In mass late yesterday - the Catholic Church operates on the Jewish time system of beginning the day at sundown - it was the feast of the Epiphany, the great peak of the Christmas season recounting how the wise men from the east visited the baby Jesus and brought him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Christians call it Epiphany, meaning, manifestation, because it's the commemoration of how these foreign scholars were the first to recognize the baby Jesus as savior. The scholars, known as Magi, were so sure about this that they traveled more than a thousand miles following a mysterious star that appeared in the sky, which, their own holy books told them to follow to find a savior. For Christians, it's a startling story because those guys had to have some kind of hardcore faith, given the cost, rigors and danger of travel in those days, with just the chimerical specter of a star as guide, which, scholars to this day still can't satisfactorily explain. A couple years ago, I called the Vatican Observatory to ask them what natural phenomenon the star of Bethlehem followed by the wise men likely was and they said they had nothing. Nothing they had computed with their maps or timelines, and all of the theories out there were wrong, too, so they suspected it really might have been a miracle.

The Magi, by James Tissot / Minneapolis Institute of the Arts / public domain

The priest, in his homily, told the parishioners the Magi came from 'someplace like Saudi Arabia' in the Middle East. Anyone who knows this stuff knows it was Iran. The Magi were Persian. I suspected the priest was trying to keep the word 'Iran' out of his homily because he didn't want to bring up any associations with the news.

Which was kind of a shame. Everyone in the world these days is thinking of Iran, owing to the specter of war, President Trump's crushing of a longtime terrorist kingpin, and the likelihood of a crumbling regime that is utterly discredited. Iranians themselves want the dictatorship out, they have been protesting with intensity since 2017, wanting to shake free of the corrupt Shi'ite religious dictatorship. Some of them despise the oppressive mullah regime so much they want to restore the Shah. Others want to restore Iran to its original faith, Zoroastrianism, which, coincidences, was the faith of the Magi. At American Thinker we have had many pieces about how Iranians love attending Zoroastrian festivals feared by the mullahs.

Georgetown scholar Shireen T. Hunter, premising her piece on how Saudi satraps love to hurl the word 'Magi' at the Iranians as an insult, wrote this in 2016 about the original faith of the Magi:

In fact, Zoroastrianism is the first of the world’s monotheistic religions, although it is often seen as dualistic because it recognizes the existence of an evil force (Ahriman) that fights the good God (Ahura Mazda). But, as in the Old Testament, the good God ultimately triumphs. Zoroastrianism has a sophisticated cosmology and is the foundation of many principles that are part of the Abrahamic religions, including the abstract concepts of heaven, hell, a bridge of judgment, a cosmic denouement at the end of the world, and the coming of a messiah, or Mahdi (Saoyeshant) in Zoroastrianism. In fact, Zoroastrianism offers the first dialectic rather than circular understanding of human history and destiny. The conflict between two opposing forces leads to a final denouement rather than perpetual reincarnations or the soul’s absorption into a vast center of energy. It’s ironic that Westerners, with their emphasis on the battle between good and evil on display during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, do not recognize its source. Zoroastrianism recognizes free will and enjoins good thoughts, good works, and good words. It is a positive religion and emphasizes the role that the individual should play in the ultimate victory of good over evil. Also a happy religion, its festivals outnumber its mourning ceremonies.

Based on what's coming out now, Magi is probably not an insult to Iranians these days.

To a lot of Christians, that makes Epiphany Sunday pretty special. The story gives us a religious connection, a link, to Iran, as Iran tries to get rid of its detested mullahs. The Jewish people have always had an unusually close and friendly connection with Iran. The Christians now have something to identify with around Iran, too. The Magi have brought us a an interesting tie to the first two Abrahamaic faith right now. Can Christians call it another gift of the Magi, this common feeling we have with Zoroastrian Iran? It's religious, it's mystical, maybe it is just a coincidence. But we don't understand all the vastly greater forces than ourselves out there churning events, so it's not known. For now, it's vividly amazing that the entire Christian world, whether they know it or not, is thinking about something great to their own faith that came from Iran.