New Testament

Carlo Maria Martini, Biblical Scholar
On the Centenary of His Birth (15 February 1927 - 2027)

The Course aims to introduce students to the cultural significance of biblical studies through a trajectory which begins with the history of the formation of the earliest Christian texts and the tools developed by philology and exegesis for interpreting them, and leads to the scholarly formation of Carlo Maria Martini and his own ways of reading, interpreting and teaching the biblical tradition. The centenary of Martini's birth (15 February 1927 - 2027) therefore provides an opportunity to retrace, through his intellectual biography, some of the principal stages in the history of biblical scholarship in Italy and Europe during the twentieth century.
The intellectual biography of Cardinal Martini has generally been understood primarily in terms of the episcopal ministry he exercised in the city of Milan during the twenty-two years between 10 February 1980 and 29 September 2002. During this period, his thought gained recognition far beyond the boundaries of the Archdiocese of Milan and beyond the confines of internal debate within the Catholic Church, eventually making him one of the most widely heard and respected voices in Europe and throughout the world. The style and substance of his episcopate - innovative in form, far-reaching in its agenda, and capable of profoundly reshaping the Catholic community of Milan - were nevertheless forged through his intensive and uninterrupted activity as a biblical scholar.
This activity, which began with the strong preference for biblical studies already evident during his theological formation in Chieri (1950) and culminated in his tenure as Rector of the Pontifical Biblical Institute (29 September 1969 - 29 December 1979), provides the central thread of the course. Martini's formation and research will be situated within the broader history of the formation, transmission and interpretation of Christian texts, thereby bringing into focus the relationship between the history of texts, the progressive development of the tools of philology and exegesis, and the emergence of the modern critical consciousness of biblical scholarship.
From this perspective, particular attention will be devoted to Martini's preference for Formgeschichte (Form Criticism) and textual criticism, to the intellectual debt he owed to the teaching of Bultmann, Lyonnet, Cullmann and Käsemann, and to the role he played in the preparation of the Nestle-Aland edition. These elements will be reconsidered not as isolated episodes in his scholarly biography, but as stages in a broader process of intellectual formation, through which the tools of philology and exegesis progressively progressively came to provide the means by which the Christian tradition could be accessed and interpreted.
The course will also place Martini's formation and scholarly activity within the historical context of biblical scholarship and, more broadly, within the historical and cultural context in which they developed: from Catholic debates - both conciliar and post-conciliar - concerning the role of Scripture in the profession of faith and the methods appropriate to the study of the "Sacred Text", to the retreat from scholastic intellectual frameworks; from militant Christianity to the cultural entrenchment of secularisation; from the so-called "student protest" movement to the Years of Lead; from Catholic political alignment to the "religious choice"; and from the priority accorded to the confessional definition of Christian faith to the emergence of ecumenism.
The 2026-2027 course in New Testament Philology and Exegesis therefore seeks to offer students a coherent trajectory in which Carlo Maria Martini's scholarly biography becomes a key through which to understand the history of biblical scholarship and, at the same time, its cultural significance. Martini's intellectual trajectory makes it possible to observe how knowledge of Christian texts, the history of their formation and transmission, and the development of critical tools for their interpretation contributed to the emergence of modern biblical scholarship as a discipline characterised by profound methodological vitality and critical self-awareness.

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The course will be organised into three Argumentative Parts, following a progression which connects the history of Christian texts, the development of critical tools, and Martini's scholarly biography.

Part I: "From Jesus' Preaching to the Earliest Textual Groupings: The Formation of the Written Christian Tradition"
The first part of the Course will examine the earliest Christian written production and the historical, cultural and religious circumstances that accompanied the formation of these first texts. Particular attention will be devoted to the sources of the "Pauline tradition", the "Synoptic tradition" and the "archival tradition", as well as to the context and distinctive characteristics of the beginnings of this early Christian textual production, from Paul to the crisis of the 60s of the first century.
The Course will first examine the role played by textuality and, subsequently, by writing in the life and ministry of the rabbi Jesus of Nazareth and in the earliest proclamation of his Easter. Particular attention will be devoted to the context in which the first Christian writings emerged, their religious purposes, and the characteristics of documentary distinctiveness which, from a literary-critical perspective, make them objectively distinctive and set them apart from the historical and literary landscape of the ancient world.
The description of these features will provide an introduction to the methodologies and critical tools developed by biblical philology and exegesis for the scholarly analysis of these complex documents.

Part II: "From the Synoptic Gospels to the Emergence of a 'Christian Literature': Textual Formation, Transmission and the Tools of Critical Exegesis"
The second part of the Course will trace the gradual emergence of properly literary characteristics within Christian production. Moving from the para-literary culture of the origins to the earliest evidence of a "Christian literature", it will examine the processes through which the original characteristics of Christian writing were reformed, regulated and transformed, from the 70s of the first century to the 30s of the second.
Particular attention will be devoted to the so-called "Synoptic Problem", as a particularly significant outcome of Christian practices of writing, reading, production and the circulation of texts. The gradual adoption of established literary conventions - circumscribed and strong authorship; closed textuality; passive reception; and bounded transmission - will provide an opportunity to examine the ways in which the earliest Christian culture of the written text was progressively "literarised" and incorporated into the "literary space" constituted by the Hellenistic and imperial koine, progressively adopting its forms, conventions and modes of transmission.
Within this framework, particular attention will be paid to the methodology of Formgeschichte (Form Criticism), considered both in its literary-critical and historical-critical dimensions, as well as to the other tools through which philology and critical exegesis have sought to reconstruct the formation, transmission and interpretation of the earliest Christian texts.
Within this trajectory, particular significance will be attached to Carlo Maria Martini's Introduzione to the Synoptic Gospels, which will serve as the pedagogical link between the description of the development of the ancient Christian written tradition and the investigation of the gradual formation of a specific method for the critical reading of early Christian writings.

Part III:"Carlo Mar ia Martini as a Biblical Scholar: Formation, Research, Teaching and Cultural Engagement at the Heart of the 'Crises' of the Twentieth Century"
The third and final part of the Course will be devoted to Carlo Maria Martini's scholarly biography, from his formative years in Chieri through his specialisation at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, his teaching activity and his tenure as Rector.
Particular attention will be devoted to the role played by the teaching of Father Roberto Busa, a pioneer of computational linguistics, and to the scholarly environments in which Martini's intellectual formation took place. The course will reconstruct the principal stages of the decade from 1969 to 1979, situating them within the context of contemporary biblical scholarship and the broader cultural transformation of the West.
The aim will not simply be to reconstruct Martini's biography, but to understand how he assimilated, selected and reworked the tools of philology and exegesis acquired during his formation, and how he subsequently transformed them into a method of critical enquiry and cultural interpretation of the biblical tradition.
From this perspective, Martini's scholarly profile will allow us to return to the texts and methods examined in the first two parts of the course from a new perspective: no longer merely as objects in the history of scholarship, but as elements of a scholarly tradition which Martini himself helped to transmit, renew and communicate.
The principal stages of his scholarly biography will therefore be reconsidered in the light of their historical and scholarly context and, more broadly, of the historical and cultural circumstances in which they unfolded: from the Second Vatican Council and post-conciliar debates concerning the role of Scripture to secularisation, from ecumenism to the transformation of the relationship between Church, culture and society.