I don’t think dalo made any false assertions, Lib, all he did was refer us to the story and post the link. I didn’t get the impression that he was trying to assert the book’s conclusions as fact, but only informing us that there WAS a book. The story, as written, does seem to imply that the book has the Vatican’s imprimatur. I think this made the story thread-worthy. Give the guy a break, dude.
Not exactly. The person probably exists, but the organization to which they belong is about the equivalent of the National Endowment for the Arts. The director of the NEA is not authorized to issue policy statements for the State Department and a “member of the Vatican’s cultural committee” does not speak for the church on matters of faith and morals.
That said, it is a lot of hoopla over nothing.
The RCC has not pushed the “literalness” of most of the things cited in years. Christmas? You can find detailed explanations of how the RCC chose the date to coincide with the Saturnalia in any reputable Catholic history. Jonah? Parable. Joshua and Jericho? Cultural myth-making by the people who displaced the original inhabitants. And so on. . . There is not a single “new” revelation in the bunch, so this assertion (which you clearly made) is in error.
It is only a very small number of people who are going to be “shocked” by any of this. (Some of it will be disputed, but it is not shocking.)
OTOH, considering how few Christians actually worry about this stuff, I am always fascinated by the (equally small number of) atheists who run around trying to find all these discrepancies and then trumpeting that they have somehow “disproved” Christianity.
I say: Ship 'em all to an island and let them dispute over minutiae until they all turn blue.
If it had anyone’s actual “Imprimatur,” it would say so – that’s a pretty specific endorsement, following a pretty specific process:
http://www.cin.org/mateo/mat93008.html
If it were a Papal Letter/Pastoral Letter/Papal Bull, or a proclamation ex cathedra, I think we’d know it too.
Given that the RCC seems to have so many official ways of making authoritative statements and endorsements of varying degrees of importance, I think a negative inference can be drawn from the fact that none of these modes of doctrinal expression appears to have been employed, and that at most, a Vatican functionary agreed to (got bamboozled into) affixing his name and title to wankerish speculation along the lines of a newspaper gossip column – not surprising, considering the apparent source of the suppositious book/pamphlet
Stand by for the sequel:
–Jesus wasn’t a Jew!
–Jesus married Mary Magdalene!
–Jesus was gay!
–Jesus was a Roman spy!
–Jesus was lefthanded!
–Jesus made a mean barbecue sauce!
–Jesus would have lost a fight with Aquaman!
–We Italian journalists have proof!
The alarming part is about half of the above have already been asserted as fact by people with way too much time on their hands.
I love the Internet. 
For this I fought the hamsters for twenty minutes?
What Duck Duck Goose says about the prophecies of Isaiah. Nothing more is known about Jesus’ appearence (although Jim Bishop speculated that He must have looked like His mother).
At any rate, I am not ready to get a refund from the last time I saw “The Greatest Story Ever Told” because Max von Syndow is too pretty to be my Savior. At least, not based on what some Italian journalists claim.
Regards,
Shodan
Just wondering, but is there a site out there that explains which ones are considered by the RCC to be a “historical” account, which ones are “parables”, and which ones are “myths”? To my athiest eye, they may all be myths, and certainly any of them that include supernatural events would be myths or parables. Some of them simply scream out that they’re apocryphal (in the non-technical sense of the word, not meaning necessarily the deuterocanonical works) even within a supernatural framework. And the stuff that purports to recount events to which there were no witnesses seems easy enough to discount.
In other words, what sort of assertions in a work like this would have drawn the ire of the Vatican, rather than its endorsement?
When I was a kid, I read a Life of Christ written by a WWI-era Italian author, in which he said that Jesus was short. For some reason I let this factoid influence me when in college I wrote a weird tale. When I brought NYA-HA, “god of the unexpected,” into the story, I introduced him as “A little guy…”
In retrospect, I’m not sure what that has to do with it at all. Sorry if it seems blasphemous, I didn’t mean it that way and I was even a Christian at the time. It just seemed appropriate for a visitor from the supernatural plane to be short.
Probably not. For most, you’d have to find various scholarly works that address each individually–and you would find different interpretations and understandings even among them. The point is that the RCC does not have lists divided into columns of “facts” and “stories.” Some “stories” are going to be held as “fact,” (e.g., the basic stories of the crucifixion and resurrection without quibbling over the details in different authors), but there is no “standard list.”
Tom~?
Is that really you saying those words?
He who has spent so many hours quibbling over Christian/RCC minutiae?
Are you OK?
Any recent blows to the head?
Have you eaten any rye with a strange mold?
Surely, HH, even you can distinguish between my attempts to identify and clarify and explain doctrines and their origins and people who will get into impassioned debates over whether or not two short passages contradict each other and whether that contradiction (if it exists) invalidates an entire work?
Or, perhaps you cannot.
Shodan wrote:
That almost merited five laughies.
Even if people are making these claims, I know of no new hsitorical evidence to support them. I mean, stuff like this would require a ridiculous amount of new evidence discovered yesterday that I just mysteriously never heard about (except the “short” thing)
—Isaiah prophesies it to boot.—
Bull. It’s pretty questionable as to whether Isaiah’s prophecies are about Jesus, especially seeing that the fulfillment of them happens long prior to Jesus.
For what it’s worth Gianfranco Ravasi could not possibly give an imprimatur*, as he’s not a bishop.
He’s a prefect of the St. Ambrose Library in Milan and a member of the Papal commission on the cultural assets of the church.
Not, in other words, a source for official Vatican pronouncements.
- Rick
I’m thinking that if there really is any new evidence, it’s in the form of texts the Vatican has been keeping under wraps. I’m really curious about the overall connection between the Vatican and that newspaper. It is a source that is quoted often all over the net. It appears to be published by Bishops.
I imagine there are different branches of politics in the church. I could imagine progressives trying to shed light on some of this stuff, but I could also imagine there would be parts of the Vatican that would fight against it. Anyone have any insight into the resources or politics of these bishops? Could a bishop allow journalists access to documents that the public typically does not get to see?
I’m thinking of starting an e-mail campaign to track down this book. I guess I should e-mail the paper, the web sites that reported on it, the vatican maybe, and I can’t really think of who else would be good to cc. Any ideas?
DaLovin’ Dj
Ah yes. The secret Vatican texts. Shelved right next to their world’s largest porn collection and millions of dollars worth of gold [which the conspiracy theorists never seem to realize is probably – to the extent it exists – mostly in the form of chalices and gold leaf, and not gold coins through which the Pope cavorts like Scrooge McDuck].
Why would “progressives” (or for that matter reactionaries) care about how tall Jesus was?
Why would these progressive bishops choose to convey the devastating information about Short Jesus through obscure Italian journalists (pardon the redundancy) whose book nobody can find even on Amazon, where you can find everything (including probably the BBQ’ing with Jesus apron)?
I would very much like to know how about the grounding in Greek/Latin/Hebrew/Aramaic that Signor Beretta and Signora Broli brought to their scrutiny of the “original sacred texts.” No doubt, as in the English speaking world, these journalists are fluently multilingual.
They’re so good they’ve even debunked biblical myths that, um, aren’t biblical – including their stunning revelation that “if Eve ate a fruit in the Garden of Eden, it was an orange or a fig, not an apple.” I don’t recall any apples being mentioned in Genesis, though I do recall the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And if someone can explain to me whether the “Jonas” whose career they know so much about is any kin to Jonah, I’d be better able to evaluate that “debunking.”
Anyone remember the Jesus Project? It produced a presumptuous color-coded Bible in which “leading scholars” modestly indicated which words of Jesus he really spoke, which he probably spoke, and which he didn’t speak. Maybe the Italians had access to some of those tape recordings/videos too.
Save yourself the trouble, and order it from this site: http://www.liberonweb.com/asp/libro.asp?ISBN=883846491X Yours for just €10.97 if you order before the end of November.
It doesn’t appear to be published by the newspaper, but by Piemme, an Italian publishing house which specialises in children’s, educational and religious books. I’ve no idea if there’s any link between Piemme and l’Avvenire.
My guess is that this is a fairly lightweight book which contains nothing new. (What do you expect for €10.97? Scholarship?) It will certainly not be based on new evidence. No “new evidence” is required to show, for instance, that Christ is no more likely to have been born on 25 December than on any other day of the year.
Most probably this book simply makes the point that many popular beliefs are not supported by scripture at all, or that a reading of scripture in the light of modern scholarship does not support them. My guess is that it’s a fairly modest book, and that the media coverage has trivialised it by presenting as “fact” new readings of the scriptural evidence which are not consistent with the popular tradition.
I very much doubt, for instance, that the book states baldly that David did not slay Goliath, but rather that a version of events in which David did not slay Goliath is, on the whole, more consistent with the scriptural and other evidence than one in which he did. Similarly with Saint Paul and the horse. Nothing ground-breaking there, really, and certainly no need for sinister conspiracy theories involving power struggles in the Vatican.
It’s the “Jesus Seminar”, not “Project”.
Well, since Jonas is the variant of Jonah that was used in the Latin Vulgate (the version/translation of the bible that was officially endorsed by the RCC for somewhat over 1,000 years) and since that variant was carried over into most Catholic translations up until the late 20th century, Jonas and Jonah are pretty much the same guy.
Since none of us have yet found the actual work (which may be published only in Italian), it is also very possible that the book, itself, makes no claim to be “debunking” any beliefs. For all we know, it is simply a recitation of all the already facts-vs-legends concepts that RexDart was asking about. (Although, given the nature of the publishing industry, a sensational “Look what we’ve found” approach is more likely.)
Thanks for the correction, DDG.
Inclusion of the Gospel Of Thomas I had not known about. That one, if I remember correctly, was great fun: It had Jesus killing his playmates, among other things.
By the way, unless the Italians uncovered some studio portraits of Jesus, I’m trying to figure out what the basis of their characterization of his appearance/attractiveness could be other than a logical inference that he had Semitic features. Anyone else vaguely troubled by their apparent equating of Semitic=“unattractive?”