2023-10-17 08:13:05
Journalist José María Zavala It is clear: Jesus Christ is the “most important person of all time.” However, he also maintains that research on him – the historical ones, those far removed from the mystification of sacred texts – began too late. This error caused his figure to blur between the real and the fabulous, when, as he explains to this newspaper, “he existed, just like Napoleon” and many other types of flesh and blood. The fact that he was the son of God is another story… Therefore, to offer that more realistic vision, he has compiled and analyzed all the archaeological findings related to the messiah in his new essay: ‘Latest news about Jesus’ ( Espasa). And today, we ask him about it.
–What is Jesus Christ as a fable character, and what is reality?
No one, unless he has read the first-century historian Flavius Josephus or many others after him, and independently of the Gospels and other sacred sources, can deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a historical character. It is not necessary to be a believer or follower of Jesus to confirm his existence, nor is it necessary to be a follower of the emperors Julius Caesar or Napoleon to know that they lived in their respective times. Christians accept, however, that Jesus is the Messiah of God and a person with two natures, human and divine, defined at the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in the year 451.
–Should we separate faith and science when studying the figure of Jesus?
Quite the opposite: science and faith must go hand in hand. Archaeology, for example, allows us to approach the colossal historical figure of Jesus from the study of stones, field work, material remains and, ultimately, the conscientious and persevering analysis of archaeologists. Hence the American academic James Hamilton Charlesworth rightly proclaim that the archaeological evidence available today to reconstruct the time of Jesus ‘are not only abundant; They are impressive’.
–As stated in his work, there are many archaeological clues that prove the existence of Jesus. Which was the most decisive and why?
People often talk about the Shroud or the Shroud of Oviedo, whose importance is decisive for the study of the historicity of Jesus. But the discovery of the pool of Bethesda, Bethesda, Bethzatha, Betzata or even Bézatha, named in Aramaic by the historian Flavius Josephus and described by John in his Gospel, is often tiptoed over. Charlesworth, specifically, ranks this archaeological discovery fourth in importance among all those carried out so far. We refer to the pool where Jesus cured the paralytic, a prodigy narrated in detail by John, which is sometimes confused with another, that of Siloam, where Jesus sent the blind man whose eyes he had previously anointed with the mud formed with his own saliva to that he washed himself in it and was cured instantly.
–What are the chances that the Holy Grail was in Valencia?
The president of the Spanish Center of Sindonology and one of the world’s leading experts on the Holy Grail, Jorge Manuel Rodríguez Almenar, assures that if the Holy Chalice exists anywhere on the planet, it is the one kept today in the Cathedral of Valencia and, If not, it simply does not exist. The reason is that gemologists who have analyzed it exhaustively indicate that the cup is much more polished on the inside than on the outside, given that Jewish tradition did not accept that the chalice was porous. And in relation to the traditional dispute over the authenticity of the relic with the chalice of León, also called Doña Urraca, the latter is a cup with much less capacity than that of Valencia and is also set so that the Mass can be celebrated with she. In this sense, it should not be overlooked that as soon as the primitive Church was organized, a relic was no longer used and, in fact, the Holy Chalice of Valencia has only been used by the popes on their rare visits to the city.
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–How did you escape from the cathedral? The story is more than curious…
On the morning of July 21, 1936, the young María Sabina Suey Vanaclocha He kept the Holy Chalice that was kept in the cathedral in his home in Valencia safe. Thanks to the admirable courage of this woman, who put her own life in danger, the Holy Grail is preserved today in the Cathedral of Valencia. Her feat would undoubtedly deserve a movie.
–Why do you think Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate existed?
Not only because both are attested in the Synoptic Gospels, but above all because of the archaeological finds that confirm their existence. Regarding Caiaphas, the discovery of the ossuary containing the bones of his wife and his four children was decisive. He powerfully drew the attention of scientists to the Aramaic name Caiapha. It was the first time that it appeared in an ossuary or in any other inscription of the first century. And if that were not enough, it had been engraved three times on the tomb, two of which specified the identity of Yehosef bar Caiapha (Joseph son of Caiaphas), the high priest cited by the historian Flavius Josephus as ‘Joseph Caiaphas’ already. whom the evangelists simply call ‘Caiaphas’.
–And Pontius Pilate? How was your case?
In relation to Pontius Pilate, a partially damaged block of limestone has been found, measuring 82 by 65 centimeters in diameter and made between the years 26 and 37, in whose inscription the full name and position appear for the first time: ‘Prefect Pontius Pilate’. The discovery took place in a Roman theater erected at the southern end of Caesarea Maritima. We thus know, thanks to this inscription, that Pontius Pilate was not a procurator, as he is frequently referred to, but rather a prefect, which is not the same. While the prefect was more of a military position, a kind of military governor, the procurator held broader civil authority and was responsible for looking after the financial interests of the emperor.
–Why is ‘skeleton 4926’, found in a place that has so little to do with the life of Jesus, important in this investigation?
The call ‘Skeleton 4926‘ was found in Britannia in November 2017, an ancient province of Rome spread across the center and south of the current island of Great Britain, covering two-thirds of the surface between the 1st and 4th centuries AD. What was so special about that body lying face up in its grave, like the others, apart from the obvious signs of poor health, malnutrition, dental disease, broken bones and even malaria? The first thing that powerfully caught the attention of the archaeologists surrounded by microscopes, pipettes and distillers, once they had washed each and every one of the human vestiges mixed with the various layers of earth, was that this unknown individual had remained buried for seventeen centuries with the fragment of an iron nail five centimeters long, riveted horizontally in the calcaneus of his right heel. In the image and likeness of Jesus of Nazareth.
Replica of the Holy Shroud in the Church of San Rafael ABC
-How did the Holy Shroud end up in Oviedo?
The Holy Shroud that covered the face of Jesus during his transfer from Golgotha to the tomb has been found in Spain since approximately the year 617. Fleeing from the Persians, the Christian community of Jerusalem took the sacred relics, including the Holy Shroud, with them to Alexandria, in Egypt, where the presbyter Philip took charge of them. The flight from Jerusalem appears in the stories of Bishop Pelayo, both in the Book of Testaments and in the Corpus Pelagianum of the same author.
But faced with the unstoppable advance of the Persian troops towards Africa, there was no choice but to return the wooden chest to safety in Spain with the Holy Shroud inside. The Ecclesiastical Dictionary of Spain is categorical in stating, in reference to the Shroud, that ‘the relic was already in our country during the first years of the 7th century’. This is how the bishop of Écija and Cartagena, Saint Fulgencio, collected the relics on the coast of Cartagena and from there the Holy Shroud would later be moved to Oviedo, where it is preserved today.
–Sculptures of Jesus have been made based on the man of the shrine, but there are no paintings about him… do we need true images of Jesus Christ?
The true image of Jesus is stamped precisely on the Holy Shroud, in which his face can be perfectly distinguished, and even the fifty wounds spread across his head as a result of the crown of thorns and the blows and slaps received before his crucifixion.
–To what extent does the man on the Shroud coincide with the Jesus of the gospels and other sources close to his time?
It constitutes a tracing. Jesus was thirty-three years old when he was crucified. The doctor Carvajal Palace warns that the morphological type of Jesus on the Shroud is characteristic of the Middle East, as the evangelist Matthew refers when citing his genealogy.
Jesus was a healthy and strong man, measuring around six feet tall, a little taller than the average male of his Semitic lineage. Dr. Judica Cordiglia took exact measurements of the man lying on the Shroud (1.84 meters tall) and calculated that when standing his height would have been 1.81 meters. He weighed almost seventy-nine kilos and his build was athletic, well muscled, typical of a man accustomed to manual work that strengthened his upper limbs, and to walks throughout Galilee, especially in his three years of public preaching. . Finally, hematologists have managed to decipher the blood group of Jesus, in the light of the Holy Shroud that wrapped him: it is AB, with its male Y chromosome.
–Was the Shroud studied with NASA technology?
Physicist John P. Jackson and thermodynamics expert Eric Jumper, both Americans and photography technicians at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA, submitted three-dimensional photographs of the Shroud to the study of a VP8 image analyzer. . Thanks to this analyzer used in the examination of photographs of the planets collected by satellites, the Shroud could finally be reconstructed.
What image could American scientists behold then, stupefied? Neither more nor less than the three-dimensional photo of a human body in levitation, located between the two parts of the Sheet: the one that covered the chest and the one that covered the back. But with the striking peculiarity that this image of the back was not crushed by the weight of the body in a state of suspension. NASA scientists were thus convinced that this image of the body of Christ was obtained two thousand years ago by a powerful instantaneous radiation emanated in all directions by the individual of the Shroud himself, which left the impression on the canvas as in a photographic celluloid.
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