But to be honest, I personally just don’t prefer using private revelations when talking about the historical stuff. You might say I’m minimalistic, but I just think that visions - even when showing biblical events - serve a different purpose than being dissected just like historical sources are.
Just to go back to this.
My personal opinion is that the visions seen by visionaries are not exactly ‘historical fact’ - in other words, they’re not seeing something like authentic footage of biblical events recorded 2000 years ago. What God allows them to see were the events
as how they (the visionaries) would have understood it. God is speaking their language, in other words.
The point of these visions IMHO is not so much to show visionaries the
fact, the events
as how they would have actually happened, but something else. There’s a whole different purpose for these visions. That’s why I said I don’t prefer using private revelations when discussing history, because they’re not meant to answer or decide historical questions in the first place. (Come to think of it, weren’t these visions first or foremost intended for the visionaries themselves?)
You might say I side with
Jean-Baptiste-François Cardinal Pitra’s opinion:
Everyone knows that we are fully at liberty to believe or not to believe in private revelations, even those most worthy of credence. Even when the Church approves them, they are merely received as
probable, and not as
indubitable. They are not to be used as
deciding questions of history, natural philosophy, philosophy, or theology which are matters of controversy between the Doctors. It is quite permissible to differ from these revelations, even when approved, if we are relying upon solid reasons, and especially if the contrary doctrine is proved by unimpeachable documents and definite experience.
(Yes, I snagged this quote from
Fr. Groeschel’s book.
)
Case in point. St. Bridget in her visions described Jesus’ feet as being pierced by two nails: the legs were supposedly crossed, but each of His two feet were pierced by one nail each. But when we go to the visions of Maria de Agreda and Anne Catherine Emmerich, both describe one single nail being driven through Jesus’ feet.
There’s an obvious contradiction here, but then again, the detail is not apparently supposed to be ‘historical’ in the first place. In fact, we can ascribe these variances with the milieu these visionaries grew up in: during the time of Bridget, it was still common for artworks to portray two nails going through Jesus’ feet, although the three-nail depiction we’re now familiar with - a convention that started in the West during the 12th-13th century - is increasingly supplanting the older convention.
But when Maria de Agreda and Emmerich came along, portraying Jesus fixed to the cross with three nails had already become the standard in Western art. (During the Counter-Reformation, there was a brief fad among some Spanish artists to revive the four-nails depiction, which was deemed to be more ancient and accurate, but it never really lasted long. These artists actually used the visions of St. Bridget as one of their ‘proofs’ for doing so.)
In other words, what the visionaries saw were ‘distorted’ by their own previous experiences and expectations, by the depictions and devotional descriptions of Jesus crucified that they would have seen and heard or read throughout their lives.
Going back to the seamless tunic, that’s why I personally don’t accept the idea that the garment really was made by Mary and grew with Jesus’ body as historical, even if Maria de A. (who I think likely was influenced by the medieval stories) saw it in her visions - and I’m not rejecting it because there’s a miracle involved. (I might be a tad more ‘dry’ when it comes to topics like religion, but I’m not a naturalist - I don’t reject miracles.) I mean, it has beautiful, deep spiritual meaning and all, but
that in itself does not make it an authentic / factual detail about the historical Jesus or His clothing.
