Melchior

Melchior is the name given in Western Christian tradition to one of the Magi who, according to the Gospel of Matthew, came from the East to honor the newborn Jesus. The Gospel narrative (Matthew 2:1–12) states that magi appeared in Jerusalem asking where the child born king of the Jews might be found, for they had seen his star at its rising and had come to pay him homage. After Herod consulted the chief priests and scribes, the visitors were directed to Bethlehem. There they found the child with Mary his mother, offered gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and, warned in a dream not to return to Herod, departed for their own country by another road. The evangelist does not name the visitors, does not call them kings, and does not state that there were three; the number three was inferred from the three gifts. Any personal biography of Melchior is therefore a product of later Christian tradition rather than of first-century historical documentation.

The personal names of the Magi first appear in sources of late antiquity. A Latin version of a Greek chronicle known as the Excerpta Latina Barbari, compiled in the sixth century, already records forms resembling Bithisarea, Melichior, and Gathaspa. In the Latin West the names Caspar (or Gaspar), Melchior, and Balthasar became conventional from about the eighth century onward. Medieval commentators and artists assigned each figure a characteristic age, region, and gift. Melchior was most often portrayed as the eldest of the three, frequently associated with Persia or more broadly with Europe or the Near East, and identified as the bearer of gold, a gift read as acknowledging the kingship of Christ. These attributions were never entirely uniform. Syriac, Armenian, and Ethiopian traditions used different names and sometimes a different number of Magi, and even in the West the pairing of gifts and homelands could vary from one manuscript or artwork to another.

From the high Middle Ages an elaborate legendary vita circulated, given classic form in the fourteenth-century Historia Trium Regum associated with John of Hildesheim. In such accounts the three kings meet, follow the star, worship the Child, are later baptized by the apostle Thomas, and die after long lives. These stories belong to pious romance; they cannot be corroborated by independent historical evidence and should not be treated as datable biography. Relics believed to be those of the Magi were kept at Milan until 1164, when Rainald of Dassel, archbishop of Cologne and chancellor of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, transferred them to Cologne. They have since been housed in the Shrine of the Three Kings in Cologne Cathedral, a major pilgrimage focus in the Rhineland. Liturgically the Magi are commemorated on the feast of the Epiphany, 6 January, which in Western Christianity celebrates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. Popular customs such as the blessing of chalk and the inscription of the letters C+M+B on doorways at Epiphany preserve their memory in household devotion.

In the visual arts of the Latin West Melchior is customarily an elderly, bearded man, often of European appearance, kneeling as he presents gold. His companions are frequently differentiated by age and, from the later Middle Ages, by ethnicity, so that the three together can represent the ages of man or the known continents. No contemporary record supplies a verified year of birth or death, a native city, a spouse, or children for Melchior as an individual. He was not a pope or a patriarch, nor a member of a religious order. Formal papal canonization in the later juridical sense was not applied to the Magi; their cult grew from scriptural narrative, liturgical celebration of Epiphany, and the prestige of the Cologne relics. Melchior therefore stands as a named embodiment of the unnamed biblical Magi: a figure whose life, as it is told, is the history of Christian interpretation, art, and pilgrimage rather than a recoverable individual career in the first century.