One netfriend wrote:

In Zoroastrianism, the magi were/are simply priests, and not the head ones at that. But as Zoroastrian priests, they would be used to pondering symbols and looking for signs.

‘…has the God who prepared the gospel for all peoples also prepared all peoples for the gospel?’

– Don Richardson, ‘Eternity in Their Hearts’ p. 33

Another replied:

Priests they may be; but what does that imply? It is a central thesis of Margaret Wertheim’s *Pythagoras’ Trousers. God, Physics and the Gender Wars*, that science as we know it today is permeated with semi-conscious priestly symbolism, and that this is why so many scientists are male. This priestly symbolism, she argues, has come from the time of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, for whom mathematics was the language of the divine.

So is the symbolism of the Magi that of science and religion finding their common source? A thousand years later, based largely on the notion of the “incarnation”, theologians began looking for God in both the “Book of Scripture” and the “Book of Nature”. The latter enterprise gave birth to modern science.