Antonio Piñero Sáenz (14 August 1941 in Chipiona, Spain) is a Spanish philologist, writer, and historian, specializing in the Judaism before Christianity, the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the founding of Christianity, and language and literature of the New Testament and early Christianity from a scientific perspective. He is especially known in the Spanish-speaking world for the authorship of numerous books and research articles, and for his active outreach efforts.
Biography
He was born in the town of Chipiona in the province of Cádiz (Spain). He graduated in pure philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid in 1968, in classical philology from the University of Salamanca in 1970, and in trilingual biblical philology from the Pontifical University of Salamanca in 1976. In 1974 he defended his doctoral thesis in classical philology, supervised by the philologist Luis Gil Fernández, and entitled Teopneustia, estudio sobre la inspiración en los escritores de los siglos I y II ("Teopneustia, study on inspiration from writers of the 1st and 2nd centuries") at the Complutense University of Madrid (Luis Vives award granted), although he completed most of his doctorate in Germany. Since 1970 he worked as a teacher at this same university, and in 1983 he became full professor. He is currently full professor emeritus of Greek philology.
In 2016, he received the Trithemius award from the Sociedad de Estudios e Investigaciones Spagyricas y la Editorial Tritemio, for his contribution to the world of culture and his endeavour in all his facets to teacher, researcher and writer.
Academic activities
As a result of his work in translating the non-canonical gospels, New Testament academic research, broad participation in dissemination activities and numerous publications, Piñero has become one of the most influential agnostic Spanish exegetes and authors in the study of the early Christianity (mainly the 1st and 2nd centuries). In his work he focuses on the historical Jesus, therefore he tries to separate the religious interpretation from the historical reconstruction of Jesus through historical and philological methods. Similarly, he also addresses the first steps of the early Christianity trying to clarify the evolution of the first communities of followers of Jesus of Nazareth.
Historical existence of Jesus
One of the recurring topics of his works is the study of the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. According to the analysis of the texts in Judea in the 1st century, Piñero defends the existence of a historical Jesus, but differentiated from the literary Jesus Christ of the gospels. The historical Jesus, according to his research, would be a craftsman from Galilee and religious leader with limited impact while he was alive. After his death, he would be magnified, idealized and divinized, giving rise to the heavenly and mythological Christ in the gospels and Christianity. Thus, according to Piñero, the vast majority of the main ideas of Christianity were born in a Jewish world through a totally natural process, and with the passage of time the human being called these ideas dogmas.
Translation work
In his work as a translator since 1983 he has coordinated a project in which a team of specialists carried out the translation of all the known gospels into Spanish, including canonical and non-canonical. This project has involved research on the social and political context that surrounded the original writings and the full translation of the texts from the original languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic and Arabic. It concluded in 2009 when the work containing the latest-translated Apocryphal Gospels is published. This translation work has been recognized as a valuable study tool.