The following two stories are both controversial - but the first one is ultimately trivial, whereas the second had major implications for one of the most popular of modern-day saints....
Left, the business-card size papyrus fragment presented as 'The Gospel of Jesus's wife'; right, Harvard Prof. Karen King, who presented the 'finding' without trying to authenticate it first.
Quite a number of respected scholars - Biblicists and papyrologists - immediately raised objections last September to a Harvard professor's claim that she had unearthed an ancient papyrus in which Jesus is quoted as referring to 'my wife'. See the stories posted on this thread on Page 345 -
http://benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=8527207&p=345
At which time it was easy to accept their objections because the Harvard prof publicly spoke about her hypothesis before she even tried to authenticate the papyrus in question! Now, that's hardly a scholarly attitude, is it, when you are advancing a hypothesis that contradicts 2000 years of Christian belief! Now comes another scholar who shows how and why the papyrus is obviously and grossly fake. (Actually, Prof. Watson of the University of Durham, cited in the Page 345 postings, offered a more impressive dismissal of the King fragment than this one). I am not aware that Prof. King has responded to the objections but it is surprising that Harvard insists on publishing her thesis despite the failure to authenticate the document. Or maybe they trust they will get authentication by the time they release the issue in January...)
How to fake an apocryphal Gospel
by Giorgio Bernardelli
Translated from
November 12, 2012
MILAN - Remember the so-called "Gospel of Jesus's Wife"? Two months ago, Prof. Karen King of Harvard Divinity School created a major media stir by reporting her discovery of a small papyrus fragment from the fourth century written in Coptic containing the words 'my wife' from a direct quote attributed to Jesus.
[How anyone could dare call a postage-stamp fragment containing less than a dozen partial lines a 'gospel' of anything is outrageous to begin with. But the media has taken to calling any supposed ancient post-Christ writing referring to Jesus as the 'gospel of...' whoever or whatever, as in the infamous 'Gospel of Judas' from few years back. The rest of us should simply refrain from following their lead!]
Her hypothesis, written up in an article that will be published in January by the theological magazine of Harvard, is that the fragment comes from a new apocryphal 'gospel' that tends to prove that Jesus's celibacy was already a subject of controversy in the early Christian communities.
Almost immediately, the authenticity of the papyrus fragment was questioned by some scholars who pointed out a series of 'oddities' about it.
But now Andrew Bernhard, an Oxford-trained scholar of ancient gospels, goes even farther to say that this was a 'fabricated fake'.
He agrees with those who have said that the partial lines represent a gross repetition of some phrases from the earlier 'Gospel of Thomas', an apocryphal Gospel in Copt which was found in 1945 among papyri found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. He points a number of suspicious typographical coincidences with an interlinear English translation of the Thomas text by Michael Grondin and which can easily be consulted online.
In an article entitled "Notes on the counterfeiting of the 'Gospel on Jesus;s wife'", he explains that the words found in King's fragment are all found in the Thomas gospel. With the exception of one: the Coptic term which means, precisely, 'my wife', that is attributed to Jesus.
Moreover, the words lifted from the Thomas text appear in exactly the same order on the fragment. Bernhard says every line found on the King fragment - Coptic words found on the same page in Grondin's English translation of the Thomas text.
He says that to compose the counterfeit lines did not even require much effort - that once the term 'my wife' was introduced to fake the fragment, all it took was to lift some phrases from the Thomas text. change gender references from masculine to feminine, and some statements from negative to affirmative, to come up with a 'historically revolutionary' document. He points out that the phrases lifted from the text also included a typographical error exactly as it is int eh Grondin translation.
As for the Coptic word which translates to 'my wife', Bernhard points out that it consists of six letters that are easily jumbled to produce new words. By coincidence he says, this word is found exactly in the center of the fragment, as though to make sure that it would not be missed!
A new book shows how the sisters of
St. Therese of Lisieux 'manipulated'
her writings to present a simplistic image
that deceived as many as four Popes
It does not reflect badly on the youngest Doctor of the Church'
but the manipulation helped shape her popular image
by Andrea Tornielli
Translated from the English service of
November 12, 2012
Popular devotion to St. Therese of Lisieux sees her as a 'child saint' in the sense of the 'childlike spirit' in the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus tells his disciples, "Unless you become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven".
Yet Thérèse Françoise Marie Martin, St. Therese of the Child Jesus, who died at age 24 in the Carmelite monastery of Lisieux in September 1897, and who was canonized by Pius XI in 1925, never once used the expression 'childlike spirit' in her writings, and although she cited texts from Scriptures thousands of times, she never once cited that passage from Matthew.
A new book entitled
Teresa di Lisieux, il fascino della santità. I segreti di una 'dottrina' ritrovata )Therese of Lisieux, the fascination of holiness: Secrets of a recovered 'doctrine') (Lindau, 616 pp, issued today in Italy), by Gianni Gennari, who is a profound connoisseur of the saint,and who includes his direct and scrupulous translation of the saint's
Manuscripts, which entered history with the name given to it by her older sisters, "The Story of a Soul".
It emerges clearly from Gennari's investigation that the doctrine of the childlike spirit attributed to Therese was always that of her family - her parents (now the Blesseds Louis and Zelie Martin). but especially of her sisters. who were disciples and spiritual children of the Jesuit priest Almire Pichon, who was never a spiritual director or confessor of Therese. Her sisters saw in Therese the perfect embodiment of the spirituality presented to them by Pichon, as Therese had written many times, explicitly, that her only spiritual director was Jesus, only Jesus.
This, Gennari writes, for 50 years, her sisters "led everyone, including Popes, to see in Therese the perfect realization of their spiritual director's teaching on the childlike spirit. And they did so, not just in promoting the devotion to her, and in presenting her writings (which they often modified for their purpose) but even in their testimonies during the canonization processes and in their correspondence with the Holy See for the preparation of speeches on Therese by Benedict XV and Pius XI, which were based on letters from her sister Celine sent for this purpose to the Vatican.
Gennari cites a letter from Pauline that has till now been ignored despite its fundamental significance. The saint's oldest sister, whom she considered her 'little mother' and who was later her prioress at the Carmelite convent, wrote ten days before Therese entered the convent that she must certainly be 'a saint. but a LITTLE saint", with the adjective written all caps in her letter. It was, and it remains the one path, but a false one, that everyone depended on in subsequent decades to interpret all the writings of Therese, also suppressing, though doing so in good faith, some texts which are among the most potentially significant.
Gianni Gennari was able to get to personally know the first true protagonist of this historical twist, Fr. Andre Combes, a scholar on spirituality, and subsequently professor at the Sorbonne and at the Lateran University, who went to Lisieux in 1946 to study the writings of Therese, and was personally welcomed by another of the saint's sisters, Mother Agnes, to be a chaplain of the Carmelite monastery.
In four years of intense study, Combes discovered the apparent manipulation of the saint's manuscripts and requested that the published texts be edited in order to restore to scholars and the faithful alike what Therese really wrote.
But when he proposed the publication of the
Manuscripts in their integrity, in which he found as many as 7,000 interventions and 'corrections' made by Mother Agnes herself, he was expelled from the convent and from Lisieux as a result of an 'apostolic visitation'.
And even Mother Agnes herself, who had perhaps begun to understand Combes's motivation, was also deposed. although she had been nominated prioress for life by Pius XI. But the prioress who succeeded her, upon the arrival of a new apostolic 'visitator' who asked to see all of Therese's original writings, ordered the burning of the 'petit carnet' (the little notebook) which was the oldest known text of what had been published as
Novissimas Verba, because it did not contain any references to her 'little way' and therefore, nothing of her supposed doctrine on 'spiritual childhood'. The changes had been introduced to Therese's text around 1910, 13 years after she died.
Thus, it was such manipulation that produced a public image of Therese that did not fully correspond to reality, and one might perhaps understand why Pius XI, who loved Therese and had canonized her, severely rejected a suggestion to name Therese a Doctor of the Church -a position that was adopted and reinforced by his successor Pius XII.
After Combes was expelled from Lisieux, the reasons for his request towards the publication of the saint's authentic texts have been gradually understood, and since 1996, an effort began to recover, if still possible, Therese's original writings.
It has been a long effort but from it has emerged the lines of the saint's authentic teaching as something original and fresh. Combes, along with other great theologians like Von Balthasar and Laurentin, have shown the true face of Therese, and thus in 1997. John Paul II decided to proclaim her a Doctor of the Church (the third female to be given this honor, after Teresa of Avila and Caterina of Siena).
One might say that the recovery of Therese's true teaching was completed in a catechesis by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011 who describer her authentic doctrine and called her "a guide above all to theologians".
It was that catechesis which led Gennari to revisit the entire history and to publish the book which he dedicates to Benedict XVI and the late Fr. Combes.
The true teachings of St. Therese emerge From the copious documentation in Gennari's book. Her idea of the 'childlike spirit' is not the minimalist reduction based on the faith of children generically - her only model was "the Child of God, Jesus whose grace 'divinizes' the human creature through the invasion of the Spirit, transforming man by grace into Christ himself, as Therese explicitly wrote in a letter to her sister Celine: "We are called to become divine ourselves".
And it follows that to love God and to love one's neighbor become one and the same, modelled after the love that is God himself, through the flame of his Spirit which transforms man and makes him one with God through grace.
The texts also demonstrate the saint's singular closeness as the 'universal sister' to all who suffer, to sinners, to the marginalized, to non-believers, to those who despair to the point of suicide, as well as her missionary passion which knows no limits.
If she hadn't died so young, she wrote about her desire to go to a Carmelite convent in Hanoi (Vietnam was a French colony at the time) as a missionary.
Her writings also show her profound interest in the life and holiness of priests, including those who have been alienated from the Church.
Gennari's book thus constitutes a complete 'summa' for those who wish to know the saint better. Besides her original texts, it includes a complete documentation of the strange history of her writings, and all the speeches that the Popes have given about her, including the subsequent 'course corrections' made by the later Popes, as well as a brief biography of Mons. Combes, who died in 1969.
Lastly, in a brief but significant post-script, Gennari recounts his first encounter with the writings of Therese, when he was a young man who woke up after eight months in deep coma. For Gennari, finding her teachings in their recovered authenticity, they are "even more necessary in the third mIllennium... (and) appear like God's providential response to the fog created by the masters of suspicion" who were her contempraries (Feuerbach, Mrx, Nietsche, and above all, Freud".
Therese's teachings, he says, bear witness that "the humanism of Christian revelation is the polar opposite of man's humiliation and announces the offering to human freedom of divinization and transformation to an eternity that that we already start to live during the time that we have the gift of life on earth".
Gianni Gennari makessome of his points clearer in this interview published in Avvenire, the newspaper for which he has written a regular column for years. Gennari is a theologian who obtained a dispensation from John Paul II and the CDF in the 1990s to be laicized so he could get married...
Therese of Lisieux,
master of theology,
Doctor of the Church
Interview with Gianni Gennari
Translated from
A 'revolution' about one of the best-known of saints. Her religious name, Therese of the Child Jesus, had made her 'little way' a spiritual practice for her devotees. But Therese of Lisiuex was a great teacher of doctrine, not just a model of spirituality.
This is attested in a historiographic and philological study by Gianni Gennari, who writes the column 'Lupus in pagina' for this newspaper, and who studied theology in Rome, Paris and Freiburg. His book on St. Therese is coming out soon from Lindau. and includes his translation of the original text of Manuscripts, the notebooks that were the basis for the saint's famous
Autobiography of a Soul/
So Therese is no longer the saint of childlike simplicity, but of man's divinization. Is this a genuine theological revision?
The life of Therese, which has usually been described as 'small', is indeed inspired by a child, but she meant the Son of God - her model was Jesus, child of God, he who offers himself to man, invading him with his infinite love and 'divinizing' him by grace.
Therese writes of being 'appropriated' by the Divine Fire, the Holy Spirit which 'burns in the heart of the Church' and possesses her to transform her into Himself: "In the heart of my mother, the Church, I will be Love, and thus I will be all".
For John Paul II and Benedict XVI, this was Therese's singular characteristic: being so open to the invasion of God as to be able to love him with his own love, even in the dark night of the soul - Therese the sister to all sinners, the marginalized, the atheists, the desperate.
This is an ecclesial doctrine, that is in no way clerical, in which the Church is seen as the Mystical Body of Christ, anticipating by 55 years Pius XII's encyclical
Mystici Corporis. Her Mariology seess Mary as "more a mother than a Queen". She also has a liberating view of the profound essence of prayer.
The story about Therese's Manuscripts manipulated by her sisters seems like a Dan Brown script. Why was everything muddled?
Her sisters always saw her as their 'little one', guided by them, but her only 'director' was Jesus himself. Fifty years after Therese died, the first to realize something was not right was Abbe Andre Combes, who was a theologian at Paris's Catholic Institute, and who later taught at the Sorbonne and the Lateran Unviersity in Rome. He spent four years in Lisieux (1946-1950) to study the life of the saint.
He discovered the manipulation of her writings that had been carried out by her sisters in good faith, but which brought to everyone the image of Therese as the saint of childlike simplicity like the children cited by Jesus in the Gospel. But the saint's model was the Child Jesus himself, the Son of God.
In fact, Therese never wrote about this 'spiritual childlikeness' , and among the thousands of Biblical citations she makes, she never once mentions the famous passage from Matthew (18,3). To hide this fact - which is today well demonstrated and accepted - true historiographic crimes were committed in good faith, which nonetheless falsified Therese's theological thinking. Combes was ablde to recover this, and it was accepted by John Paul II who declared her a Doctor of the Church, rejecting the strong NO to such a step expressed in 1932 by Pius XI and the man who would succeed him, Pius XII.
Today, the new 'way of St. Therese' consists of a non-professorial theology that is sustained by her view of the action of the Holy Spirit on the Church.
So your new book is a sort of truth-finding oepration?
Since 1956, the year when Fr. Combes was able to 'recover' the saint's actual writings - for which he was expelled in 1950 from the Carmelite convent in Lisieux - the truth has largely imposed itself, even if some resistances remain, as I document in my book, which resulted in hiding some documents and facts about the psst.
That is why my book has a double purpose: to tell the story of the complex fate of Therese's writings, as well as to lay out the spiritual and theological doctrine of this Patron of Missions and 'Doctor of Love' as John Paul II called her and 'master of theology', as Benedict XVI called in his catechesis on April 6, 2011. That had given me the dscisive push to take up the argument about her teachings that had been vital to me for more than 50 years, as I explain in my Post-Script.
You write that Therese seemd to be the providential response to the 'masters of suspicion' like Marxk, Nietszhe and Freud. Why and how?
Yes, she was that, but much more. Therese taught that the grandeur of God is offered totally to his creatures who can let themselves be divinized by his grace. The saying, "Everything is grace', used by Georges Bernanos in his
Diary of a Country Priest, really came from Therese.
Man, who is God's creature, becomes a child of God by the invasion of the Holy Spirit: Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote that Therese's teaching is genuine pneumatology [study of the Holy Spirit].
Man, who can allow himself to be divinized by the invasion of the Spirit, is anything but 'alienated' (as Fuerbach and Marx maintained), anything but the rival of a Father who castrates man and denies him fappiness and love (as in Freud), anything but the Superman who proclaims the death of God (as in Nietszche).
Christology and anthropology go hand in hand - in which Therese anticipated the modern trend by a century. Some texts of Vatican II, fo Paul VI and of Benedict XVI (check out No. 10 in
Caritas in veritate) were inspired by Therese, sister to sinners, the desperate ones adn atheists in search of truth, for whom she offers her final sufferings on earth.
But It is a fact that the last two Popes have re-evaluated Therese from the theological perspective...
Yes, they have exalted her as Doctor of the Church and master of theologians, precisely because her original writings have been recovered, and because these have contradicted the tradition that for so many years had produced the misunderstandings about her childlike simplicity based on psychological and sentimental factors deduced from minor things about her life.
This revaluation and the restitution to her of those gifts of light and grace that the Lord had blessed her with, and which she accepted without reservations - that is Christian holiness.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/11/2012 04:49]