Codex Escalada - Doubts and Suspicions

Doubts and Suspicions

In 1996 and 1997 the parchment and Sahagún's signature were subjected to technical and critical analysis the results of which were all favourable to the document's authenticity (see below under Investigations as to authenticity). Nevertheless, the owners' initial stipulation for anonymity added an air of mystery to what was already a highly fortuitous discovery both as to its timing and as to the nature and number of the historical data to which it seemingly attests, although it was not the only such discovery in or around this period which aided the case for the historicity of Juan Diego. Baltasar de Echave Orio's painting of 1606 has already been mentioned in this regard. To this can be added the discovery by Eduardo Chávez Sánchez in July 2001 of a copy (dated 14 April 1666) of the original translation of the Informaciones Juridicas de 1666, formerly known only from a copy dated 1737 and first published by Hipólito Vera Fortino in 1889. In April 2002, on the eve of the canonization of Juan Diego, the owners waived their right to anonymity and, in a public ceremony, donated the parchment to the Archbishop of Mexico, since when it has been kept in the Historical Archives of the Basilica of Guadalupe.

Some scholars found the mode and timing of the discovery suspicious and the convergence of data on it little short of miraculous. The puzzling features which require elucidation and explanation were gathered by one eminent Mexican scholar (Rafael Tena) under six headings as follows:- provenance (his comments predated the release of new information in 2002, as to which see under Provenance above); materials analysis (where Tena urged destructive investigatory techniques despite the document's exiguous dimensions); art-historical criticism (including orthography); graphology (where Tena, despite Dibble's expert opinion, expressed the view that access to the original is indispensable for a conclusive attribution of Sahagún's signature); historiography, and another in contending that Sahagún's signature on the codex is irreconcilable with his known opposition to the cult – as to which, see below); and finally linguistic analysis.

While many of the puzzling features have still not been fully explained or accounted for (including alleged anachronisms which presume that the date 1548 is the date of composition as opposed to the date of record), and while further tests can be devised, no critics have impugned (i) the integrity and expertise of those who have subjected the document to investigation, or (ii) (subject to reservations over Dibble's lack of access to the original) the reliability and coherence of such tests and investigations as were actually performed or conducted, or (iii) the conclusions drawn from the results of those tests and investigations. Rafael Tena, among others, contended that even if Sahagún's signature is authentic, its presence on a document such as this constitutes a serious internal inconsistency arising from Sahagún's known hostility to the cult of Guadalupe. While Sahagún did indeed express reservations as to the cult in his historical works, that comparatively late criticism was based on what he considered to be a syncretistic application to the Virgin Mary of the Nahuatl epithet "Tonantzin" ("our dear mother") which, however, he himself had freely used with the same application in his own sermons as late as the 1560s.