The Italian priest presented in Madrid "The Bible. Scrutinize the Scriptures." together with Giacomo Perego, and the coordinator of the Spanish edition, Pedro Ignacio Fraile.
This is a new and complete edition of Sacred Scripture conceived to approach the Word of God in an integral way: with the mind, reason and prayer.
Shortly before, Voltaggio had a conversation with Omnes in which he shared his experience as an inhabitant in Holy Land and expert in Sacred Scripture, the importance of the prayerful reading of the Bible in the Christian life or the urgency of recovering in the Church a Christian initiation that makes one understand the unity of the Word of God, the sacraments and the mystery of the Church in its totality.
How did "The Bible. Scrutinize the Scriptures" was born?
-This project was born from a proposal of the San Pablo publishing house together with some members of the Neocatechumenal Way, although many biblical scholars have participated in this Bible, that is, it is an ecclesial work. The idea was to create a Bible that would be scientific, for study, but also designed by the scrutatio of the Scriptures or lectio divinafor the prayerful reading of Scripture.
Therefore, it contains a general introduction, which gives the principles for reading the Bible. Along with this, it contains some technical notes on the history, the history of salvation and also the geography of salvation; besides paying attention to the main archaeological discoveries in the Holy Land.
Another of its characteristics is the presence of 380 thematic notes, which point to the main themes of Scripture, and for which recourse has been made both to the Greek background and to the Jewish tradition and also, of course, to the interpretation of the Fathers of the Church.
In this sense, despite their differences, there is a key common ground between the rabbinic Jewish interpretation and the patristic interpretation of the Church Fathers, which is that Scripture is an inexhaustible source.
Modern and contemporary exegesis has taken very important steps, but sometimes it reaches a dead end trying to reach the author's intention, which is important, of course, but we maintain that, beyond the verse or verse, there is a living person who speaks to us. I scrutinize the scriptures, but in the end, it is Christ who through his Word scrutinizes me. It is a living encounter. This characteristic of a living and inexhaustible source is what we want to emphasize through this work.
The interpretation of the Bible is one of the great "themes". In this sense, how does one interpret the Word of God without falling into interpretative personalism?
-There are many points in common between the Jewish tradition and the Christian and, especially, the Catholic tradition. Among other things, the importance of tradition because it must be understood that the Word is not a dead text. For the Jews and later for the Fathers of the Church and the Catholics, one cannot separate Scripture from tradition. The sola scriptura is something inconceivable for the Jews, because this book is the fruit, first of all, of a living, existential experience, of people and then of a people. In the case of the Old Testament, of the Jewish people.
In the case of the New Testament, in addition to the Jewish people, the Christian people is born. God has not given us a mute writing but an experience, a revelation that later crystallized in a writing given to a people and that has been transmitted from generation to generation.
The authors of the New Testament received a living text, clothed with all the ornaments of oral interpretation. There are differences, of course, between the Jewish tradition and our concept of tradition, but this is very similar.
For us Catholics, Christ has revealed himself in Scripture and Tradition. This is very important. The second thing is that there is a great difference which is a novelty. For Catholics, Judaism is not "another" religion with respect to Christianity, but there is a key novelty, Christ. But he is not an "optional", but, as understood in Revelation, Christ is the lamb who can open the sealed book. This sealed book is not only scripture, but it is also history. Christ is the key, the key to understand the whole Bible, the one who can "open" this book to all. This is the greatest novelty.
Tradition, in the Catholic Church, is very important because scripture is already interpretation; it is not that each one interprets it as he pleases, -although it is true that scripture is an inexhaustible source-. Scripture is given to a community. In the case of the New Testament, to the Church. The magisterium of the church is the guarantor that this scripture is not misunderstood or even totally misinterpreted to the point of heresy. These are two components that seem to be in tension, but they are not in contradiction.
The Bible. Search the Scriptures
Following this logic of thought, is the Bible a reason for union or separation?
-It depends. It can be a cause of great union or great separation. Like religion. Religion is an engine for good because it moves so many people, but it can also be used for evil: religious wars or even differences among Christians or Catholics themselves.
But the Bible read with a spirit open to the will of God cannot but unite us. It has been so with the Jews and with the other Christian confessions.
Among the desert fathers there were quarrels about the Bible and in this regard, there is a story about two brothers who see a bird: one sees it white and the other black. They begin to argue until they almost kill each other and, in the end, they realize that it is the devil who makes one see the bird black and the other white. It has a lot of meaning because the devil is a great exegete. When he tempts Christ, he does so by quoting Scripture perfectly: "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He has given orders to His angels concerning you, that they should watch over you,' and also, 'They will hold you in their hands, so that your foot will not stumble over any stone.'" (Lk 4, 9 - 12). This is a very clear example of how something as beautiful as the knowledge of the Bible can be instrumentalized.
I have also had my controversies in conferences with rabbis, of course, because they question me. So it is key to maintain charity and also to talk not only about what unites us but also about those things on which we may disagree, and to do so not in the spirit of imposing the truth on the other, but of proposing it.
How can we unite the Word of God to the sacramental life proper to a Christian, even in those sacraments that have "less" Scriptural presence?
-There is no sacrament without the Word. It is impossible, because the word is a visible sign of an invisible grace, but through the word. I think it is essential to recover in all the sacraments the power of the Word. This is not easy without Christian initiation and without a living community. For example, in the sacrament of reconciliation, we go to confession individually with the priest and that's it.
This is all very well, but it would be very good to recover, at certain times, the community celebration of penance with individual confessions. There we find a community that listens to the Word and, afterwards, each one confesses individually. It is a celebration that also enhances that communitarian dimension of reconciliation, which was very clear in the first centuries of the Church, for example, in the catechumenate when someone had sinned in a serious way, was excluded and then welcomed into the community with mercy.
The Word has to be celebrated. Individually scrutinizing Scripture is fine, but it must be kept in mind that the Bible was not primarily given to be studied individually but to be proclaimed.
The locus The ideal of the Word is the Liturgy of the Church.
The Book of Revelation, in fact, begins "Blessed is he who reads, and those who hear the words of this prophecy." It is the community that receives the Word, interprets it, and helps one another to understand it.
What is the difference between a Catholic who reads the Bible and one who does not?
-In Jerusalem I live in an Arab environment, both Muslim, Christian and Jewish. I think it is a pity that the Muslims know the Koran by heart, or the Jews, especially the Orthodox, are always meditating, ruminating, the scripture, also some of the Protestants. In this sense, the Vatican Council II has done a marvelous job of speaking about the two tables of the Christian: the table of the Bread and the table of the Word: the Most Holy Eucharist and the Word of God. We are very aware of the most Holy Eucharist, thanks be to God, but not infrequently we lack the second table. After the Vatican Council IIThe Church has returned to the centrality of the Word, but it is a long road because what is lacking in general is Christian initiation.
In the first centuries of the Church, Sacred Scripture was very important in the catechumenate; the Church Fathers knew the Old Testament in depth and saw it fulfilled in Christ. Eusebius of Caesarea, who wrote the OnomastikomThe Bible mentions more places from the Old Testament than from the New Testament. However, today we Christian pilgrims visit almost exclusively New Testament sites.
Recovering Christian initiation in the whole Church is a mission, a mission because we must be initiated. The Jews say that the word of God is like wine. At the beginning, when one tastes the wine when one does not understand anything, one does not distinguish. This also happens in the reading of Scripture.
Reading the Bible is not easy. There are those who do it and the Lord helps them, but without the Church we cannot truly understand the Word. It is the Church that gives that initiation, that introduces you to the word as something living. St. Jerome answers this question clearly: "To be ignorant of the Scriptures is to be ignorant of Christ".
What does a believer lack if he does not have a knowledge of the Bible, however little? He lacks the knowledge of Christ. That is why sometimes faith is also lived as something boring, monotonous, because it lacks dynamism, creativity, that inexhaustible something.
I really like the verse from Psalm 62 that says. "God has said one thing, and I have heard two."How so, we may ask, because it is so rich that it is so. When you are formed on the path of faith you realize that there are so many treasures, that God himself is such a great treasure, so inexhaustible, that we can only immerse ourselves in the mystery of God and the Word.
You live in the Holy Land, known as "the fifth gospel". How are these traces of the Incarnation perceived in that land?
-The expression fifth gospel on the Holy Land is by Paul VI and it is a wonderful expression. Our Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Cardinal Pizzaballa also uses another expression which states that the Holy Land is "the eighth Sacrament". Clearly we know that the sacraments are seven, but, in this sense it happens what happened to Carmen HernandezThe co-initiator of the Neocatechumenal Way, who explained how to her, who had studied Theology, when she lived for a year in the Holy Land "the scriptures opened up to her".
Thus, the contact with the holy places, with the people of Israel, still alive, which is the Jewish people; the contact with the Arab and Semitic world, with the Eastern Churches, the primitive languages, the mother liturgy of the Church of Jerusalem, all of this forms a humus through which we gain deeper access to the treasures of revelation and of the Church.
In this sense, how important is it for a Christian to be aware that God has been part of history?
-It is essential. Without history, our faith is reduced to a philosophy, or to a moralism - which is a great danger - or to a gnosis. We cannot fail to remember that revelation is historical, that God has revealed himself through a particular people, at a particular time, in a particular place.
In Hebrew there is a word עוֹלָם (olam) which has two meanings. One of spatial dimension and the other of temporal dimension. It means "world", "universe", but also "century", "eternity". In other words, in Hebrew there is a word that expresses space and time. It is not by chance that Albert Einstein was Hebrew.
It must be understood that the Bible is history, but it is not a chronicle. It is not historiography in the modern sense, but it is history and, at the same time, a proclamation of salvation. History and kerygma. History and theology are inextricably linked. Clearly there are historical and historiographical details in the Bible that are sometimes impressive, but archaeology does not say that the Bible is right about everything, just as it does not say that it is right about nothing.
We must understand that the Bible is truly the Word of God and truly the human word. It is the infinite revealed in the finite. The Bible contains more than what it says, because in human words it contains the infinite. It is an analogy with what Christ is, God and man, a dimension that is totally divine and, at the same time, totally human. This access to humanity is what archaeology facilitates. Knowing the environment, the language, the philology, the places where Christ lived, where the history of Salvation materialized, allows us to reach the divine message.
We can reach God through humanity, and more so we Christians. Already in the Old Testament, God "pitches his tent among men", enters history, and fully in the Incarnation of Christ.
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