The Venerable Bede - Namer of the Wise Men

It’s probably from the Venerable Bede, an 8th century Anglo-Saxon historian, that we get the names of the Magi. He wrote...

The magi were the ones who gave gifts to the Lord. The first is said to have been Melchior,
an old man with white hair and a long beard...who offered gold to the Lord as a king. The second, Gaspar by name, young and beardless and ruddy complexioned... honored him as God by his gift of incense, an oblation worthy of divinity. The third, black-skinned and heavily bearded, named Balthasar... by his gift of myrrh testified to the Son of Man who was to die.

Even poor Mr. Bede was the victim of a cultural misinterpretation, however...

Bede was born in Britain in 672 or 673 A.D., the height of “the dark ages.” An Anglo-Saxon, he was a Benedictine monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter and its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, both in the English county of Durham. He was placed in the monastery at the age of seven, he became a deacon when he was nineteen, and a priest at thirty, remaining a priest for the rest of his life. It is not clear whether he was of noble birth but we do know he was well known as an author and scholar. His most famous work was The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In that work of five books and 400 pages, Bede describes the history of England, ecclesiastical and political, from the time of Caesar to the date of its completion in 731. This work gained him the title "The father of English history".

Bede became known as Venerable Bede soon after his death on May 25, 735. He was not considered for sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church, so the title “venerable” is somewhat unusual. His title is believed to come from a mistranslation of the Latin inscription on his tomb in Durham Cathedral. It was intended to be: "Here lie the venerable bones of Bede," but it was wrongly interpreted as: "Here lie the bones of the Venerable Bede." And the name stuck. So did his names for the 3 Wise Men!