PK is an acronym for Pastor’s Kid and that is what I was. When the church doors opened, I was there, planting my bum in the theater chair. Resumes such as that one pretty much qualifies me to make the following claim. Some of you are already rolling your eyes, expecting me to say something with the raving eyes of a madman like: “The Bible always used to say three wise men and now it doesn’t.” Well, if that’s what you were thinking, then you’re wrong. I wasn’t going to make any such claim. Let me finish a sentence without interruptions for once. Stop making up arguments and then firing back with your rebuttals.

What I was going to say is, the worship leader never could seem to instruct us to turn to ‘We Three Kings’ in the hymnal, it was one page number or another, without an annoyed congregant turning around and telling me: “It never says there were three of them in the Bible. It was three gifts which they gave. Why must we assume it was only one type of gift per person? They may have been twelve or twenty in number, an entire caravan of them for all we know.” I am paraphrasing, of course. Or am I exaggerating? Conveying frustration is more like it. I would then watch the said person turn around and grudgingly sing along, year after year after year. And so, I would sit there in my chair, a young Noel Joshua Hadley, listening to the words of ‘We Three Kings,’ wondering what else we assume the Bible says but which it doesn’t, like eating unclean animals or swapping the Sabbath to Sunday and doing away with the holy days, replacing it with Easter and Christmas

I have plenty more to say on the three Magi issue but you’ll have to read it either in ‘The Lion & the Lamb’ PDF or in the book of the same name. A $5 TUC pass grants you access to my entire Archives of documents.