Cardinal Augustin Bea and the Historicity of the Gospels at the Second Vatican Council: The Making of the Pontifical Biblical Commission’s Instruction of 21 April 1964

In November 1962, Cardinal Augustin Bea distributed to the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council a pamphlet on the historicity of the Gospels, intervening—after two years of apparent silence—in the dispute between the Pontifical Biblical Institute and the Pontifical Lateran University over the legitimacy of the historical-critical method in Catholic exegesis. This article investigates Bea’s specific, little-explored contribution to the conciliar debate on this question, central to the future constitution Dei Verbum. Drawing on unpublished correspondence, diaries, and drafts preserved in Bea’s private archive in Munich and in other conciliar collections, the study reconstructs the genesis of the 1962 pamphlet and its links to the Instruction Sancta Mater Ecclesia, issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission on 21 April 1964. The evidence shows that Bea opened a new, more assertive phase of a lifelong commitment to exegetical freedom—understood here as the use of his own institutional authority to shield the Biblicum’s exegetes from ecclesiastical suspicion and prejudice against the historical-critical method—and that he played a decisive, largely backstage role in shaping the 1964 Instruction, which directly influenced Dei Verbum 19. Far from a peripheral academic quarrel, the historicity of the Gospels has been one of the longest-running fault lines between conservatism and renewal in twentieth-century Catholicism, and remains a significant point of discussion in biblical scholarship today. Bea’s conciliar action thus confirms his role as a decisive, if ambivalent, mediator between tradition and “aggiornamento”.