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Mat_2:12. χρηματισθέντες ] Vulgate correctly renders: responso accepto: passages in Wetstein, Kypke, Krebs, and Loesner. The question that preceded is presupposed, Luk_2:26; Heb_11:7. Comp. on Act_10:22. Bengel well says: “Sic optarant vel rogarant.” The passive is found in this meaning only in the New Testament and in Josephus (Antt. iii. 8. 8, xi. 8. 4).
ἀνακάμψαι … ἀνεχώρησαν ] The latter is not: they turned back (Mat_2:13-14; Mat_2:22; Mat_4:12), but they withdrew, went away, made off; ἀνακάμψαι is “cursum reflectere.” They were not to turn back to Herod, from whom they had come hither, and that with the instruction, Mat_2:8, but were to select another way to their home, Luk_10:6; Act_18:21; Heb_11:15; Herod. ii. 8; Plat. Phaed. p. 72 B; Diod. Sic. iii. 54.
The divine direction had for its object, that Herod should not at once take measures against the true Child who was pointed at.
REMARK.
The narrative regarding the Magi, as it bears in Matthew the stamp of real history, has its profound truth in the ideal sphere, in which the Messianic idea, which was afterwards set forth, realized in all its glory in the historical life of Jesus, surrounded the little known childhood of this life with the thoughtful legends—its own creation—preserved in Matthew and Luke. The ideal truth of these legends lies in their corresponding relation to the marvellous greatness of the later life of the Lord and His world-embracing work; they are thereby very definitely distinguished from the legendary poetry, which assumed various shapes in the Apocryphal narratives of the infancy. Whether, moreover, any real fact may have lain at the basis of the narrative of the Magi,[368] and what the nature of this is, cannot be more minutely ascertained. Certainly Eastern astrologers may, according to the divine appointment, have read in the stars the birth of the Jewish Messiah, who was to be the light of the heathen, and with this knowledge have come to Jerusalem; but how easily did the further miraculous formation of the history lay hold of the popular belief in the appearance of a miraculous star at the birth of the Messiah (see Fabricius, Cod. pseudepigr. I. p. 584 f.; Schoettgen, II. p. 531; Bertholdt, Christol. § 14),—a belief which probably had its basis in Num_24:17 compared with Isa_60:1 ff. (Schoettgen, II. p. 151 f.), as well as in the Messianic expectation that foreign nations would bring gifts to the Messiah (Psalms 72; Isaiah 60), as on other occasions, also, rich temple gifts had arrived from the East (Zec_6:9 ff.). It was easy to connect with this, by way of antithesis to this divine glorifying of the child, the crafty and murderous interference of Herod as the type of decided hostility, with which the ruling power of the world, necessarily and conformably to experience, entered with cunning and violence the lists against the manifested Messiah (Luk_1:51 f.), but in vain. If we were to regard the whole narrative, with its details, as actual fact (see amongst the moderns, especially Ebrard and Gerlach), the matter would be very easily decided; the difficulties also which have been raised against so extraordinary an astral phenomenon, both in itself and from the science of optics, would be authoritatively removed by means of its miraculous nature (Eusebius, Demost. ev. 9; John of Damascus, de fide orthod. ii. 7), but there would still remain unexplained the impolitic cunning and falsehood of the otherwise so sly and crafty Herod, who allows the Magi to depart without even a guide to make sure of his designs, and without arrangements of any other kind, his expenditure of vigilance and bloodshed, which was as unnecessary as it was without result, and the altogether irreconcilable contradiction between our account and the history narrated by Luke,[369] according to which the child Jesus received homage of an altogether different kind, and is not threatened by any sort of persecution, but at the date when the Magi must have arrived, had been for a long time out of Bethlehem (Luk_2:39). Considering the legendary character of the star phenomenon, it is not adapted to serve as a chronological determination of the birth of Christ, for which purpose it has been used, especially by Wieseler and Anger, who calculate, according to it, the beginning of the year 750 as the date of that birth. (Ideler, Münter, Schubert, Huschke, Ebrard, 747; Kepler, 748; Lichtenstein and Weigl, 749; Wurm, 751; Seyffarth, 752.)
[368] Schleiermacher, Schr. d. Lukas, p. 47, L. J. p. 75, assigned a symbolical character to the narrative. According to Bleek, the symbolical point of view (“the first destinies of the Christian church being, as it were, reflected”) predominated at least in the mind of the first author; but the preference in point of historical truth is due to Luke. According to de Wette, the narratives contained in ch. 2 are to be regarded more with a dogmatico-religious than with a strictly historical eye; the dangers surrounding the child Jesus are a type of the persecutions awaiting the Messiah and His church, and an imitation of the dangers which threatened the life of the child Moses, and so on. According to Weisse, what is set forth is the recognition which Christianity met with amongst the heathen, the hatred it experienced amongst the Jews, and then how it took refuge amongst the Hellenists in Egypt. According to Ewald, the inner truth of the narrative is the heavenly Light, and the division amongst men, on the other hand, into the faith of the heathen and the hatred of the Jews. According to Hilgenfeld, it is the expression of the world-historical importance of Jesus, and of the recognition which, amid the hostility of the Jews, He was to find precisely amongst the heathen. According to Köstlin, the narrative has an apologetic object, to declare Jesus in a miraculous manner to be βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων , at the basis of which, perhaps, was the constellation of the year 747. According to Keim, it is an ideal history, the true form of which stands before the eyes of the Christians of all ages, and which proceeded from the fundamental thought of the conflict of the Messiah with the pseudo-Messias (Herod).
[369] The assumption (Paulus, Olshausen, Wieseler, Lichtenstein, Ebrard) that the presentation in the temple took place before the arrival of the Magi, breaks down at once before Luk_2:39. See, besides, Strauss, I. p. 284 ff. The accounts in Matthew and Luke are irreconcilable (Schleiermacher, L. J. pp. 65 ff., 75). This is also recognised by Bleek, who gives the preference to Luke.