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.