meeting
2003
Exegesis
Gospel,
and Historicity Jesus Spoke Aramaic
The women at the sepulcher and the empty tomb: Msgr César
Franco and Fr Garcia talk about the recent studies of the School of Biblical
Exegesis of
Madrid,
focusing on the Aramaic substrate of the Gospels and the errors in the Greek
text narrating the Resurrection
by Alberto Savorana
In the early 1990s, the question of the historicity of the Gospels was the topic
of a cultural battle that in the columns of the weekly magazine Il Sabato and
the monthly 30Giorni (30Days), as well as the Meeting in Rimini, galvanized the
attention of the cultural and ecclesial world. Its starting point was the studies
done by the late Fr O’Callagan on the Qumran scrolls which offered historical
documentation of the contemporaneousness of the Gospel narrative and the events
narrated (see Stefano Alberto, Vangelo e storicità [Gospel and Historicity],
Milan, BUR 1995). The session on this question at the Meeting was tied to this
battle, approaching it from another point of view. It focused not on the ancient
fragments of scrolls found in the desert, but on the study of the language of
the Gospels, which is at the center of the attention of a group of exegetes from
the “School of Madrid,” whose point of reference is the San Damaso
Theology School in Madrid. Fr Julián Carrón, who also belongs to
the School of Madrid, was present at the session.
It all started with the enthusiasm that an elderly professor of Holy Scriptures
and Biblical Exegesis, Fr Mariano Herranz, was able to communicate to a group
of students in the Seminary of Madrid, starting from his revolutionary insights
into the Aramaic–the language spoken by Jesus–substrate of the Gospels.
This was the beginning of an adventure that launched them on a battle against
two centuries of Biblical exegesis that maintained the mythical, legendary character
of the Gospels, as though the early Christian communities had invented for themselves
the myth of a Jesus who was the Son of God, the incarnation of Being and Mystery.
Two of these students, now scholars in their own right, were at the Meeting in
Rimini, Italy, in August of this year to report on the most recent studies about
the historicity of the accounts of the Resurrection of Christ: Msgr César
Augusto Franco Martìnez, Auxiliary Bishop of Madrid, and José Miguel
Garcia, Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the San Damaso Theology School
in Madrid.
Anomalies of redaction and meaning
Bishop Franco began by observing, “For about six years, we have been realizing
that the first task of New Testament scholars is to identify the anomalies of
redaction and meaning in the Greek text. This is not always easy, because in
a good number of cases we are so used to these anomalies that we read and reread
them without noticing anything strange. Only after taking this first step can
we go on to the second one, which consists of explaining how this strangeness
of the Greek text could have come to be, a strangeness that for more than 200
years has presented a very serious obstacle to the affirmation of the historicity
of the Gospels.”
He then offered the fruit of the latest research on Chapter 20 of the Gospel
of John. “Even though it seems odd, we can state that the pages of the
Gospel with the greatest number of obscure or incomprehensible points are precisely
those that are of the greatest importance for Christian faith in Jesus Christ.” He
cited the accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb and of Jesus’ appearances
in Mark, Matthew, and John, pointing out the incongruities of the Greek text
when compared with the Aramaic.
Reconstruction of the Gospel account
The story as we all know it goes like this:
“
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and
Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint Him. And very early on
the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They
had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from
the entrance to the tomb?’ When they looked up, they saw that the stone,
which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb,
they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and
they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking
for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; He is not here.
Look, there is the place they laid Him. But go, tell His disciples and Peter
that He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see Him, just as He
told you.’ So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement
had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mk
16:1-8).
Here is how the Madrid scholars have reconstructed it on the basis of the Aramaic
substrate:
“
What we have here is not the story of one trip made by some women to Jesus’ tomb
on the morning of the third day after His death, but the account of two trips
made by two different groups of women. The first group, consisting of three women,
goes to the sepulcher while it is still dark, to anoint Jesus’ body as
was the custom among the Jews. The three women know about the guards, and as
they walk along they express the hope that they will not have any trouble. But
when they arrive at the tomb, they find the stone rolled away and Jesus’ body
gone. Returning to Jerusalem, without knowing what has happened at the tomb,
they tell all this to the other women, who go immediately to see. The second
group is certainly more numerous than the first; while the first trip is narrated
very schematically, in the second, the evangelist dwells more on details, even
though he never abandons his sober style. The angel appears to this second group
of women and announces to them that Jesus has risen. Going back into the city
of Jerusalem, they tell the Apostles what has happened, but the Apostles do not
believe them, thinking that the women have lost their heads. It is easy to note
that in the original Aramaic account, there is no discrepancy between the Gospels,
nor any of the oddities or dissonances of relationship that we saw in the Greek.”
The discovery of the tomb
It was then Fr Garcia’s turn; he dwelled on how John recounts the discovery
of the empty tomb. On one hand, the evangelist only tells about the first trip
of the women to the sepulcher, the one narrated more specifically by Mark. On
the other, he tells about the visit of Peter and the other disciple to the tomb
after hearing from Mary Magdalene the news that the tomb is empty and the Lord
has been taken away. “The narrator says that Mary goes to the tomb and
sees that the stone has been rolled back from the sepulcher. Immediately afterwards,
he speaks of her rush to bring this news to the disciples, but if in the first
verse the text does not say that Mary entered the tomb, or at least that she
looked into it, we cannot understand how she can present herself to the disciples
and say, ‘They have taken the Lord away from the tomb.’”
Here is the reconstructed translation, made on the basis of the Aramaic substrate:
“
On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala goes to the tomb early, while it
is still dark. And even though she can only see a part of the tomb from the stone
moved away from the door, she runs to go to Simon Peter and the other disciple
that Jesus loved and says to them, ‘They have taken the Lord away from
the tomb, and we do not know what has happened and where they have put Him.’ Then
Peter and the other disciple went out and went to the tomb, and they both ran,
but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and reached the tomb first. Bending
down, he saw the folded cloth with which they had put Him, with which they had
buried Him, but he did not go in. Simon Peter arrived after him and, inside,
in the tomb, he noticed that the folded cloth was placed just as it had been
left, and the shroud that had been around His head was not lying with the folded
cloth but to the side, rolled up in the same place. Then the other disciple went
in too, who had reached the tomb first, and he saw and believed now that he saw
what they had not understood according to the Scriptures–that He would
rise from the dead.”
Last April 29th, Cardinal Ratzinger recalled a fundamental truth on the occasion
of the centennial of the constitution of the Pontifical Biblical Commission: “The
opinion that the faith as such does not know historical facts at all and must
leave all this to the historians is Gnosticism. This opinion disincarnates the
faith and reduces it to pure idea. For the faith that is founded on the Bible,
precisely the reality of what happened is a constituent necessity. The Catholic
faith is born from an historical event, and our Gospels are historical accounts;
they narrate something that happened.”
In the wake of this judgment, Garcia concluded, “These accounts are not,
as many scholars would have it, legendary accounts, written later with an apologetic
purpose or to express a theology, but are the narratives of historical events
that let us participate today in the nervous drama lived by the women and men
who were their protagonists.”
The studies of the Bible scholars of the School of Madrid help us to keep alive
the awareness that the Mystery took on a face and a form: a man who talked, ate,
died, and rose again, extending His claim through time.