Giuseppe Ricciotti

Giuseppe Ricciotti (1890 in Rome – 1964) was an Italian canon regular, Biblical scholar and archeologist. He is famous mainly for his book The Life of Christ edited in 1941 and reedited and reprinted several times. Ricciotti's Life of St. Paul (Rome, 1946, trans. as Paul the Apostle, Milwaukee, Wisc., 1953) was meant to complement his Life of Christ. Giuseppe Ricciotti also wrote: La «Era dei martiri» , Rome, 1953, trans. Rev. Anthony Bull. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992, La Bibbia e le scoperte moderne , 1957, and L'imperatore Giuliano l'Apostata secondo i documenti , 1958, trans. M. Joseph Costelloe, S.J. (1960; reprint, Rockford, Ill.: TAN Books, 1999). Additionally, he edited a new translation into Italian of the Bible from the original texts.

Legacy Ricciotti's book Vita di Gesù Cristo ("Life of Jesus Christ") was extremely popular and influential in Italy, selling 40.000 copies in its first edition and being praised by the Royal Academy of Italy; even Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini read a copy of the book. It has been re-printed several times and can still be easily found in Italian libraries and bookstores even today. It was also greatly praised by Catholic peer journals of that time, but received strong criticism from excommunicated modernist Catholic Ernesto Buonaiuti.

More recently, some Catholic scholars have been critical of Ricciotti's work: Italian Catholic cardinal and biblical scholar Gianfranco Ravasi has stated that the text is "not immune to many apologetic simplifications". Fr. Giulio Michelini believes that Ricciotti's book shows many of the flaws of Catholic scholars of the time: a tendency towards gospel harmony, vehement and excessive attacks toward Protestant scholarship (especially Rudolf Bultmann), insufficient knowledge of Second Temple Judaism and even some anti-Jewish interpretation of the Gospels (see blood curse). Fr. Giuseppe Segalla, while praising the book for its style of writing, categorized it as an apologetic work.

Despite this, Ricciotti's work is still widely appreciated by Italian conservative Catholics like Vittorio Messori and Luca Doninelli.