Traverse Afar

Professor Tom O’Loughlin, of the University of Wales (Lampeter), is a Catholic priest. Yet in Ian Hislop’s excellent Radio Four programme on the Three Wise Men this morning, he went out of his way to dismiss the suggestion, not only that they fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy that the Church has always held them to have fulfilled, but that they ever really existed at all.

It fell to Dr Rowan Williams to explain that astrologically minded people with partly Jewish backgrounds on the Roman Empire’s fringes generally, and in Persia in particular, certainly did exist, and might perfectly easily have done exactly as described.

We encounter God as they did, first in the material world created through the Word (the Star), then in the written Word (the Prophets, whose writings are consulted by Herod’s advisors), and finally in and as the Word Incarnate, before Whom we “fall down and worship” as King (gold), God (frankincense) and Sacrifice (myrrh). It matters utterly that they really did this as an historical event, our template within actually existing time and space. And there is no reason whatever to think that they did not.

Did Father O’Loughlin say this? No? (Nor did Dr Williams, but that is not my problem.) Well, then, why not?