Palmarian Bible
The Palmarian Bible[Gospel harmony|] is the religious text of the Palmarian Church, first published by the Holy See at El Palmar de Troya in 2001 under the title The Sacred History or Holy Palmarian Bible According to the Infallible Magisterium of the Church, believed by Palmarian Catholics to be a revelation directly from God. The Palmarian Church claims that the work is the divinely mandated purification of the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome. Rather than being a translation based on academic textual criticism it is heavily inspired by the alleged heavenly visions of the Spanish mystic Pope Gregory XVII, who, as Palmarian Pontiff, claimed to the legitimate Pope of the Catholic Church from 1978 until his death in 2005.
The 1943 Papal encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu by Pope Pius XII gave a qualified green light to certain forms and methods of biblical criticism. The encyclical encouraged biblical scholars to go back to older sources and original languages in order to more fully understand the texts of the Bible, nevertheless reaffirming at the same time the "juridical" authority and authenticity of the Latin Vulgate. One such subsequent effort was the Jerusalem Bible. It was inspired by the historical-critical method and was perceived as a liberal effort, especially unpopular among Catholic traditionalists. In 1979, it was anathematised by the Palmarian Pontiff in favour of the Vulgate.
Although Pope Gregory XVII had visions relating to sacred scripture since at least 1981, the most direct and specific was one of the Prophet Elias in 1997, who allegedly directed him to begin the project of mystical purification. Within the Palmarian Church, two ecumenical councils took place, which followed on from the Vatican Council ; these were the First Palmarian Council and the Second Palmarian Council. The conclusion of the latter was that various adulterations, simulations and falsifications within the texts, distorting the word of the Triune God and the true history of the people of God, especially in the Old Testament, had taken place at various junctures when the texts were in the possession of the Jewish people. In the New Testament, the Four Gospels are
merged into one single Palmarian Gospel, laying out a single authoritative chronology of Jesus Christ's life.
History
Background: The Bible in the Catholic Church
In the early centuries of Christianity, the Greek-language Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament from the Biblical Hebrew was first used and formed the basis of texts used by the Christian Church. Supposedly, this was originally created in the 3rd century BC at the request of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, Pharoah of Ptolemaic Egypt and was carried out by seventy translators from the community of the Jews of Alexandria. With the coming of the Christian Church, when the Roman Empire was the prevailing political power in the Mediterranean, Latin gradually replaced Greek as the lingua franca and the Septuagint was translated into various different Latin versions known collectively as the Vetus Latina.Evidence of a complete list of books of the New Testament, which is now considered as canonical, is first found in a letter of Athanasius of Alexandria from 367. For the Church, defining the approved books of the Biblical canon for the single Catholic Bible from a wide range of scriptures that had been passed down was proclaimed at the Council of Rome of 382, presided over by Pope Damasus I. The late 5th century manuscript Decretum Gelasianum, associated with Pope Gelasius I, also affirms this same canon. This canon was reiterated by a number of other synods, such as the Synod of Hippo and the Councils of Carthage, which were ratified by Pope Innocent I. This Biblical canon was confirmed in later ecumenical councils of the Catholic Church, first the Council of Florence and then the Council of Trent, in the latter of which including the aforementioned books in the Bible was defined as an article of faith for Catholics.
The Council of Trent, an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, most directly approached the subject of sacred scripture in its Fourth Session on 8 April 1546. The First Decree of this Fourth Session, "Concerning the Canonical Scriptures", dealt with the Canon of Trent and made an explicit list of the books which must be included in a Catholic Bible, on pain of anathema. The Second Decree of the Fourth Session, "Concerning the Edition and Use of the Sacred Books" would declare that, “out of all the Latin editions, now in circulation", the old Vulgate translation in Latin was to be regarded as the authoritative edition for use in lectures, debates, sermons and expoisitions. Thus, while giving endorsement to the Vulgate from what was then available, it did not perclude that a future, superior Latin edition may superseed it, nor that, before the Vulgate, in the distant past, in the original Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek texts, some no longer available, there may have been a more accurate and definitive texts. While carrying a favoured and influential position in the Latin Church, it was not declared as the definitive "official Bible" in the 1917 Code of Canon Law.
File:Pius XII crowned.jpg|thumb|right|240px|Pope Pius XII's encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu paved the way for a critical source engagement and revision of the Vulgate within the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church initially responded cautiously and defensively to the rise of the German liberal Protestant historical-critical method of Biblical criticism, viewing it as a threat to traditional doctrines about the Bible’s divine inspiration and authority. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Pope Leo XIII's Providentissimus Deus and Pope Pius X’s Pascendi Dominici gregis condemned the methods of higher criticism, warning Catholic scholars against approaches that treated Scripture merely as a human text or questioned its divine inspiration. However, a significant shift occurred under Pope Pius XII with the 1943 encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu, which opened the door for a more nuanced engagement with biblical criticism and created a pretext for a revision of the Vulgate, as well as use of other source texts. Pope Pius XII encouraged the use of critical methods, including historical and literary analysis, to deepen understanding of Scripture’s original meaning while maintaining its divine inspiration in matters of faith and morals. This encyclical made it possible to for there to be a critical approach to the text of the Vulgate within the scope of the Church, laying the groundwork for both liberal revisions published after the Second Vatican Council by groups which align with the modern Vatican and also the Palmarian "purification" of the text at the opposite end.
Scripture in the pontifical documents of Pope Gregory XVII
The Palmarian Catholic Church claims that Jesus Christ moved the Holy See of the Catholic Church to the "Mystical Desert" of El Palmar de Troya, Andalusia, Spain, in 1978, in the form of Pope Gregory XVII, following on from the supposed Great Apostasy of the Roman Catholic Church from the Catholic faith. Domínguez was a stigmatist and mystical seer associated with the alleged apparitions of Our Lady of Palmar. Representing a Catholic traditionalist pushback against the Second Vatican Council, in the early Papal documents of Pope Gregory XVII, released between 1978 and 1980, the Palmarians discuss sacred scripture in several documents. Notably, the Forty-Fourth Document published on 12 December 1979, lionises the Book of Isaias and sees within it prophecies foretelling of the Palmarians in the Last Times of the Church; "The Holy Prophet Isaiah, when he speaks of the last times of the Church of Christ, repeatedly speaks of the Desert, the Holy Mountain, Mount Carmel, and of the Great Pontiff of the Last Times — as well as the great blind one who sees with spiritual eyes: the eyes of the soul" and in addition to this, "The Holy Prophet Isaiah speaks of the need to draw the faithful out of Babylon to avoid contagion, and to lead them to the desert, to the Holy Mountain, to Mount Carmel. The Holy Prophet Isaiah foretells the fall and destruction of the second Jerusalem, the present Rome, the City of the Seven Hills."File:Aparición de la Virgen a Sor María de Jesús de Agreda.png|thumb|right|240px|St. María de Jesús de Ágreda, author of the Mystical City of God. The revision of the Vulgate was partly informed by the chronology of the Bible she provided.
In the same Forty-Fourth Document, Pope Gregory XVII recommends that the faithful "read from older Bibles, approved by Holy Mother Church before Vatican Council II, and before the terrible pest of modernism, since as you know, modernism is the sum of all heresies and errors." It also discusses some of the more recent translation attempts, which were then being promoted in the Catholic world and declared "We, with the authority with which we are vested, anathematise the famous bible known by the name "Jerusalem Bible", as likewise all bibles similar or parallel to the famous Jerusalem Bible, since in these bibles the progressivists and cursed modernists have introduced heresies and errors. We observe that all these bibles, the fruits of modernism, are designed to turn the Catholic into protestant." One of the central themes of the document was attempting to work out an coherent chronology of the Bible and refers to the Mystical City of God by the Spanish mystic St. María de Jesús de Ágreda, which assigns very specific dates to biblical events, for instance, claiming that Jesus Christ was born in "the year 5,199 of the Creation of the World." In this effort, it seeks to align the chronology with that of the Roman Martyrology. Already, as far back as this document, the Palmarians discuss that there are differences of years between Greek versions of the Bible, such as the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate and the dates of the Roman Martyrology.
The Palmarians asserted that, when St. Jerome composed the Vulgate, there were several other Latin texts of the Bible in circulation at the time, which he compared to some of the Greek and Hebrew texts, before the Catholic Church chose the Vulgate of St. Jerome as the "most adequate" from what was available. In this document, Pope Gregory XVII claimed that, in reference to the Old Testament, "after the time of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Jews falsified certain biblical texts, and even concealed and destroyed others, particularly those that better portrayed the Messiah." They claim that, the ordinary Jewish people were sure that the Messiah was near, due to the propehecies, but supposedly, the Scribes and Pharisees "who rejected Christ tried by every means to conceal the clear proofs that that was the time of the Messiah." He claimed that the Jews, "with patience and serenity, with premeditation and malice, took the trouble zealously to lessen the number of years of the patriarchs, to let it appear that the Coming of the Messiah was still far off" and "adulterated the biblical texts", as "the prophets had given signs of the approximate years for the Coming of the Messiah. For that reason the perfidious Jews, that cursed deicide race, changed the years of the biblical chronology in order to hide their monstrous crime, that monstrous crime of deicide." The document ends by declaring "We, as Universal Doctor of the Church, decree: That the Vulgate be revised, and that the chronology be made to conform with the Roman Martyrology."