Codex Escalada

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The Codex Escalada

The Codex Escalada, also called the Codex 1548, is a Nahuatl-language document which pictographically relates story of the 1531 apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the Mexican hill of Tepeyac, an apparition which is credited with converting the indigenous peoples of Mexico to Roman Catholicism.

The document, which is painted on deerskin, depicts the Virgin of Guadalupe and mentions the death of Juan Diego, the Aztec man credited with witnessing the apparition. It also mentions Antonio Valeriano, the 16th-century governor of San Juan Tenochtitlan^[1]. Finally, it is signed by Bernardino de Sahagún, a Franciscan historian who once complained that Guadalupan devotees were syncretically venerating the indigenous goddess Tonantzin.

In 1995, Xavier Escalada, a Spanish Jesuit who was editing an encyclopedia about the Guadalupan apparition, claimed to have discovered the codex. The discovery came at a moment when the Catholic hierarchy was deliberating the canonization of Juan Diego, and the codex allayed many doubts about the historicity of the apparition. These doubts had arisen due to arguments that there was very little documentation of the apparition between 1531 and the 1640s, when the Nican mopohua and Miguel Sanchez's Imagen de la Virgen Maria were published. However, some scholars, such as the priest-historian Stafford Poole and Cambridge professor D.A. Brading, found the timing of the "discovery" suspicious. Brading commented on the convergence of Guadalupan personalities in the codex:

Within the context of the Christian tradition, it was rather like finding a picture of St. Paul's vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, drawn by St. Luke and signed by St. Peter.^[1]

[edit] References

^ ^a ^b Brading, D.A. Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.