Over the next month, I'll be offering thoughts on the Nativity set
model, a large papercraft crèche that you can find and download here:
Advent Calendar Day 10: Balthazar
In yesterday’s write-ups I discussed why we default to three
as the number for the magi; today I’ll touch on why we give them kingly status.
Early Christian writers (including some of those who penned
the New Testament) made a concerted effort to tie Christ with scripture of the
past, and the magi-as-kings interpretation is a post-Biblical example of this
continued theological tradition. Though
Psalm 72 (including the verse pertinent to this write-up, “May all kings bow
down to him, may all nations serve him”) is clearly a literal blessing/prayer
from David to his son Solomon, it becomes viewed around the 600s as a prophecy
about Christ, a complete departure from its original intent, but one that quickly
cements itself in the Church. The problem
is that, as prophecy, it leaves some holes, especially a notable lack of kings
bowing before Christ. For some, EVENTUAL bowing hundreds of years later by kings and emperors was enough, but some thought it ought to reflect events during his lifetime. Thus, we see the magi
transformed into kings in order to account for this theological addition.
So this creates some obstacles: the kings are probably not
from the same country, or else they would not be true kings. So the all-Persian/all-Babylonian grouping
disappears, and we begin to see the varied ethnicity that has become such a
staple of nativity depictions.
In the 700s, global sociology, at least for Christians, was viewed through a Noahic
lens, with the assumption that all of the world’s population descended from the
three sons of Noah: Japeth populating Europe, Shem populating Asia, and Ham
populating Africa (this latter notion would be used to justify slavery in the
United States, citing that Noah’s curse on Ham’s son extended to all his
offspring, and that this curse is slavery).
With the world thus divided, the kings best serve prophetic
purpose by operating as a stand-in for their continents as a whole. So we see each given a fixed position and
clear ethnicity, elements which exist to some degree or another to this
day. And while two of the kings,
Melchior and Caspar, are all over the place, race-wise, Balthazar has been
consistently depicted as Sub-Saharan African for the last six hundred years (a
likely result of the increased presence of black people in Europe), though his
blackness finds its way into writing and art as far back as the 1100s.
Balthazar, whose name, along with those of the other two
kings, comes from an early 4th century Greek source, serves a
symbolic function beyond the geographic.
Like the other kings, he takes on the responsibility of being a stand-in
for a third of mankind, and as such represents the first stage of life. Balthazar is young, about twenty, the avatar
of youth. And though I’ve never read
commentary saying so, I’d like to think that this gives added bravado to the
gift of myrrh (each of the named gifts is associated with a specific king, traditionally, and myrrh is linked with with Balthazar).
Myrrh is an embalming fluid, and I’d like to think that it’s a statement
on the cavalarity with which the young regard mortality.
Balthazar is sometimes depicted riding an elephant, but I
don’t like that approach. It doesn’t
make much sense for someone from Nubia/the Sudan (my take) to be riding an Indian
elephant, and there’s little precedent for domesticated African elephants. The latter also gives a kind of
Africa-as-fantasy vibe that I think has bad social repercussions. I gave him a dromedary, which would have been
abundant in Nubia. And the color
palette? Yanked from Franco Zefferelli’s
Jesus of Nazareth miniseries, in
which Balthazar is played by James Earl Jones.
I’ve always been a big fan of Zefferelli’s color choices (both in film
and his art direction for opera) and thought this would be a good place to give
a nod to his influence.
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