Does the Bible actually specify that they were three wisemen who visited baby Jesus?

 

No. And that is not the only thing fishy about this tale.

As a child, I always found the story of the ‘Three Wise Men’ suspect. I knew enough about stars to know that they could not come to ‘rest’ above an individual building, and so would not lead anyone to the stable where Jesus was supposedly born.

Subsequent things I learned undermined my belief in the story even more:

1. there were not three wise men, as the number is not stated. ‘Three’ was a convenient number (due to the three gifts), and the Bible likes threes for some reason. This introduced me to the idea that religious authority figures just made stuff up to suit their purposes.
2. I discovered that that were not ‘wise men’ at all, but astrologers. But wait a minute, doesn’t the Bible condemn astrology as a form of divination of Satan? Yet here is God using practitioners of a Satanic black art showing us where the Savior was born!
3. I had always been led to believe that that Matthew and Luke accounts of the birth of Jesus were complementary, just telling the same story from different ‘perspectives’. Once I looked into this in more depth, it became obviously that these were two conflicting and irreconcilable narratives, written for theological purposes, and not giving us a reliable historical account at all.
4. I discovered that Mark was the original gospel written, and that he seemed to be utterly unaware of any birth story about Jesus. This compounded my doubts. Equally, the apostle Paul seems to have no clue about Jesus being born in Bethlehem - something that would have been important to a Pharisaic Jew.

These all pointed to the whole birth narratives about Jesus as being completely fictional, and while the story of the wise men is a lovely tale for children to dress up for in their nativity plays, that all it is - a made-up story.