Whether you praise or curse Columbus, it's worth noting he wouldn't have sailed without the Book of

[dimbear]

Esdras: ....... "But the text that seemed to have the most influence on Columbus came
from the apocryphal second Book of Esdras, Chapter 6, verse 42:
"Six parts hast Thou dried up." To Columbus this was proof that
only one-seventh of the earth was covered by water and thus the
Ocean Sea was quite narrow. The meaning of this is quite clear
from the notes he marked in his copy of d'Ailly's "Imago Mundi".
Columbus had the 'authority' he believed he needed to present
sailing west to a ruling sovereign."
**********************
The idea from Esdras led Columbus to provision his ships for a short trip. If it hadn't been for the accident that America lies between Spain and India, all would have ended up feeding sharks.

[gopiscrap]

1. Interesting

[regnaD kciN]

2. This is a weird story, because…

…that book is not part of the Roman Catholic Bible. (It's only accepted as scriptural by the Russian and Ethiopean Orthodox Churches, and was only allowed to be included in R.C. Bibles -- in a non-authoritative "appendix" section -- by a Papal decree some hundred years after Columbus's voyages.) In short, if this is true, Columbus was basing his venture on a book that his (and, at the time, the only Western) Church considered, when he sailed, to be a counterfeit book with, presumably, erroneous teachings. Strange.

[Igel]

3. You confuse "official" with "commonly accepted by the faithful."

These are different kinds of things. Many things are part of Xian tradition even though they were unofficially accepted by masses of people before the Church (whichever--Catholic or other) incorporated them into official doctrine.

In fact, their incorporation in 1546 wasn't just incidental. "Gee, nothing much has changed. Hey, these old mss have been sitting around, rejected and unread for the last millennium. I know! Just to liven things up, let's resurrect these old things and put them into the canon."

No, it was more like, "These reformers are rejecting something that we haven't officially included but which a lot of our people believe. What's worse, they're using our not giving these books some official status as grounds for chucking them. We have to have a council to give these books official cover, before these Reformers chuck them out and make us look bad for allowing them to be used. Let's make sure that we're even more distinct from them, the retrograde mouth-breathers."

In other words, they were commonly accepted by many low-ranking priests and by many of the people. They were printed. They were read by those who had some education. They were used.

Columbus, contra revisionist history, was a person. So while I take it as unproven speculation that this was a big part of his motivation, I'm not going to rule it out on a technicality.

Any more than claims that ultimately he wanted to use the riches to help fund a reconquista of Jerusalem. (I prefer the term "reconquista" to "crusade" because for many the fact that there was a "conquista" of Jerusalem is a blurry spot in their education.)