Might the Vatican have some secret 1st to 2nd c. works?

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rakovsky
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Might the Vatican have some secret 1st to 2nd c. works?

Post by rakovsky »

We have excerpts from maybe the 10th c. IIRC noting contents of g. Hebrews as if it was still accessible then. That many years is a long time for the Vatican to be holding on to a manuscript if it was censored or worthless.

There was a
discovery in 1923 of a manuscript of the Essene Gospel of Peace in the Vatican's Archivo Segreto
=====
there's no reason to suppose that the likes of the Essene Gospel of Peace was being actively suppressed by the Vatican. It was just one badly catalogued document amongst many, many others. For all practical purposes, they didn't even know they had it, never mind what it was.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho ... p?t=190271
From the Rumor Mill:
IS THE VATICAN STILL HIDING SOME DEAD SEA SCROLLS FROM THE PUBLIC?

There have been repeated stores from several sources claiming again and again that the Vatican has even has carted off several Dead Sea Scrolls (between 1946 and 1960) which will never be shown to the general public for fear it would undermine the basic tenets of the Christian Faith, by showing that the Dead Sea Sect Community at Qumran (BC 200 to AD 68) was a a kind of "model for the Church" and that their hero, the socalled Teacher of Righteousness (BC 196 to BC 104) prefigured the "suffering Righteous martyr" long before "Iesous" ever came to existence.

As for all those Dead Sea Scroll documents that "went missing" (!) after the Vatican came to take a look at them, there is an interesting story about one scroll in Particular: THE DANIEL SCROLL.
...
The Vatican Control Ecole Biblique heavilly censored any findings from the caves for 50 years-----until someone at the Huntington Library in California in 1991 finally decided to allow wider access, and now most of the material is in print and in modern translation.

=======================================================================================================================

The Vatican has acted quite suspiciously in the past. No one had ever been allowed to see Codex Vaticanus until Napoleon took it to Paris, and it took until 1889 before the text became available -- after numerous roadblocks from the Church. It is really staggering how much of our history has only been known since the second half of the 19th century. ~ Eleleth

===================================================================


http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread59832/pg1
The Vatican does hold these kinds of things:
Gospel Papyrus Donated to Vatican

"It Has Not Yet Revealed All Its Secrets"

November 22, 2006: the Bodmer Papyrus 14-15, donated to His Holiness Benedict XVI by the generosity of the Sally and Frank Hanna Family Foundation and the Solidarity Association (U.S.A.), as well as the Mater Verbi/Hanna Papyrus Trust, was given to the Vatican Apostolic Library.

During the five and a half centuries that separate these two dates, albeit through different vicissitudes, such as the losses caused by the lansquenets on the occasion of the sack of Rome (1527) or the transfer of the manuscripts to Paris in the Napoleonic age, the Vatican Apostolic Library remained faithful to the mandate it received to enrich, guard and preserve with all care the cultural treasures entrusted to it and to put them at the disposition of qualified scholars.

In the meantime, the initial thousand manuscripts by this time numbered 150,000

...

very soon, this frequent use ended up by damaging the fragile structure of the papyrus, which began, perhaps at the end of a century, to lose pages, to the point that at present in contains about half the text of the two Gospels. What could be done then with a manuscript which had become altogether unusable, but which contained the Gospels, the sacred text par excellence?

Probably aware of the antiquity of the codex, some one made an extreme decision: to give it a modest binding, which was reinforced making a hard binding with the rest of the first and last surviving pages. In these conditions, unusable as a book, but, as similar examples demonstrate, probably venerated as a relic, the papyrus was conserved, perhaps beginning in the fifth century, in the library of the Pachomian monastery of Middle Egypt.

Later, in face of an unspecified danger, probably the Arab invasion of Egypt, it was hidden around the year 700 in a mound that kept it sheltered from the floods of the Nile and there it waited patiently, alongside some forty other Greek and Coptic volumes, containing sacred and profane works and documentary papyruses, until it was discovered around 1952 by the inhabitants of a neighboring village.

...
is it really certain that P75 was produced in Egypt? The answer is certainly affirmative. Although the text of the great Palestinian manuscripts of the fourth century is confirmed in general, P75 also presents some small variations that relate it undoubtedly to the Egyptian tradition, represented by the Coptic translations.

For example, in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) it is the only Greek testimony that indicates that the rich man was called N(in)ive. In John 10:7, instead of, "I am the door of the sheep," the papyrus uses the variant "I am the shepherd." In both, the lessons are almost exclusively of the Coptic tradition.

This fact allows one to specify some particulars of the production of P75 and, at the same time, to perceive some of the stages that separate it from the originals of the two Gospels.
https://www.ewtn.com/library/SCRIPTUR/zgospapyr.htm

My research on the prophecies of the Messiah's resurrection: http://rakovskii.livejournal.com
StephenGoranson
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Re: Might the Vatican have some secret 1st to 2nd c. works?

Post by StephenGoranson »

The "Essene Gospel of Peace" is not a first nor second century text, but almost certainly twentieth century.
Roger Pearse
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Re: Might the Vatican have some secret 1st to 2nd c. works?

Post by Roger Pearse »

The Vatican Library is not an ancient collection. It was basically assembled by Leo X in the renaissance.

The idea of secrets in the Vatican library is a 19th century idea. It arose because of the extreme difficulty that scholars had in gaining access to the collections. These contained the manuscript B (Ms Vaticanus Graecus 1209), which a lot of people wanted to look at; and also the manuscript of the anti-Christian author Zosimus. There was no catalogue of the library; you had to know what you wanted, and the staff were very obstructive. So legends began to develop.

The real problem was more prosaic. The papacy at the time was combined with the Papal States, a minor Italian princedom which was (rightly) very fearful of its neighbours, and populated by a backward and superstitious populace. The library was in the hands of Italian librarians; and anyone who has ever attempted to do business with these even today will know their laziness and obstructiveness.

Anyway time moved on. The papal state disappeared, the area modernised, and around 1900 the then Pope got fed up with the bad publicity, and turned the Vatican library over to the Swiss guard to administer. These are mostly Swiss Germans, and are very efficient (again I can testify to this). A catalogue was compiled, and the collection gradually became one of the better known major collections. At the moment the manuscripts are even going online.

So ... beware of old tales of "Vatican secrets". Every manuscript archive has stuff that it doesn't know about (because cataloguing manuscripts is an art), but there is no reason to believe the old conspiracy stories.

Sadly!

All the best,

Roger Pearse
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rakovsky
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Re: Might the Vatican have some secret 1st to 2nd c. works?

Post by rakovsky »

Roger Pearse wrote:
So ... beware of old tales of "Vatican secrets". Every manuscript archive has stuff that it doesn't know about (because cataloguing manuscripts is an art), but there is no reason to believe the old conspiracy stories.

Sadly!

All the best,

Roger Pearse
Thanks Roger.
There is "a" reason to believe the stories, one which you already mentioned, namely that the librarians could be inefficient enough that they missed something due in part to the vast volume of manuscripts. Even if the Swiss are efficient, there could still be something theoretically falling through the cracks.

Another instance comes to mind is the stuff on the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish were intentionally concealing documents, but then (I guess in the 19th c.), the new head of the Dominicans (IIRC) had a kind of conscience issue and revealed the documents.

Of course the Vatican today is not 17th c. Spain, I am just saying that theoretically there could be some info that the Pope or Vatican doesn't want to get out, and this could even involve very old documents. The Vatican could be efficient and open today, but there could still be some things someone decided to keep secret.

My research on the prophecies of the Messiah's resurrection: http://rakovskii.livejournal.com
Diogenes the Cynic
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Re: Might the Vatican have some secret 1st to 2nd c. works?

Post by Diogenes the Cynic »

Roger Pearse wrote:The Vatican Library is not an ancient collection. It was basically assembled by Leo X in the renaissance.

The idea of secrets in the Vatican library is a 19th century idea. It arose because of the extreme difficulty that scholars had in gaining access to the collections. These contained the manuscript B (Ms Vaticanus Graecus 1209), which a lot of people wanted to look at; and also the manuscript of the anti-Christian author Zosimus. There was no catalogue of the library; you had to know what you wanted, and the staff were very obstructive. So legends began to develop.

The real problem was more prosaic. The papacy at the time was combined with the Papal States, a minor Italian princedom which was (rightly) very fearful of its neighbours, and populated by a backward and superstitious populace. The library was in the hands of Italian librarians; and anyone who has ever attempted to do business with these even today will know their laziness and obstructiveness.

Anyway time moved on. The papal state disappeared, the area modernised, and around 1900 the then Pope got fed up with the bad publicity, and turned the Vatican library over to the Swiss guard to administer. These are mostly Swiss Germans, and are very efficient (again I can testify to this). A catalogue was compiled, and the collection gradually became one of the better known major collections. At the moment the manuscripts are even going online.

So ... beware of old tales of "Vatican secrets". Every manuscript archive has stuff that it doesn't know about (because cataloguing manuscripts is an art), but there is no reason to believe the old conspiracy stories.

Sadly!

All the best,

Roger Pearse
Very well articulated, thank you.
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