I thought it must be accurate, as a matter of fact I was an angel at church when I was a kid!
BELIEF:
Three wise men (or kings in some traditions) visited Jesus at the time of his birth.
STATUS:
MYTH
Perhaps you have seen paintings or nativity scenes that depict the infant Jesus lying in a manger, surrounded by three wise men bearing gifts. This image, however, is fiction, not fact.
It is true that a delegation from the East paid homage to young Jesus. These visitors, though, were really astrologers. (Matthew 2:1, The New English Bible; The Bible—An American Translation) And did they find Jesus nestled in a manger? No; they visited him in a house. Evidently, they arrived some months after Jesus’ birth.—Matthew 2:9-11.
As to the number of visitors, were there 2? 3? 30? The Bible does not say. Perhaps the traditional number of three arose from their three types of gifts. (Matthew 2:11) Some have even proposed that each of the so-called wise men represented a different race of mankind. But that idea is not found in the Scriptures. Rather, as one Gospel commentary notes, this particular myth is the product of “an eighth-century historian with a vivid imagination.”
