Gift Places Historic Gospel Text In Heart Of Church
PRISCILLA GREEAR, Staff Writer
Published: March 8, 2007
ATLANTA—The evening of Jan. 20 Frank Hanna III, his wife Sally, and daughter
Elizabeth descended into the vault holding the rarest documents of the Vatican Apostolic
Library to view the Bodmer Papyrus XIV-XV, the oldest manuscript in existence of the
Gospel of St. Luke and one of the two oldest of St. John’s Gospel.
They were accompanied by the prefect of the library, Bishop Raffaele Farina, SDB,
Father Laurence Spiteri, and Pat Cipollone, an attorney who assisted with the acquisition.
They first viewed the world’s oldest Bible that dates to the fourth century, the “Codex
Vaticanus.” Bishop Farina then showed the Hannas leaves of the famous Bodmer
Papyrus, each encased in glass.
The papyrus was handwritten in Greek around the year 200 and contains about half of
each of the Gospels of Luke and John. It holds the oldest copy of the Lord’s Prayer in
Luke. The manuscript was originally discovered in Upper Egypt in 1952 as part of a
larger horde of manuscripts, the majority of which were acquired by Dr. Martin Bodmer.
The Vatican acquired the manuscript in late November from the Bodmer Foundation in
Switzerland through the purchase by the Frank and Sally Hanna Family Foundation and
the Solidarity Association. The Hannas were originally contacted about the papyrus by
the Pave the Way Foundation, a Jewish group which seeks to build peace and good will
with other religions.
The Scriptures are written on 52 pages comprising 51 leaves, or part leaves, from a codex
that is made up of 36 double leaves, and folded in the middle to form a single quire.
“It was a beautiful color, an amber color in the light. That night it almost had a golden
glow. As we stood there Father Spiteri, just behind us, calmly whispered, ‘There it is, the
word of God’ and it was,” recalled Hanna. “We have two key components of our faith.
We have the church and her tradition, and we have holy Scripture. We were there at the
Vatican, at the tomb of St. Peter where the church resides, and here we were looking at
the word of God itself. It was nice to see the combination of these two elements, this
ancient manuscript of the word of God residing there in the church.”
Hanna, the chief executive officer of HBR Capital Ltd. in Atlanta, recalled in a phone
interview Feb. 16 the inspiring experience and how the papyrus “found us.” He is a
parishioner at Holy Spirit Church and through his foundation has financially supported
the Solidarity School for low-income Hispanic children and other Catholic schools in the
archdiocese. He also served as a co-chair of President George W. Bush’s Commission on
Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.
After his family beheld the handwritten, fragile leaves in ancient Greek he contemplated
the historical foundation of his faith—how this copy of the Gospel was used in the liturgy
and was part of the accepted set of four Gospels of the nascent church. He contemplated
how people may not believe that Jesus is indeed God, and other messages of the Gospel,
but they can’t deny the authenticity of the Gospels as historical documents, and how
Jesus’ life led to the birth of Christianity which rapidly spread across the Middle East and
beyond.
“Our faith does require belief, but it is a belief grounded in reality. When you go to
Rome, St. Peter’s is a reality, built on the tomb of St. Peter. His bones are there. And he
knew Jesus and was martyred for that belief,” he reflected. “This papyrus is 1,800 years
old, dating back to 200. It really does exist. Somebody really wrote it down, and its
existence is not a legend. It’s up to each individual to accept what Scripture says, but the
authenticity of that Scripture and what we base our faith on, these are historical facts.”
The morning of Jan. 22 the family attended Mass in the Clementine Chapel near the tomb
of St. Peter on the bottom level of St. Peter’s Basilica. Later that day a ceremony was
held in the Apostolic Palace, where heads of state are received, with the Vatican
Apostolic Library’s archivist and librarian Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, Bishop Farina,
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Father Richard Donohoe of
Birmingham, Ala., Cipollone, the president/founder of Pave the Way Foundation Gary
Krupp, and other Vatican staff. Pope Benedict XVI greeted each person and discussed the
importance of the documents, and he thanked everyone present for making the gift
possible.
Cardinal Tauran presented the Hannas and then displayed pages of the papyrus under
glass to the pope.
Hanna told the pope that it was a privilege for his family to assist the church in acquiring
such a precious relic from the roots of Christendom.
“We first thanked him for his service to the church and told him we were praying for him
and grateful for his dedication, and we told him we were grateful for the privilege of
being in Rome with him and being able to be part of this effort with the papyrus,” Hanna
recounted.
In the conversation Hanna referred to the pope’s message in a homily before the conclave
about how money, buildings and books do not last, but what remains eternally is the
human soul.
“We told him this papyrus would not last forever, but the imprint it would have on the
souls of those who see it and believe in it can indeed last forever. We were hopeful of
that. I told him how his focus and devotion to the liturgy and his book ‘Soul of the
Liturgy’ had been an inspiration to us, particularly regarding the church’s teaching that
liturgy is a sacred action surpassing all others,” he continued. “We told him we are
hopeful that the papyrus would help all who see it to grow in appreciation of the word of
God and in appreciation of the liturgy that embodies that word.”
Pope Benedict remarked about the treasure of the liturgy for the church, then put his
glasses on and began to peruse the papyrus and then read introspectively out loud the
Greek text.
“You could tell he immediately recognized it. …You could tell he enjoyed reading it,”
Hanna said.
He described the room as warm and beautiful but not ornate. He found Pope Benedict to
be a gentle man.
“He is very warm and engaging, and is a very kind, peaceful and serene man. Obviously
he is a world class intellect and theologian, but he’s also a very simple and peaceful man,
and I think all of us were struck by that.”
The new acquisitions join the Bodmer Papyrus VIII, a copy of the First and Second
Letters of St. Peter, which Martin Bodmer personally gave to Pope Paul VI in 1969. The
Gospel papyrus will be accessible to qualified scholars worldwide.
The document purchase was finalized on Nov. 21, which was the feast of the Presentation
of Mary, a fitting date since they had named the trust they established for it at the Vatican
the Mater Verbi (Mother of the Word)/Hanna Papyrus Trust. Both sides agreed not to
disclose the purchase cost.
“The Gospel of Luke is also known as the Gospel of Mary because it contains certain
details that could only be attributed to Mary,” Hanna said, such as Jesus being lost as a
child after a visit by the Holy Family to the temple in Jerusalem.
Father Donohoe, rector of the Cathedral of St. Paul in Birmingham, initiated the project
when he learned through his goddaughter on Thanksgiving 2005 about the sale of the
papyrus by the Bodmer Foundation through Christie’s auction house. The Bodmer
Foundation holds a vast collection of world literature, ranging from comedies by Greek
playwright Menander to a Gutenberg Bible. Father Donohoe contacted the Pave the Way
Foundation, knowing they had worked on other Vatican projects, and got the Vatican
library phone number. He called and staff members were “ecstatic” to learn the twin
papyrus was for sale. Within a week Cardinal Tauran called the priest directly to discuss
the importance of acquiring it. And soon thereafter he had a mandate from the Holy See
to raise the funds for the purchase and was crisscrossing the country from February
through June 2006 speaking to cardinals and bishops about it. He was advised in
fundraising by Pave the Way, which was “extremely helpful.” Archbishop Pietro Sambi,
apostolic nuncio to the United States, was also instrumental in helping to realize this
historic acquisition.
Hanna’s friend Harry Epstein, brother-in-law of Pave the Way founder Krupp, contacted
Hanna and told him about the project and sent a packet of information. This wasn’t the
type of endeavor that Hanna’s foundation usually supports, but as he contemplated the
importance of this acquisition to the church library, which specializes in preserving
ancient documents, and his own love of liturgy, Hanna agreed. He made the decision
“given the fact that this was very important to the Holy Father and important to the
church and given what it contained.”
“I thought, we have one God in the universe. He came to earth one time, and he gave us
one prayer to pray, and this is the oldest copy of that prayer. And he left us a church that
is his bride, and this copy of that prayer should be within the church. We concluded at the
Solidarity Association and the Sally and Frank Hanna Charitable Foundation that this is
something important for the church and that we were being called to do.”
He added that “one point the papal nuncio made to me was that if we don’t seize the
opportunity when it’s available it may not be again. He was very concerned that it could
be lost to the church.”
Solidarity is an association of the Christian faithful that provides financial and logistical
support to other entities within the church and undertakes corporeal works of charity, he
explained.
The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano reported that until the 1952 discovery in
Egypt of the papyrus, biblical scholars relied on references to the Gospels in the writings
of early church theologians to assert that by the year 100 the Christian community had
accepted only four Gospels as inspired texts. The newspaper said the papyrus provides
concrete evidence that the four Gospels were circulating among Christian communities as
a complete set by the year 200, although the twin papyrus containing the Gospels of St.
Matthew and St. Mark has not been found.
As the writer of Luke wrote in chapter one, after the middle of the first century the need
began to be felt in the Christian community to “compile a narrative of the things which
have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from
the beginning were eyewitnesses.” The four books of the Gospel were then brought
together in the second century.
The article also reported that the papyrus was probably used by a Greek-speaking
Egyptian parish. As the ancient manuscript became unusable and lost pages, it was given
a modest binding which was reinforced with a hard binding with the rest of the first and
last surviving pages. It was then probably venerated as a relic and conserved, “perhaps
beginning in the fifth century, in the library of the Pachomian monastery of Middle
Egypt.” In the face of unspecified danger, it and some 40 other Greek and Coptic
volumes were hidden in a “mound sheltered from the floods of the Nile,” it reported.
The Vatican, upon receipt of the manuscript, discovered that while in Switzerland some
30 fragments of external pages that were recovered by a partial restoration of the hard
binding in 1961 by the Bodmer Foundation had not been identified, and others had not
been documented. So now Vatican staff members are excited to find they have additional
documents to study, Hanna said.
Krupp was happy to assist with the project, in accordance with his organization’s mission
to make concrete gestures of good will to bring together good Christian, Jewish and
Muslim people, as well as other people of faith, to fight hatred, which endangers
mankind, and to focus on common values. The seventh Jew in history to receive a papal
honor of knighthood, Krupp said the foundation’s many projects now include working to
formalize Vatican relations with Israel and trying to organize a conference at the Holy
See opposing religious extremism. He said this manuscript is now the second most
important work at the Vatican after the “Codex Vaticanus,” and that it is probably the
best-equipped library in the world to preserve it.
“We feel very wonderful about this, that two Jewish men and two Catholic priests were
able to make this happen, and, of course, the Hannas,” he said. The papyrus “has got
enormous value to the Christian world.”
He commended Father Donohoe for working over a year on the project, clocking 110,000
sky miles. He called the Hannas “an enormously generous family” and Mr. Hanna a kind,
benevolent and religious man.
Over in Alabama Father Donohoe prays that more people will come to understand the
importance of these documents and how they manifestly communicate the unchanging
truth.
“In our society, we are constantly confronted with documents and concepts contrary to
the Gospel: the Judas Gospel, ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and countless other things that are
contrary to the teaching magisterium of the church. The Bodmer Papyrus should cause us
to center in to better appreciate the deep and profound reality of the gift of the Good
News that comes to us,” he said. “It is the Bodmer Papyrus that reminds us of the validity
of the deposit of faith; it is the Bodmer Papyrus that should turn us to the magisterium,
the teaching authority of the church, encouraging us to give thanks that through these
ancient texts we are continually authenticated in what we believe.”
Hanna also left Rome with a sense of gratitude for the priests and bishops at the Vatican
who have selflessly dedicated their lives in service of the church.
“They are human beings and subject to the same failings of us all. But it’s remarkable
how much they love the church and how much of their lives they dedicate to it,” he
reflected. “We have priests throughout the world and in our archdiocese who give their
entire lives in service for the church, so when we in the laity have a chance to make a
fraction of that sacrifice, it’s a privilege. We left Rome with a profound sense of gratitude
(that) we had a chance to participate in this event for the church. We felt like we were the
ones who received the gift.”
March 8, 2007.