Emanuele Testa

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Emanuele Testa (2004)

Emanuele Testa OFM (born February 20, 1923 in Maceratola di Foligno ; † January 13, 2011 in Assisi ) was a Roman Catholic religious, biblical scholar , biblical and Christian archaeologist .

Life

At the age of 11, Emanuele Testa joined the convent of the Minorites in Città del Castello, Umbria , and was dressed four years later. He completed his theology and philosophy studies in 1946. In 1947 Giuseppe Placido Nicolini , the Bishop of Assisi, ordained him as a priest. Testa received his doctorate in Catholic theology from the Pontificia Università Urbaniana in 1959 , which was followed by a doctorate in biblical studies from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1962 . From 1965 he was professor of Biblical Theology and Exegesis of the Old Testament at the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem and from 1972 at the Pontificia Università Urbaniana in Rome; from 1975 to 1984 he was the rector of this university.

Teaching

"Jerusalem Ship"; Condition after cleaning

Testa emerged with several publications on the history, theology and symbolism of Jewish Christianity . Research into an early Christian cult of Mary in Nazareth was of particular importance to him . Emanuele Testa, together with Bellarmino Bagatti and Virgilio Corbo, can be assigned to a Franciscan archaeological school in Israel, which gathered a lot of material with excavations and publications in the second half of the 20th century.

Jean Daniélou described Testa's reconstruction of Jewish Christianity as "something unusually new"; the interpretation of the excavation findings in Nazareth was "still controversial, but interesting." Bagatti and Testa, for their part, built on Daniélou's work on Jewish Christianity and created the image of a group in whose belief system visiting holy places was of central importance. The Christian pilgrimage landscape that developed in Palestine in the 4th century did not create anything new, but instead was able to inherit the Jewish Christians in many places. Christian pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land go back to Bagatti and Testa in early Christian times. According to Bagatti and Testa, the tradition of Mary asleep and assuming heaven in Jerusalem is of Jewish Christian origin. This hypothesis was further developed in the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem; its reception was largely restricted to members of this institution. The belief system reconstructed from the graffiti in Nazareth by Bagatti and Testa has a more Gnostic than Jewish-Christian effect . Jewish Christianity is said to have been a numerically large group in the 2nd and 3rd centuries with heterodox esoteric doctrines and rituals that were practiced in grottos, isolated from the large Gentile Christian church, from which it was then ousted in the course of the 4th century.

Testa's formation of hypotheses is often viewed critically. Günter Stemberger writes about Testa's interpretation of the graffiti in Capernaum that his reconstruction of texts and their evaluation for a Jewish Christian theology and community organization go “far beyond what can be proven from the few letters.” The interpretation of the excavations in Nazareth presented together with Bagatti is “ anything but convincing and especially the tendency not to really secure all caves that could once have been used for ritual purposes to assign to Jewish Christians. "

Emanuele Testa was entrusted with cleaning the so-called "Jerusalem Ship", a colored drawing of a late Roman merchant ship with Latin inscription, which was discovered in the 1970s behind the crusader apse of the Helena Chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher . The discoverers Humphreys and Helms read a dedication to Isis , while after the purification a Christian interpretation was obvious (Bagatti and Broshi): Quote from Psalm 122 , reference to a pilgrims' voyage to the Golgotha ​​sanctuary that was happily survived. Testa himself argued that the inscription testifies to a Jewish-Christian interpretation of Golgotha ​​as a garden of paradise. Max Küchler considers the Isis interpretation as well as the pilgrimage interpretation to be plausible (the former assumes, however, that Testa changed the letters when cleaning the drawing), while Testa's Paradise Garden interpretation slips "into the improbable, even fantastic".

Publications (selection)

  • (with Sylvester J. Saller): The archaeological setting of the shrine of Bethphage . Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem 1961.
  • L'Huile de la foi. L'Onction des malades sur une lamelle du 1er siècle . Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem 1967.
  • Nazareth giudeo-cristiana: Riti. Iscrizioni. Simboli . Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem 1969.
  • Cafarnao , Volume 4: I Graffitti della Casa di S. Pietro . Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Jerusalem 1972.
  • Maria terra vergine . Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Jerusalem 1984.
  • (together with Bellarmino Bagatti :) Il Golgota e la Croce. Ricerche storico-archeologiche . Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem 1984.
  • The faith of the Mother Church: an essay on the theology of the Judeo-Christians . Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem 1992.
  • (together with Frédéric Manns and Eugenio Alliata): Early Christianity in context: monuments and documents . Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem 1993.
  • Il Simbolismo dei Giudeo-Cristiani . Franciscan Printing Press, Jerusalem 2004.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ edizioni terra santa, author: Testa Emmanuele .
  2. ^ A b Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem: The Holy Land is grateful to Fr. Emanuele Testa, ofm .
  3. ^ Günter Stemberger: Judaica Minora: History and Literature of Rabbinical Judaism , Tübingen 2010, p. 63.
  4. ^ Jean Daniélou: The Jewish Christianity and the beginnings of the church . Westdeutscher Verlag, Cologne and Opladen 1967, p. 10.
  5. ↑ Edwin Keith Broadhead: Jewish Ways of Following Jesus: Redrawing the Religious Map of Antiquity (= Scientific Studies on the New Testament . Volume 266), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2010, p. 302.
  6. ↑ Stephen J. Shoemaker: Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption . Oxford University Press, New York 2002, pp. 213 f.
  7. ^ Joan E. Taylor: Christians and the Holy Places: The Myth of Jewish-Christian Origins . Oxford University Press, New York 1993, pp. 261 f.
  8. ^ Joan E. Taylor: Art. Jewish Christianity: Material Culture . In: The Eerdmans Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archeology , Volume 1, Grand Rapids 2017, p. 751.
  9. ^ A b Günter Stemberger: Jews and Christians in the Holy Land. Palestine under Constantine and Theodosius . CH Beck, Munich 1987, p. 70.
  10. ↑ ISIS MIRIONIMUS, "10,000-name Isis."
  11. ↑ DOMINE IVIMUS "Lord, we will come."
  12. ↑ Testa reads: D [eo] O [ptimo] MIN [im] E IVIMUS, “For the best of God! We came as quickly as possible. "
  13. ↑ Max Küchler: Jerusalem: A handbook and study travel guide to the Holy City , Göttingen 2007, pp. 470–472.
personal data
SURNAME Testa, Emanuele
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian Roman Catholic religious, biblical scholar, biblical and Christian archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 20, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Maceratola di Foligno
DATE OF DEATH January 13, 2011
Place of death Assisi