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was Jean-Paul Sartre, simply add a few anecdotal facts to his life.

      Beethoven and the Ninth Symphony

      Two centuries earlier, Martin Luther had intuited that God was not reached by works and good intentions. The corollary of his thought was that in order to find Him it was necessary to put faith into play, because mere reason alone would not reveal His secrets. In the late 18th century, the poet Schiller suffered for that truth and composed his Ode to Liberty which was censored to read “Ode to Joy.”

      His contemporary, Emmanuel Kant, gave form to this feeling and established through his implacable reasoning, that no matter how much we investigate the subject and however much science abounds in discoveries, God will not be reached this way. Perhaps Kant did not mean for things to be this way, but the great majority of his contemporaries who thrived on intuition and feelings, this meant that God was far from life, from relationships between persons and, especially, far from each other´s heart.

      All these vectors led to one place and one person. That person was Ludwig van Beethoven, who, despite fierce deafness, composed one of the most celebrated musical works of our culture: his Ninth Symphony.

      There are poets who feel constricted by syntax and chained by words, and they dream of breaking that structure. They seek to reduce words to their sounds. They long for the music of the syllables, rather than the objectivity of the words, and wish to emulate the musicians by nullifying meaning in their verses. Beethoven was driven down the opposite path. Dissatisfied with the sounds and scales he mastered as few could, tired of not being able to express what he felt, he did what no one had imagined, what only someone desperate could do: he put words to his symphony.

      Now comes what we really want to convey, the justification of these lines. The world in which Beethoven lived was becoming distressed by the lack of divinity. God was no longer in things, God could no longer be found in lengthy pilgrimages to sanctuaries, and miraculous appearances were not to be trusted. It became known that a flower, however beautiful, no longer revealed the Creator. Also that human life was no guarantee of his existence. Even if for ages institutions—the Church, philosophy, reason—had ensured contact with God and the peace of His blessing, now everything was in the hands of each person. God is only found through faith, and faith is an act of will, an action that we have to perform, a human initiative subject to our ups and downs and our different moods. Sometimes we cling to it and at other times it escapes us.

      Not surprisingly, Beethoven modified Schiller’s poem and rewrote it to his own taste. It is almost a paraphrase, a way of resorting to him without being tied by his words. What he could not say with music he said with borrowed words:

      Brothers, beyond the stars

      must a loving Father dwell. . ..

      World, do you sense your creator?

      Seek him then beyond the stars.

      There are no longer certainties nor tutors. The God who can no longer be reached by reason has not abandoned humanity. He is still there and can be felt when we contemplate the immensity of the stars.

      Psalm 8

      He walked toward the rock where every night he sat to rest. It was near his house and its shape allowed him to lie down and see the sky. His wife was feeding the baby, born four weeks before; the other children already slept. He removed his sandals, because he liked to feel the earth itself beneath his feet. He felt that in this way his feet connected him to what was below the earth and his eyes to what was above the earth.

      Then she arrived. Now the baby also slept. She sat beside him, on the same rock, and, as she did every night, she held his hand.

      He thought about her hands, when she spun with her fingers and made those blankets to warm them in winter. She thought about the baby falling asleep at her breast, about that pink mouth that joined them and through which flowed milk and love.

      A movement, a noise, reminded them that the sheep and the ox also slept in the yard, and that tomorrow would be a long work day. Suddenly they saw a falling star. They saw them almost every night and they loved to think about what a star might be like, where it might fall, and if someone might pick it up. He asked her, “Do you think a star will ever fall near us so we can pick it up and show it to the children? She answered, “I don’t know.” And they remained silent for a long time. It was one of those nights with a small moon, a thinning bow, almost gone, and she wondered about that opening and closing of the moon, so inexplicable and so beautiful.

      They gazed at the sky. They measured distances by stades; they never knew what a light year was. Neither did they know what a star was or why they disappeared by day, but they knew that the town that lived behind the hills, their friends, who talked to the moon and awaited a reply, would never receive one. The moon was there to be admired, not to be spoken to. They did not know about the atom nor did they imagine a galaxy; for them the earth did not extend much beyond the circle of the horizon, that strange line that could never be reached.

      They were almost asleep on top of the rock and beneath the sky. They liked that moment because it was when they gathered words and played with them. They did not know how they did that either, because they were words that came to them from inside. She told him, “Before going home to sleep, let’s say those words we began to build and let’s add others, something about children.” He said, “Yes, and something about fingers.” And they began saying them together, very softly, so as not to wake anyone:

      O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. . .

      And they continued weaving words until they went to sleep.

      The Apostle Julia

      In the libraries of Michigan and Dublin dwell the treasures that Sir Alfred Chester Beatty collected throughout his life. Among the works of art and rare pieces, there is also a collection of Islamic, Persian and Chinese texts, including several papyri from the Old and New Testaments.

      Only one of the three New Testament papyri interests us at this time, the so-called P 46, which contains the Epistles of Paul. And from this papyrus, verse 7 of chapter 16 of the Epistle to the Romans. There, in the papyrus, the Apostle Paul says: “. . .greet Andronicus and Julia, my kinsfolk and my fellow prisoners; they are of note among the apostles. . ..” Later he mentions that they were both Christians before he was. There is no room for doubt: Julia was an apostle and perhaps the wife of Andronicus.

      This mention of the Apostle Julia also appears in the Bible called the Vetus Latina (the “old” Latin, prior to the Vulgate which was published in the year 382 replacing it) and in the translation of the Bible to the Coptic language, which is late Egyptian. The oldest Bibles mention “Julia.” However, this name is replaced by the name Junias—a word in masculine form—in all Bible versions beginning in the 5th century. And that is how it has been reproduced until it reached our modern bibles.

      It is difficult to hide the truth and, although a long time may go by, that which is authentic rises to the surface. There are two arguments in favor of Julia, each different and each indisputable. The first is that the studies of all ancient Greek and Latin literature, of all the literary texts, of their theater and lyrics, of their history and philosophy, have not found a single instance of the name Junias. Junias, as a name, does not exist.

      The second argument involves a sage. In the late 4th century, John Chrysostom, the greatest preacher and theologian of his day, bishop and patriarch of Constantinople, when preaching on Romans 16:7 said, “How great was the devotion of this woman that she should be deemed worthy of being called an apostle!”

      John Chrysostom read Paul’s Epistles in their original version, before they were adulterated.

      (From St. John Chrysostom,Homily on the Epistle to the Romans)

      Casiodoro de Reina, Bible Translator

      Casiodoro de Reina was a monk from Seville who, like so many others of his generation, felt the contradiction between the faith that sustained his life and the teachings of the Church. He became

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