Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE VISIT OF THE MAGI. " 0 Jerusalem, look about thee toward the east, and behold the joy that cometh unto thee from God."?Babuch iv. 86. The brief narrative of the Visit of the Magi, recorded in the second chapter of St. Matthew, is of the deepest interest in the history of Christianity. It is, in the first place, the Epiphany, or Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles. It brings the facts of the Gospel history into close connection with Jewish belief, with ancient prophecy, with secular history, and with modern science; and in doing so it furnishes us with new confirmations of our faith, derived incidentally, and therefore in the most unsuspicious manner, from indisputable and unexpected quarters. Herod the Great, who, after a life of splendid misery and criminal success, had now sunk into the jealous decrepitude of his savage old age, was residing in his new palace on Zion, when, half maddened as he was already by the crimes of his past career, he was thrown into a fresh paroxysm of alarm and anxiety by the visit of some Eastern Magi, bearing the strange intelligence that they had seen in the East1 the star of a "The expression might, perhaps, be rendered, "at its rising" (the plnral AvoroXal, not imroAj;, is used for " the east," in Matt. ii. 1); but this would seem to require abrov, and docs not well suit verse 9. HEROD THE GREAT. 25 new-born king of the Jews, and had come to worship him. Herod, a mere Idumsean usurper, a more than suspected apostate, the detested tyrant over an unwilling people, the sacrilegious plunderer of the tomb of Davidl ?Herod, a descendant of the despised Ishmael and the hated Esau, heard the tidings with a terror and indignation which it was hard to dissimulate. The grandson of one who, as was believed, had been a ...

ISBN-13: 9781116388640 ISBN-10: 1116388642 Publisher: BiblioLife Publish Date: October 2009 Page Count: 530 Related Categories Books > Religion > Biblical Biography - New Testament Books > History > General