Scholars studying Matthew's infancy narrative generally read the visit of the magi as serving a clear theological purpose within the Gospel's structure: it presents Gentile outsiders, associated with astrology and foreign wisdom traditions that Jewish scripture elsewhere treats with suspicion, recognizing and honoring Jesus as king even before many of his own people do, foreshadowing the wider Gentile mission Matthew's Gospel anticipates unfolding after Jesus's resurrection.
The episode also functions to draw a contrast between the magi's sincere homage and Herod's murderous hostility, structuring the surrounding narrative, the visit, Herod's deception, the massacre and the flight into Egypt, as a connected sequence illustrating both the recognition and the rejection Jesus's birth provokes, themes Matthew develops further across the rest of his Gospel.
Historians note that Matthew's account, read on its own terms as history, raises questions that the text does not resolve, including how a star could move ahead of travelers and come to rest over a specific house, details more consistent with a symbolic narrative device than an observable astronomical phenomenon, without this literary reading requiring a judgment on whether some historical visit of foreign dignitaries, in whatever form, may lie somewhere behind the story as Matthew has shaped it.