

What she's doing there, she's a veil weaver.

Tell us what that means.

That tells us, Yes, when Mary was.

In the temple, according to the Infancy Gospel of James, she was one of the young girls in the temple who was actually weaving a new veil for the temple.

Now, it's perfectly possible that a new veil was being woven at that time because Herod was restoring and glorifying the temple.

It was one of his vanity projects, really, and so they probably were weaving a new veil.

And when Mary had left the temple, she continued to work as a temple weaver.

And the story is that when she first or the second time, she was aware of the presence of Gabriel.

And Luke's gospel doesn't say that Mary saw Gabriel.

Mary heard Gabriel.

She was actually working.

According to the Infancy Gospel of James, she was actually working.

She was spinning the wall for the temple veil.

And this is why when you see an icon of the Annunciation and Gabriel is rushing in from the left with this message, Mary is sat on the right and she is spinning red wall.

The message there is that while Mary was weaving literally the new veil of the temple, she was just stating within herself, giving flesh to the one who is going to emerge through that veil and become incarnate among us.

And the veil of the temple represented matter.

It represented earth, air, fire, and water, and the four colors represented that.

Woven together, they were the matter that concealed the glory of God from the eyes of humans.

And so when High Priest comes through the veil, he takes on an ephod as I said earlier, woven from those four colors, woven through with gold.

Mary is depicted as weaving the new veil of the temple.

She is giving flesh to the one who is going to come.

John.

So she's literally the Holy of Holies with the veil, you know, creating the veil.

I mean, that's really what she is at that moment.

It's a beautiful piece of symbolism.

And John is quite clear in the product of the Gospel.

He said, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld the glory.

And Charles Wesley's wonderful Christmas Carol, which I'm sure you sing as well, mailed in flesh the Godhead see Hail incrlauty.

See Charles Wesley knew far more temple theology than most Christian ministers do today.

That's a great pity.

Yeah, No, that's a great line too.

I love that.

I love that line.

In the middle of the song.

I have to ask you about something that's caused a bit of stir the Jordanian lead codices.

You chair the Center for the Study of these Jordanian lead books.

They're small lead books.

Yes, the ones I study in the pages are little tablets that are the size of a bank card, so they're seriously small, and I have to work with huge magnification.

Yes, the first time I was aware of them, I was aware, and this was what two thousands eleven, quite a while ago, and.

They were allegedly found in a cave in Jordan, right, but there's been a lot of controversy about whether.

They're are the controversy.

Others have been found elsewhere, which fortunately are in a better state of preservation.

And the ones, the ones that I have been working on for the last were ten years.

I would think, yes, Sluboleu ten years are really quite well preserved.

And I have been using just three pages from one of these little books that was found outside Jordan, and they have been dismissed because they are not obviously readable.

They have been dismissed as you know, superstitious magic charms and all kinds of stuff, forgeries, that kind of thing.

But in fact they are perfectly readable once you persevere and realize that these were written in a sophisticated code, and everything on them is a series of parallels.

One side of the text has to match the other side of the text, like the writing in the line in Bencira, the Jewish philosopher who says, you know, God created everything in pairs.

And when you start decoding these things, this is what is so fascinating.

You can find in them the roots, not only the roots of the Nativity story, but also the outlines in patterns of what became the traditional Nativity icon, which is a very strange kind of cartoon depiction really, And then you realize why all these funny little pictures around the edge of Mary are put in the order that they are.

So these led books are showing that the Nativity story has its roots way way back.

And I have only recently, about five or six months ago, managed to decode from one of the pages the story that we now read as the Nativity in the Qur'an.

Huh, So that story is ancient.

Also are these?

I thought you told me once before that the Isaiah's prophecies were in some of these.

They are, Yes, they are.

And I strongly suspect that the people who created and certainly the people who preserved.

These things were that school of Isaiah living in exile, the exile profits because find when I'm finding some of the words I'm finding in them are very rare Hebrew words, and Hebrew dictionaries will say, well, this word is only found once in Isaiah, we only find once in Micah, or something like that.

The vocabulary points to this particular points clearly to this particular group of profits.

And so what you're really saying, Margaret, is that these led codices found in caves in Jordan could well be the prayer books, the meditation books of the prophecies of a coming Messiah that the wise men use.

They could be or and I think this is more likely, they could be accurate copies of them, because these books are made, they were cast in molds, and the letters on the surface of these books are above the surface, So it would be very easy to make lots of copies of the same book.

And this is which means you could have lots and lots around and sewed.

It's incredible.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority, the Jordanian government, many scholars insist that these are forgeries.

You would respond, how.

They're not quite simply and I'd be prepared to argue that with anybody.

Some of the people who've said therefore have said that they are in sized lead tablets, that the letters are cut into them.

Well, that shows they never looked at one, because they're not cut into them.

They are above the surface.

The letters are above the surface, so you can't alter them.

If you alter these lead books, you have to melt them down and start again.

So whatever we've got is the original, and we have lots of people have done eminent metallogists have done studies on them.

And I don't understand metallogy.

I just listen with amazement to what these wise people can tell me.

But they are convinced they are very old, that the copies the things I am working on are very old.

I know they exist because I, until I realized how valuable they were, I walked around London with them in my handbag of all things.

Wow, I don't do that, now, that's good, I won't.

I've got to go back to the Christmas Story for a moment, Margaret, before we run out of time.

You wrote something in your book that I found striking.

You wrote, the Christmas Story does not describe the birth of the Son of God.

It describes the incarnation of the Son of God who was born in eternity.

What does that mean, Margaret, Well, that means exactly what the Orthodox Church make quite clear when they talk about the Nativity.

They talk about our Christmas, the Bethlehem story as the Nativity of the Son of God according to the flesh.

Because if you read the evidence of the oldest Hebrew versions of for example, the Book of Deuteronomy, such as is found amongst the Kumanteks, so the pre Christian texts, they tell you quite clearly that there were heavenly beings known as the sons of God.

In the oldest Hebrew tradition, these were the sons of God most High el eleone.

And the firstborn of these, son of God, was named the Lord, and he became the guardian Angel, the special protector of the people of Israel.

And so the oldest stratum of the Old Testament has as its trinity, if you like, the Father, the Mother of the Lord, and their son.

So we have Father, Mother, and son.

And this comes through into Christianity as Father, Holy Spirit, and Son.

And some of the Old I mean the Gospel of the heb of the Gospel written in Hebrew that Jerome knew and consulted in four hundred AD.

He knew that Jesus called the Holy Spirit his heavenly mother.

So when Gabriel tells Mary that her son will be called Son of the Most High, exactly what, Gabriel, and you'll sit on the throne of David.

That's really invoking this language that you're talking about.

Exactly right.

Gabriel got it right.

And if we don't give them the credit for this, the power of the Holy Spirit will overshadow you.

And so the incarnation was not a rather crude version of perhaps a Greek seduction legend where Zeus comes down and you know, seduces a milkmaid and all this kind of thing and produces a demigod.

It was the operation of the Holy Spirit making a new creation.

And that's what you get right at the beginning of Genesis.

You get the Holy Spirit Genesis one, verse two.

You get the Holy Spirit hovering over creation, and she's a female figure there.

It's it's a feminine partisiple maracfa.

She hovers and creation comes.

And we have in the story of the Annunciation, the Holy Spirit overshadowing and the creation comes and as an early Christian gospel, the Gospel of Philip, which has only survived in a Coptic translation.

Philip was clearly dealing with this misconception, and he says, when did a woman ever conceive from a woman?

Which is a very pointed remark.

We know exactly what he's saying, that the incarnation has to be understood as a new creation, not as you know, God as the father and Mary as the mother, which is just a travesty.

Yeah, you've written about how early Christian liturgy incorporated first Temple liturgy, the Eucharist, baptism, even the use of oil and water.

These aren't random innovations.

They're restorations of those ancient practices.

Oh, they are definitely restorations of the ancient practices.

Otherwise, we have to credit the early Christians with incredible creativity in the first forty years when a lot of them were hiding for fear of their lives, and yet this sophisticated theology emerges very very early on, virtually you know, intact fully born.

Unfortunately, due to the early years of persecution, a lot of early Christian writings are lost, and we have none of the early Hebrew writings in our extent.

I have a feeling, it's an increasingly strong and certain feeling, that the little lad books that I am dealing with are the reality behind John's vision of the Angel coming from heaven.

Remember Revelation chapter ten, and this mighty angel surrounded by rainbow, all rest of it.

And he brings a little book which is opened, and he gives it to John, and he says to John, eat it, in other words, absorb what it says, but don't talk about you know, you mustn't speak it.

And when you have the seven thunders sounding in that seventh thunder's just the seven voices, if you think about it.

In Hebrew, what John is being told is the vowels that you need to be able to read these Hebrew consonants, because all those Hebrew tablets that I'm dealing with don't have the consonants with them, so you can read the don't have the vowels with them.

Obviously, you can read the consonants in all sorts of ways.

And John is being told how to read with the seven voices, the seven vowels, how to read this little book with all these strange letters in it.

And then he's told absorb it, eat it, and then office SI.

Before I leave the Christmas story, because all of this is so fascinating, tell me where do you think the wise men left too?

They said they returned home by different ways, but it's not reasonable to think they went back to Matia, is it.

I don't know.

There are all sorts of stories of what happened to the wise men.

That's how they ended up dead in so many different places.

Bodies of the wise Men are all over the place.

The tradition is that one of their stopping places on their way back was the site where the mass Sabah Monastery was later built.

That maybe an old tradition.

Who knows, But certainly where they actually went and what happened to them, we don't know.

There were I think they went to Damascus.

I've read accounts where there's a tradition that believes they went to Damascus and may have even Saint Paul may have even studied with them after his conversion.

Yes, that's in Galatians chapter one.

He says, I went to Arabia for three years?

What was he doing there?

Because when he comes back, he has learnt about his new faith and he roots his new faith earlier than the time of Moses, which means he roots it in the First Temple before the Moses traditions became dominant.

The Moses traditions were there in the First Temple, but they came to dominate in the Second Temple, and they superseded those of the old royal Messianic culture Melchizedek.

Wow.

Yeah.

And then throughout when this gap was filled by the Moses figure, because over the Second Temple period, Moses became more and more important, and he was no longer the prophet who brought the people out of Israel.

He becomes the God and king of his people.

That's Philo.

Margaret Parker, before I let you go, it's Christmas time again.

Families are gathering, they're reading the Nativity story from Luke, or they'll hear it again at church.

What's the one thing they should understand or embrace so they hear it differently this year and in a deeper way.

Don't try to look for the historical details.

You have investigative documentary films going around saying things like what was the upper room, what was the lower room, what was the stable, what was this?

What was that?

This is not what the story's about.

It's a deeply mysterious record of how the first Christians recorded what they thought of as significant in those events.

They linked them to the ancient prophecies.

They limited their stories to the parts that linked to the old prophecies.

We're not told what Mary used for nappies because diope as you would call them, because they know there's no prophecy about those.

But this is the sort of wrong question that is asked about the Nativity stories.

We accept that they are a mystery, going deep, deep deep, accept them, love them, explore them, and then be thankful for them.

Yeah.

No, Well, I love that your work has sort of unveiled that mystery a bit, particularly this interaction of the wise men, who I see is the link from that ancient old temple, that first temple worship that you know, the first breath of God if you will, among his people, and the practice of their faith and becoming of the Messiah.

That really is the link.

So for me, the lights went on when I started reading your work.

I'll give you the last word.

Well, I'm pleased the lights went on.

It's so so important.

We are living in a generation that is losing touch with real biblical scholarship.

It's being seduced and lured away by all sorts of fashionable things.

This sort of discipline, that sort of study, and they belong in departments university, departments of literature, rhetoric, social study, gender studies, all sorts of things.

That's fine study then, but not in a department of biblical studies.

Please, let's stary Bible.

We are a discipline.

We are an ancient and proud discipline.

Selling out to all these new new kids on the block is not going to do us any good at all.

Yeah.

Well, Margaret, I also see the contemporary overlays of what you're talking about, particularly that early the vying in that early Temple, the rebellion, if you will, against those ancient traditions.

We see that in Catholicism, even in the in the Protestant churches as well, that sort of rebellion against the old ways, the ancient ways, the expulsion of the Latin Mass and the rising of the New Mass, and that battle still going on.

So it feels very all of this feels very contemporary.

In some ways, people are destroying what they don't understand instead of trying to understand it, and that's pity.

That's a pity.

Let's throw out all this old junk because we don't know what it is.

Now, you get through it and see if you can find why all previous generations valued it.

They could all been wrong.

Margaret.

I love your insight.

I also love that warning.

If you will, as we step into Christmas, embrace the mystery.

Embrace the mystery that not only of this story, but in the moment we're in and God's hand in our lives.

Thank you so much for being here.

It's been lovely.

I've enjoyed it.

You know what strikes me about Margaret Barker's work.

It reminds us of the Jewish roots of this Christmas story we've forgotten.

These are Jews operating within the tradition of ancient Jewish worship, witnessing the fulfillment of these prophecies.

And the magi weren't kings from the Fari's, but very likely priests from the Orient, meaning east of Jerusalem.

They were exiled priests, probably carrying these sacred instruments needed to anoint the royal High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, who would enter the Holy of Holies not made by human hands.

Margaret Barker's book Christmas the original story is well worth reading, and I hope you'll think about Gold and Frankenson's and Mr and those Wise Men in a whole new way.

And my picture book The Wise Men Who Found Christmas is a wonderful way to introduce your family to the real wise Men.

And it's a fun read along, and it will situate this historically, and I think give the story and the Wise Men new vitality as you go into the Christmas season.

I hope you'll come back to a royal Grande soon.

Why live a dry, constricted life when if you fill it with good things, it can flow into a broad, thriving Arroyo Grande.

I'm Raymond Arroyo.

Make sure you subscribe like this episode, Merry, Merry Christmas, and thanks for diving in.

We'll see you next time.

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