De Chèrisey's Big Parchment
Why Stephen Anderson Is Wrong

Paul Smith

3 October 2015
Last Updated 5 October 2015



The late William “Bill” Putnam (1930-2008) was a professional archaeologist and a Classical Scholar who understood Latin as fluently as he could English.

Using religious Latin concordances, Bill Putnam discovered that the text on Philippe de Chèrisey's Large Parchment (John XII:1-11) was copied from John Wordsworth and Henry White's Nouum Testamentum Latine, that first began to be published in 1889. The parts of the book Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved (2003, 2005), co-authored with John Edwin Wood that dealt with the Latin text on Philippe de Chèrisey's parchments, were written by Bill Putnam.


Unfortunately, Bill Putnam's transcript of John XII:1-11 from John Wordsworth and Henry White's Nouum Testamentum Latine, as published in Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved, contained several errors. These errors consisted of the following:

Line 2: cenam instead of caenam
Line 3: unguenti instead of ungenti, with the word ex omitted
Line 4: Scariotes instead of Scariotis
Line 5: unguentum instead of ungentum, and venit instead of ueniit
Line 9: Cognovit instead of Cognouit, venerunt instead of uenerunt, viderent instead of uiderent, suscitavit instead of suscitauit

Perhaps this represented human error, perhaps this was typesetting error at Sutton Publishers – or perhaps Bill Putnam just liked to correct Wordsworth and White. In any case, these errors alone simply do not rule out the fact that the text on Philippe de Chèrisey's Large Parchment was copied from Wordsworth and White's Nouum Testamentum Latine, as will be demonstrated below.

Stephen Anderson – member of a fringe Rennes-le-Château mystery group – has written the article “Putnam and Wood Exposed! Why the Longer Parchment Could Not Be From The Latin Vulgate New Testament” (online since January 2015). On the basis of these several errors by Bill Putnam, Stephen Anderson argues that the text on Philippe de Chèrisey's Large Parchment could not have originated from Wordsworth and White's Nouum Testamentum Latine. In Appendices to his article, Stephen Anderson also adds “I am in the process of trying to find the Latin manuscript text from which the creator of the parchments may have taken the text from”.

Curiously, Stephen Anderson brings to attention the passage of John XII:1-11 found on page 1681 in Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem – a project headed by Dom Robert Weber (1904-1980) – without giving the information that this version of the Vulgate was only first published in 1969. The history about it can be found here. The section on the New Testament in the Biblia Sacra is based upon Wordsworth and White's earlier Nouum Testamentum Latine.

So here goes – the demolition of Stephen Anderson's argument that the text found on Philippe de Chèrisey's Large Parchment did not originate from the 1889 Nouum Testamentum Latine.

Italian researcher Mariano Tomatis presented a detailed intertextual analysis of Philippe de Chérisey's Large Parchment that went online on 17 December 2007, showing it was copied from Wordsworth and White's Nouum Testamentum Latine, also providing details of de Chèrisey's omissions, spelling mistakes and other textual anomalies (as a matter of interest, Mariano Tomatis made some mistakes in his transcript of Wordsworth & White's text, but these were not carried over onto the intertextual analysis). This analysis was later published in his Italian magazine “Indagini su Rennes-le-Château”, Number 21, pages 1039-1052, February 2008.


Below, analysis by Mariano Tomatis – without any textual mistakes – showing that Philippe de Chèrisey copied John XII:1-11 onto his Large Parchment from Wordsworth and White's Nouum Testamentum Latine (found in the Bibliothèque Nationale) – and thus vindicating Bill Putnam's discovery in the process.






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