Family Theater: The Other Wise Man

Family Theatre presents Otto Kruger and Jeff Chandler. From Hollywood, the mutual network in cooperation with Family Theatre Incorporated brings you Jeff Chandler in Henry Van Dyke's The Other Wise Man. To introduce the drama, your host and narrator, Otto Kruger.

Thank you Gene Baker. Friends, you all know the story of the three Wise Men of the East. Now they travel from far away to offer their gifts at the major cradle in Bethlehem. But have you ever heard the story of the other wise man, who also saw the star in its rising and set out to follow it?

The story of the fourth pilgrim, whose great desire to pay tribute to the king of Israel, was denied, yet accomplished in the denial. Allow me to tell it to you then, as Henry Van Dyke first told it in his beautiful and touching tale of the other wise man.

The story that we first heard in the Hall of Dreams, in the Palace of the Hearts of Man. In the days when Augustus Caesar was master of many kings and Herod reigned in Jerusalem, there lived in the city of Persia a certain man named Atavan, the median.

Tall he was in dark with brilliant eyes. His brow that of a dreamer, his mouth that of a man of war. And upon the night that we now tell of, he was seated in an upper chamber of his house, speaking gravely to some visitors.

Men who, like Artuban, wore the long white robe and pointed cap of the fire-worshippers, the garb and dress of the ancient priesthood of the match-eye. Tonight, my father and friends, let us speak of the new light and truth that lie in the prophecies of the ancient wise men of Kaldir.