Literary Fiction or Ancient Astronomical and Meteorological Observations in the Work of Maria Valtorta?

Abstract

Abstract:In The Gospel as revealed to me, Maria Valtorta reports a lot of information on the Holy Land at the time of Jesus: historical, archaeological, astronomical, geographical, meteorological. She states she has written what seen "in vision". By a detailed astronomical analysis of explicit and implicit calendar information reported while she narrates detailed episodes concerning the three years of Jesus' public life-possible because of many references to lunar phases, constellations, planets visible in the night sky in her writings-it is ascertained that every event described implies a precise date-day, month, year-without being explicitly reported by her. For example, Jesus' crucifixion should have occurred on Friday April 23 of the year 34, a date proposed by Isaac Newton. She has also recorded the occurrence of rain so that the number of rainy days reported can be compared to the current meteorological data, supposing random observations and no important changes in rainfall daily frequency in the last 2000 years, the latter issue discussed in the paper. Unexpectedly, both the annual and monthly averages of rainy days deduced from the data available from the Israel Meteorological Service and similar averages deduced from her writings agree very well.

A Mathematical Analysis of Maria Valtorta’s Mystical Writings

“…As already noted, the EMV contains a lot of information on the historical time when Jesus lived, so detailed and precise to give the impression of reading the report of an eyewitness of the events narrated, occurring in the Holy Land two thousand years ago. This is the unexplained conclusion of the astronomical and meteorological analysis of a large amount of data reported in her work (Matricciani and De Caro 2017;De Caro 2014, 2015. It would be very interesting and useful if scholars of other disciplines studied her writings such as, for example, archeology and ancient history.…”

“…In recent years, however, it has been demonstrated that, in some favourable circumstances, a scientific approach can be used to analyse the writings of mystics, with unexpected results. Indeed, in some recent works (Matricciani and De Caro 2017;De Caro 2014, 2015, a series of studies carried out on the writings of an Italian mystic of the 20th century, Maria Valtorta, are summarized. Her writings, concerning the life of Jesus, have the peculiarity of containing a large amount of historical, biblical, geographical, archaeological, even astronomical and meteorological information, hardly attributable to the skills of the author, who received an education certainly higher than the average of her times, but surely not enough to justify what emerged from a careful analysis of her writings.…”

“…We find also many references to the moon in the night sky (moon phases), to planets, constellations, weather conditions, all narrative elements that enrich the events of Jesus' life described, so detailed that they seem to be real data, as if they were recorded by a careful observer present at the scene. The astronomical data contained in Valtorta's work are so accurate that they have allowed for pursuing several scientific investigations on them and deriving dates for every episode of Jesus' life narrated (De Caro 2014, 2015Matricciani and De Caro 2017;La Greca and De Caro 2017).…”

“…Nevertheless, when extracted from her notebooks, the EMV episodes regarding Jesus' and Mary life have a perfectly organic and coherent structure, from the first to the last page. Without reporting any explicit date, they imply an accurate chronology, reconstructed by an astronomical analysis (De Caro 2014, 2015Matricciani and De Caro 2017) from Maria Valtorta's descriptions of night skies that enrich her narration. These episodes, collected and reordered following the indication given by Jesus to Maria Valtorta herself, constitute the main opera-the EMV-published in 10 volumes (about 5000 pages).…”

Jesus Christ’s Speeches in Maria Valtorta’s Mystical Writings: Setting, Topics, Duration and Deep-Language Mathematical Analysis

“…In our previous work on her literary writings [2,3], we have found striking mathematical differences in fundamental and consciously uncontrollable deep-language indices, curiously anticipated by the alleged Jesus of Nazareth to Maria Valtorta -in the following, we drop the qualifier "alleged", although we always mean it throughout the paper. It is not our duty, or task, to declare or establish that her "visions" were true, because this is beyond the realms of science-: "I have planned to alternate your contemplations and My consequent clarifications, with true and proper dictations, to comfort you and your spirit, granting you the beatitude of seeing, and also because in this way the difference in style between your composing and Mine will be obvious" (44.8).…”