Bargil Pixner

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Father Bargil Pixner explains the ruins of Magdala , 1994

Bargil Pixner OSB (born March 23, 1921 in Untermais near Meran as Virgil Pixner ; † April 5, 2002 in Jerusalem ) was an amateur archaeologist and Benedictine monk .

Life

Dormition Abbey, where Pixner was last prior.

Bargil was born as the first of eight children in the small South Tyrolean farming village of Untermais, south of the Passer . His parents were a married couple and named their son Virgil. Only later, through the clumsiness of an Israeli customs officer, did Virgil become Bargil. Bargil means son of joy in Aramaic . He began to study theology in Brixen in 1940 and in 1941 joined the Tyrolean branch of the Mission Society of St. Joseph of Mill Hill ( Mill Hill Fathers ).

Shortly afterwards he was drafted into the armed forces of the German armed forces as a member of the German-speaking minority in Italy and stationed with his army unit on the Eastern Front . During the fighting in retreat on the Eastern Front in 1944, he refused to take the Fuehrer's oath to Adolf Hitler , which at that time was normally punished with death by firing squad. However, he managed to escape to Silesia in 1945 .

After the war, Pixner continued his studies in Bressanone and was ordained a priest there in 1946 . He then directed the Santa Barbara Leprosy Hospital in Iloilo , Philippines , for eight years on behalf of the Mill Hill Fathers . He later worked in France, Italy and the United States, which he also acquired citizenship .

In 1969 he came to the Holy Land and became a co-founder of Newe Schalom , a peace village , near which some researchers locate the biblical Emmaus . There he entered the order of the Benedictines in 1972 . He made his perpetual vows in the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem in 1974. Pixner was active as a guide at the sites of the Holy Land, Jimmy Carter and Helmut Kohl were among his guests. From 1982 to 1994 he was in Tabgha busy helping to organize the reconstruction of the church. He was friends with the native Viennese and Jewish religious scholar David Flusser and most recently prior of the Dormition Abbey.

Excavations and Conclusions

In 1977 he excavated a gate on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, which he identified with the Essen Gate mentioned by Flavius ​​Josephus . He dated the crucifixion of Jesus on April 11th, 30. He assumed that Jesus knew the Essenes and classified this group as a heretical, iconoclastic Gnostic group , as it occurs at regular intervals in the midst of Christianity. In 1985, he identified an excavation site in the mouth of the Jordan on the Sea of ​​Galilee as Bethsaida . Many of his identifications of biblical places are controversial.

From an archaeological point of view, Pixner's excavation campaign on Zionsberg (1977 to 1988) was criticized: The focus of Pixner's interest was the generation of hypotheses through idiosyncratic interpretation of archaeological findings in combination with literary sources. The excavation was only selectively documented, the excavation was not published, and after the end of the campaign part of the excavation was filled into the cuts, whereupon the excavation area was neglected and became a garbage dump.

Works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Seewald : Jesus Christ - the biography . Pattloch Verlag 2009, p. 55.
  2. ^ The world : The fifth Gospel v. Paul Badde on April 13, 2002, accessed April 21, 2010
  3. ^ Felix Corley: Obituaries: Fr Bargil Pixner. Archaeologist with a key to the 'first Vatican' , in: The Independent Online of May 16, 2002
  4. ^ German Evangelical Institute for Classical Studies of the Holy Land: Mount Zions Jerusalem - Research History. Retrieved November 17, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Pixner, Bargil
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Pixner, Virgil (original name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American-Italian archaeologist and Benedictine monk
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Lower maize near Merano
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 2002
Place of death Jerusalem