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Crossing biographies and biblical texts with the work of
Emmanuel
Some passages in the Acts
of the Apostles contradict Paul and Stephen,
and part of this is due to the choice of the directors
of Spiritist films to base the movie on the biblical
book of the evangelist Lucas, to the detriment of the
work of Emmanuel. The main contradiction involves the
relationship between Paul of Tarsus and Stephen still
embodied. In Acts and in the biographies of the
convert from Damascus, it is stated that the stoning2 occurred
beyond the walls, that is, outside the city of
Jerusalem, in a manner consistent, therefore, with the
fact that, supposedly, there was no permission from the
Roman authority for the execution in the city, as
established in the law of the Empire (Wright, 2018, p.
54) and also the way it happened regarding Jesus.3 It
is worth saying that Luke wrote Acts in the
sequence of his gospel, something that had been
suggested to him by his great friend Paul, as can be
assumed, in a rational way, regardless of the account in
the work of Emmanuel.4
In the book psychographed by Chico Xavier, when Paul is
being taken to Rome, many Christians were touched and
went to him, in Ephesus, to say goodbye and Luke then
tells him of the intention to record the fact in his
future biblical writings. The Damascus convert, however,
determined that this should not be done and that the
evangelist should not write about Paul's personal
virtues either. As pointed out by Herminio Miranda
(2010, p. 71), Lucas followed this determination. On the
other hand, he disobeyed Paul by reporting part of his
virtuous deeds and, mainly, by allowing himself to
elaborate a non-criminalizing version of the apostle, at
least regarding the deliberation and coordination of
Stephen's extermination. For my part, I allow myself to
say that this is a logical spiritist interpretation of
the meaning of such a contradiction between the two
texts.
I arrived to this interpretation based, at least
partially, on a section of the first chapter of the work
of the German priest, called: “Stephen and Saul”.
There, Holzner (2008, p. 33-34), reports something that
does not appear in the book Acts, which is to
say: the
heated debate that occurred between both:
It would be a mistake to regard the new Church as an
independent and autonomous entity, with its own
organization separate from Judaism. For the time being,
it was presented only in the very free form of a
synagogue, although it did not have its own building for
worship. He was distinguished only by an impressively
fervent belief in the Messiah, by the fraternal charity
that united His followers, by the eating meals together
and by the mystical and Eucharistic worship of Jesus,
which was also involved in a certain mystery (Acts 2:
42-46). Stephen was one of His main representatives, and
apparently he was the first to clearly manifest the
definitive and universal value of the Church,
contrasting it with the limited preparatory meaning of
the Mosaic Law. Saul was, therefore, facing a
respectable enemy. Let us go for a moment to a Jerusalem
synagogue. At the entrance porch, one can read in
Aramaic and Greek; “Synagogue of the Cilice”. People
from all the diaspora communities are elbowing at the
door, because today is a day of agreat fight. The house
is full; the reading of the Scripture and the sermon are
over, and the controversy begins. Behind a pillar, Peter
and John watch the scene. In the center, on a higher
platform, we see Stephen, and in front of him stands a
slim figure, consumed by an inner fire: he is a young
Rabbi from Tarsus, who is going to cross the sword with
one of the greatest spirits of the young church (...)
We understand, therefore, with what violence Stephen and
Saul, the defenders of two absolutely opposite
conceptions about the coming of the Messiah, had to face
each other (...) Saul was a contender of strong oratory
talent, but Stephen demonstrated to be broadly superior
to him. No one could resist “the wisdom and the Spirit
that inspired him” (Ac 6,10), whereas the Pharisee could
only oppose the arid words of the Law: “Cursed is
everything that hangs on the tree”
Based on some excerpts from Acts and his personal
research, Josef Holzner briefly reports what Emmanuel
(2013, p. 80-89) inserted in detail in his book about
Paul of Tarsus, regarding the clash between them, which
took place at the Casa do Caminho, called by the German
priest cilice Synagogue. It is never too much to say to
the eventual non-spiritist reader that Chico Xavier
would have enormous difficulty in accessing and
consulting, with an interpreter, the book published in
Germany in 1937, just four years before he psychographed
the referred work.
There are also contradictions between Acts and some of
Paul's epistles. The three small excerpts gathered
below, from Holzner's book (2008, p. 60-62), deal with
this and also with the three-year period, an interval -
also pointed out by Wright (2018) - of isolation in the
desert by the apostle to the Gentiles regarding the
great importance in proving the history of Paul and
Stephen and which will be addressed in this article
later:
Regarding the events of the following years, there are
apparent divergences between the narration of St. Luke
and the indications provided by the Apostle in the
letter to the Galatians. There is, of course, a
shortcoming in the Acts. “A few days” (Ac 9, 20) are not
enough to prepare a lasting missionary activity, and it
is also unlikely that Paul would start preaching soon
after his conversion: it does not match what we know of
the great people who transformed the world after they
were converted (...) “I left for Arabia”. The term
“Arabia” was a very broad concept: it applied all over
the Arabian peninsula to Damascus and even to the
Euphrates (...) This retreat of almost three years was
the most contemplative time (...) Here started, under
the direction of the Spirit of Christ, the great process
of interior transformation to which he himself refers in
the Epistle to the Philippians (3, 7-11).
Among the biographies, it is also that of Josef Holzner
(2008, p. 75; 79) who interprets the period of the
apostle to the Gentiles in his hometown Tarsus - pointed
out in them as being a decade - after leaving Jerusalem
already as a converted Christian, with a notable
similarity with the indication of only three years,
contained in the story narrated by Emmanuel:
It seems more likely, however, that he lived in the
neighborhood of the Jews of Tarsus, in the street of the
weavers, since we have already seen that, as a son of
Pharisees, he exercised when he was a young man in the
weaving work (...) There is an intrinsic probability
that Saul spent the next three or four years in silence,
waiting for a new call from God. Sometimes God makes His
chosen ones wait long. Like the Master in Nazareth,
Paul, too, must be prepared for the moment when he was
called.
It is worth noting, however, a notable partial
similarity with Paul and Stephen also in the work
of Wright (2018, p. 99), who, based on the Letter to the
Romans (9: 1-5), mentioned the apostle's disappointment
and sadness in relation to his relatives. The English
theologian also considers the possibility that he had a
romance with a woman, being in his opinion plausible
that:
Paul was promised to someone from an early age, probably
to the daughter of some family friend, and returned to
Tarsus, eager to see her again, but also worried about
how it would all unfold and also praying that she too
would come to know Jesus (...) But she, or her parents,
had broken off their engagement when they discovered
that the full of energy young Saul had returned with his
head and heart filled with the horrendous folly about
the crucified Nazarene. Did
Saul manage, as we say, “to forget her? [emphasis
added] Nobody knows (Wright, 2018, p. 101).
To conclude this crossing between Emmanuel's work,
biographies and biblical texts, it is worth saying that
Holzner (2008, p. 75) also underlines the Pauline
authorship of the Letter to the Hebrews, written
directly by the convert from Damascus, without any of
his young people auxiliaries writing parchments and
marked by a lot of commotion, as recorded in the
psychographed book by Chico Xavier:
In the Epistle to the Hebrews, which
was written according to the Apostle's mind and
contains a good part of the treasure of his ideas
[emphasis added], it refers precisely to the Lord's
prayer in his mortal anguish: “Which in the days of his
flesh He offered prayers and leas, with great cries and
tears, to the One who could save him from death”(Hebr 5:
7).
Other evidence and a fact
that shows the veracity of Paul
and Stephen
In addition to the evidence of historical veracity of Paul
and Stephen mentioned above, it is worth mentioning
three more, all related to the Greek city of Corinth,
where the martyr was born and also his sister Abigail,
whom the book points out as the bride of the apostle to
the Gentiles, who died shortly afterwards. after
converting to Christianity.
It has already been said in the spiritist medium,
publicly, by Haroldo Dias that the streets of the
capital of the former province of Acaia - described by
Emmanuel as “sumptuous” - are made of marble, according
to the archaeological discoveries made (Crook, 2018, p.
32-33 ). On trips to that city, two other spiritist
activists observed aspects consistent with the book
psychographed by Chico Xavier. Dias' partner, the
musician Julio Adriano Corradi indicates that one month
was necessary for a ship to cross (transported on wooden
wheels) the ancient 6.4 km road on the isthmus (narrow
strip of land), since a water channel 5 was
only built there in 1893 - corresponding to the period
that Jesiel (Hebrew and former name of Stephen) remained
in prison, with wounds healing, until he could enter as
a slave in a typical vessel of the time, called
“galera”. Finally, the scholar Altino Mageste, who
organizes trips for non-profit spiritist groups, to that
and other cities included in Emmanuel's historical
works, points out that the maps of Corinth and the
description in detail in the book make it possible to
locate the prison where Stephen, his sister and father
Jochebed were incarcerated.
Having seen all these signs, we finally arrived at a
fact that shows the veracity of the story narrated by
Emmanuel. To understand it, let us start with what Josef
Holzner (2008, p. 63; 82) says about Paul of Tarsus:
He himself preferred to call it "my gospel". “That I did
not receive or learn from man, but through the
revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal 1, 12; cv. Eph 3, 4-5),
that is, his knowledge of the universal plan of
salvation announced by God
(...) It is difficult for us to evaluate how the stay in
Arabia and these years spent in Tarsus were important
and decisive for the interior evolution and the
maturation of the Pauline theology. When Paul, in his
letters, speaks so much of 'his Gospel', it is in Tarsus
that we must look for the principles of this wonderful
knowledge.
And let us also see the reflection on Nicholas Thomas
Wright (2018, p. 79; 84):
Apparently, he had been accused of extracting a
second-hand “gospel” from the Jerusalem apostles. (...)
Paul, in other words, is not only making it clear in
Galatians 1 - 2 that his “gospel” was given to him
directly, and not acquired, second-hand, through the
leaders of Jerusalem, as he is also clarifying that his
calling and commissioning positioned him in the ancient
prophetic tradition, whether from Isaiah, Jeremiah, or
Elias himself.
In addition to the Letter to the Galatians and the
Letter to the Ephesians, Paul's reference to “his
gospel” is still present in two parts of the Letter to
the Romans (2:16 and 16:15) and in his last epistle, the
touching Second Letter to Timothy (2:18). In fact, this
strange personalism of Paul calls attention when he uses
the expression “my gospel” for the good news that, in
truth, belongs to Jesus. Holzner,
(2008, p. 63) thus sought to explain it:
This is not to say that he had a different gospel than
that of the other Apostles; in that case, he would have
been expelled from the nascent Church. But he announced
it with an unparalleled energy, coherence and power of
speech, and impressed him with such a personal and
unparalleled stamp, introducing into it the world of the
Hellenistic intellectual, who could well say: “my
gospel”.
Wright (2018, p. 80), in turn, also tried to explain it:
Paul is therefore insisting that his message came from
himself: he had received it from Jesus himself, not from
other members of the movement. It had come, he says,
"through a revelation of Jesus the Messiah" (Galatians
1:12).
If Holzner's interpretation is rational and believable,
Wright's gives rise to thinking that Jesus would have
made revelations exclusively to Paul of Tarsus,
something, however, which he did not, in fact, make
explicit in his epistles or in Acts, written by
Lucas. Considering that the dialogue with the Messiah at
the gates of Damascus has been mentioned several times,
it would be expected that the same would happen with
regard to such revelations, if any.
However, Josef Holzner's interpretation is not, however,
satisfactory. For if we consider that the Pauline period
in isolation of three years, before he spoke for a very
short period (probably a few weeks) with the apostles in
Jerusalem and also the next interval, again isolated for
three years in Tarsus, were very important for his
reflection on Jesus, a doubt remains. Which is to say:
only a thorough reinterpretation of the texts of the
Mosaic law and of the prophets, in the light of events,
then recent, would have been sufficient for all the
discernment made by him? If we add to this the fact that
the expression “my gospel” - or if we want: “my good
news”, objectively, therefore: not that of Jesus - is
attributed to someone like him, whose apostolic
trajectory was marked by self-denial, doubt about it
only increases.
For it is in Emmanuel's work that not only the most
logical explanation of the fact is found, but the answer
to this true puzzle: Paul of Tarsus used the expression
“my gospel” because he effectively owned and kept with
zeal scrolls containing notes about the teachings of
Jesus Christ, that is, one of the copies of the gospel
written by Matthew, also called Levi. Since this was the
only apostle with a typical profession of someone
literate (tax collector) who had remained following the
messiah together with humble fishermen, it was natural
that he sought to make such a record.
As Chico Xavier's psychographed book narrates, the
“gospel of Paul” had been donated to him by his former
teacher of childhood and youth, the also converted rabbi
Gamaliel, at the beginning of the first period of Paul's
isolation. The latter, in turn, had received the
document as a gift from Simon Peter, in return for a
cordial visit to Casa do Caminho, even before Stephen's
martyrdom. Emmanuel reports that, during Paul's first
missionary trip, made with his friend Barnabas to the
island of Cyprus, both suffered an assault at night,
while they were in a cave talking about a “true
treasure”: the gospel of Jesus in their possession. One
of the two thieves, said he heard and then demanded the
surrender of such wealth along with other belongings,
this being done serenely by the apostle of the Gentiles.
It is worth reproducing the dialogue that Barnabas and
Paul had the following morning:
- I am resigned to the absolute lack of material
resources, but I cannot forget that the Gospel notes we
had were also taken away from us. How can we restart our
task? If we know by heart a large part of the teachings,
we will not be able to check all the expressions ...
However, Paulo made a significant gesture and,
unbuttoning his tunic, removed something that
he kept close to his heart [emphasis
added].
"You are wrong, Barnabas," he said with an optimistic
smile, "I have the Gospel here that reminds me of
Gamaliel's kindness." It was a gift from Simon Peter to
my old mentor, who, in turn, gave it to me just before
he died. (Xavier; Emmanuel, 2013 p. 312-313)
As you can see, Paul of Tarsus not only had a copy of
the first writing on the good news of Jesus, but it had
a great symbolic-sentimental value due to the trajectory
that the document had until reaching his hands,
remaining with him after that assault, something that
made him allow himself to be called "my gospel". With
such an expression, the apostle of the Gentiles also
seems to admonish the Christian communities formed by
him not to distort the gospel, copied by them as well.
This rational deduction only reinforces the finding of
the existence of those notes. Contrary to what
researchers say, including Spiritists, instead of the
First Letter to the Thessalonians, therefore, that was
the first New Testament document.1 (Continued
in the next edition.)
Referências bibliográficas:
_______. Existence of Publius Lentulus at the time of
Emperor Tiberius II: The role as senator and consul suffectus. Reformador,
year 132. n. 2.222, May. 2014b, p. 14(268)-19(273).
CARVALHO, Antonio Cesar Perri de.
Espístolas de Paulo à luz do espiritismo (Epistles of
Paul at the light of Spiritism). Matao, O Clarim,
2016.
CHAMPLIN, Russel Norman. O Novo
Testamento interpretado: versiculo por versiculo.
(The New Testament interpreted: verse by verse). Vols.
3-5. Sao Paulo, Hagnos, 2014.
CROOK, Wilson W. The Design and Layout of First Century
A. D. Roman Cities. The Journal Houston Archeological
Society, n. 138, 2018, p. 31-42 (Link-2)
HOLZNER, Josef. Paul of Tarsus. 2nd edition.
Sao Paulo, Quadrante, 2008.
XAVIER, Francisco Candido. Paul and Stephen. By
the Spirit Emmanuel. 45th edition. Brasilia,
FEB, 2013.
_______. Ha dois mil anos (Two Thousand Years ago). 46th edition.
Rio de Janeiro. FEB, 2009.
WRIGHT, Nicholas Thomas. Paul: a biography. Rio
de Janeiro, Thomas Nelson Brasil, 2018.
Without
the presence of the young John Marcus who had left the
trio to return to Jerusalem, without first receiving
relevant recommendations from Paul of Tarsus, something
that perhaps influenced him to write, later, the Gospel
of Marcos, based on the memories of Simon Peter.
André Ricardo de Souza is PhD in Sociology at the
University of Sao Paulo, Associate Professor II at the
Department of Sociology at the Federal University of Sao
Carlos and organizer of the books: Spirituality and
Spiritism: Reflections beyond religiosity (Porto de
Ideias, 2017) and Identity and assistance dimensions of
Spiritism (Appris, 2020). He is a member of the Sao
Paulo Spiritist Heart of Jesus group from São Paulo.
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