Scripture Cast in Lead

In 1595, books made of lead began emerging from a hillside outside Granada, promising revelations from the earliest Christians in Spain; the people asked to read them would help decide whether the discoveries were holy scripture or a carefully buried deception.¹

The box in the broken tower

The books did not appear without warning. Seven years earlier, workmen demolishing Granada's Torre Turpiana had reported finding a lead casket among the rubble. Inside were objects presented as relics and a parchment carrying a remarkable claim: an ancient Christian message had survived in a city whose Islamic past remained visible around the cathedral being built. The tower had belonged to the old mosque. Its destruction seemed to have uncovered something older and more useful to the new religious order.¹

The parchment combined Latin, Arabic and Spanish. It connected itself to Cecilio, traditionally honoured as Granada's first bishop, and to a prophecy attributed to John the Evangelist. Red and black letters, arranged in a grid, added another layer of difficulty to the reading. The document offered an ancient pedigree, a sacred author and an explanation of later history. It also presented the people examining it with a problem: the appearance of age was doing a great deal of work before its contents had been established.¹

This was the beginning of the Sacromonte affair, one of Spain's most consequential historical forgeries. The later lead books were not lost first-century gospels. Their supposed antiquity would be rejected, and Rome would condemn the texts in 1682. Yet the story cannot be reduced to an object fooling a gullible buyer. An archbishop, translators, royal officials, rival scholars and pilgrims all became involved, while the discoveries helped give a hillside a sacred name and an enduring institution.¹⁸

There were doubts from the beginning. Why should a document from Roman Spain use languages and forms that appeared to belong to a much later world? How could its account of the past be tested independently of the objects found beside it? A prophecy that accurately describes events already known to its discoverers may be a retrospective composition. Recognising those questions did not require a modern laboratory. Scholars working within the Church were capable of asking them.¹

The parchment's supporters had answers, however. Something preserved through centuries of concealment might need special expertise to interpret. Strange writing could be presented as evidence of remote antiquity, rather than as a warning that the text was manufactured. A difficult reading might be corrected by another translator. Apparent contradictions could be treated as problems awaiting resolution. Doubt therefore did not automatically produce rejection; it could create demand for more interpretation.¹

The casket also joined writing to material devotion. A relic was an object through which a believer could approach a sacred person. A text could explain whose relic it was and why it mattered. Found together, each appeared to support the other. But that relationship could also be constructed. If a forged document identified an otherwise anonymous fragment, the identification did not become independent evidence merely because it referred to something that could be held in the hand.¹⁸

For several years, the discovery remained a contested local marvel. Then the hillside outside Granada began supplying new objects that seemed to connect with the tower's message. The next stage would be harder to contain: instead of one enigmatic parchment, there would be inscriptions, books, alleged martyrs and a growing community of people who had already begun to believe.¹

Books from the hollow hill

In February 1595, according to the nineteenth-century historian José Godoy Alcántara, men searching among subterranean remains east of Granada found an inscribed strip of lead. It was not immediately intelligible. Eventually, a reading identified a Christian martyr. The archbishop, Pedro de Castro, supported further investigation. More inscriptions followed, linking the place to followers of the apostle James and to deaths under the Roman emperor Nero. The discoveries seemed to supply names for remains found in the same setting.¹

Bones, charcoal and ash acquired meaning through the inscriptions. The metal described martyrdom; the material around it appeared to fit the description. One inscription announced that a disciple of James had written a book on lead and that it was concealed in the caves. The promised book duly appeared. What looked like corroboration was also a sequence in which one discovery prepared an audience to recognise the next.¹

The physical form was extraordinary. These were not ordinary bound volumes. Thin, circular leaves of lead, small enough to hold in a hand, were fastened together and inscribed on their surfaces. Their coverings were metal too. Lead offered an arresting alternative to paper or parchment: a supposedly ancient message that seemed designed to endure burial. Its unusual appearance helped make the object memorable before its writing was understood.¹

A later inscription tied the hillside directly to the earlier tower discovery by invoking Cecilio and the prophecy associated with him. The find was no longer an isolated curiosity. It seemed to be part of a single concealed history, with different objects pointing towards one another across the city. To a supporter, that connection made the whole collection stronger. To an investigator, it raised the possibility that the objects had been conceived together.¹

The finds continued to multiply over subsequent years. Some were attributed to labourers, others to people searching or moving earth around the site. Accounts of the discoveries became part of their authority. A book with no secure ancient history could acquire a compelling recent one: it had emerged from this cavern, after that inscription, among remains already treated with reverence. The story of recovery supplied a substitute for the long chain of custody that the objects lacked.¹

Godoy records the enthusiasm that followed: celebrations, journeys to the hillside and the erection of crosses. He reproduces earlier descriptions of barefoot pilgrims and crowded paths. Those descriptions belong to the history of belief in the discoveries, not proof of the events that the books claimed had occurred in Roman times. They show that the affair was creating a devotional landscape while argument about the texts was still under way.¹

That momentum mattered. Once people had prayed at a place, endowed it or publicly defended it, a verdict on authenticity threatened more than the reputation of a translator. The objects were becoming part of the city's religious life. A book could be carried away for examination; the expectations already built around it were harder to remove. Granada was acquiring a sacred past in public, and some of its most influential residents had reasons to want that past to hold.¹

A past worth forging

The late-sixteenth-century city was living with the consequences of conquest and conversion. Granada had passed into Christian rule in 1492. Its Muslim population and their descendants faced increasing demands to conform, while the term Morisco came to designate people descended from Muslims who had been baptised. A Christian identity imposed by law did not produce a single private religious life. Belief, language, ancestry and public behaviour could remain painfully entangled.¹⁵

The repression of Arabic customs and language gave an apparently ancient Arabic-Christian document a particular force. If the earliest evangelisers of Spain had themselves been Arabs, Arabic could no longer be dismissed as merely the language of an alien faith. If Granada's Christian beginnings were written in Arabic, people associated with that language might claim a place within the city's sacred history. The books offered a way of arguing about the present through an invented past.¹

That did not make every Morisco a participant in the forgery, or every reader an opponent of Catholicism. The threatened population included people whose practices and convictions differed. Nor does the existence of persecution establish the precise intentions of whoever composed each text. It supplies the setting in which the books' claims became useful. A story about Arab disciples and ancient revelation could answer needs that were cultural, devotional and political at the same time.¹

Catholic Granada had its own reasons to welcome the discoveries. A city associated with a long Islamic history could now point to a Christian past reaching back to the apostles. The cult of James connected the local story to one of Spain's most powerful sacred traditions. Cecilio supplied an early bishop and martyr. The hillside could become a place where that history was encountered materially, through relics, inscriptions and pilgrimage.¹⁸

Pedro de Castro became the discoveries' greatest ecclesiastical champion. It would be too easy to turn him into either an accomplice who knew everything or a fool who understood nothing. The record shows a committed supporter who sought interpretation and confirmation. What he hoped the books would prove influenced the questions asked of them. An archbishop responsible for his city's religious standing had more at stake than settling a detached antiquarian puzzle.¹

The interpretation most often offered to a general reader is that the books attempted a reconciliation: make Arabic ancestry Christian enough to survive, while giving the Christian authorities a past they could celebrate. That captures something important, but it is not a complete explanation of the texts. Their religious content could challenge Catholic teaching as well as flatter Catholic devotion. A message acceptable at first glance might become much more difficult when somebody insisted on a precise translation.¹

The alliance of interests was therefore unstable. A defender could welcome the assertion that Granada was anciently Christian without accepting every proposition about Jesus, Mary or revelation. A Morisco reader might recognise meanings that a Catholic sponsor missed. The objects had gathered supporters who did not necessarily want the same thing from them. Their success depended partly on how long those differences could remain unresolved.¹

Who could read the metal?

The books required readers with knowledge that many of their patrons did not possess. Their Arabic script was unusual, and the texts were associated with supposedly ancient or special forms of writing. Calling the characters Solomonic connected difficulty with sacred authority. It suggested that obscurity might be an attribute of the revelation, rather than a flaw in the object. Every uncertain letter created room for a translator's judgment.¹

Two names became especially important: Miguel de Luna and Alonso del Castillo. Both were Granadan Moriscos, physicians and interpreters with connections to royal service. Their involvement made them valuable to the investigation and, later, conspicuous suspects in the manufacture of the books. A translator might be the person best equipped to expose a forgery, or the person best placed to control what others believed it said. The role alone could not decide which.¹²

Castillo's experience extended beyond this controversy. His work included interpreting Arabic inscriptions and material for the authorities. That background helped explain why he would be consulted. It should also prevent a lazy reading of the affair as a tale in which no competent Arabic scholar was available. Knowledge existed, but it was distributed among people whose patrons, histories and religious positions differed. The question was not simply whether somebody knew Arabic; it was whose reading would be believed.¹²

Other specialists entered the dispute, and their conclusions did not all support Castro. Objections concerned language, historical setting and religious content. An apparently apostolic document could be challenged because its words belonged to a later world, because its claims contradicted known history or because the meaning assigned to it depended on an accommodating translation. These were related tests, but a text could fail more than one of them for different reasons.¹

The distinction between deciphering and interpreting was crucial. Recognising the letters did not settle what a passage meant; producing a fluent translation did not establish when its original had been written. Even if a book contained a religious idea a patron considered true, that did not prove its claim to ancient authorship. The dispute repeatedly crossed those boundaries. A defence of doctrine could become a defence of dating without the missing historical evidence ever being supplied.¹

Royal interest increased the pressure to resolve the problem. The abbey's museum describes a provision of Philip II dated 9 August 1596 ordering translation and interpretation of the lead books. The objects were no longer merely the subject of local conversations. Their reading was becoming an official undertaking, drawing on specialists and generating records of its own. Each new translation could be treated as progress even when it exposed further disagreement.⁷

That process could also reveal the strength of prior commitments. A version that made the books sound comfortably orthodox would be welcomed by their supporters; a reading that emphasised incompatible teachings could be attacked as incompetent or hostile. Neither reception decided which translation was sound. The metal might be fixed, but the books available to most participants were the versions being made from it. The dispute over the originals was also a struggle over those intermediary texts.¹

A gospel with two audiences

The books placed familiar sacred figures at the centre of an unfamiliar narrative. Jesus, Mary and James appeared in accounts that gave Arabic-speaking people an ancient role in the Christian history of Spain. Mary was especially important. Her authority allowed the collection to approach a Catholic devotional world in which reverence for her could be intense. But the place assigned to her in the revelations did not simply repeat the doctrine her Catholic supporters already knew.¹³

One of the collection's most intriguing objects was called the Essence of the Gospel. Much of its writing was cryptic, and the difficulty of reading it became part of its religious significance. The promise that its full meaning would become clear at a future moment could protect it from an immediate demand for explanation. A reader who failed to understand it had not necessarily disproved its authority; the text supplied a reason why understanding might have to wait.¹

The Seal of Solomon recurred among the books. Its familiar interlaced geometry linked writing to an older tradition of protection and sacred knowledge. In this setting, the symbol should not be mistaken for evidence that the books possessed supernatural powers. It was part of the language in which they claimed significance. A recognisable sign could make an unfamiliar text seem to belong to a world of hidden wisdom, while offering little help in establishing its date.¹

To read the collection only as a plea for tolerance would leave out much of its force. It offered an account of revelation and a future in which its truths would be vindicated. Modern scholars examining its religious vocabulary have emphasised Islamic meanings beneath, or alongside, the Christian names. The distinction matters: a book can invoke Mary and Jesus without affirming what a Catholic theologian understands those names to mean.³

Older summaries described the result as a hybrid religion, assembled from Christianity and Islam. That label is convenient but may suggest a neat compromise that neither author nor reader actually held. A text might be deliberately inclusive, deliberately ambiguous or understood differently by different audiences. A later reader could sharpen one strand and suppress another. Establishing that the history was forged does not make its religious purposes simple.¹

Godoy's account illustrates the dangers of treating a translated summary as transparent access to the original. He read the books through a later Latin version and judged their mixture of teachings from a nineteenth-century Catholic standpoint. His narrative remains valuable for the history of the affair, but the Arabic texts and the choices made by their translators require separate attention. A judgment about what the books attempted should not rest entirely on the preferences of one later critic.¹

For the authorities, this complexity created an increasingly serious problem. Supporting a local discovery was one thing; allowing a newly discovered collection to speak with the authority of apostles was another. The books' defenders wanted recognition without surrendering the meanings that had made the discoveries attractive. Their opponents wanted the texts tested beyond the circle that had already invested in them. The longer the dispute continued, the more difficult it became to pretend that everyone was protecting the same revelation.¹

Rome demands the books

The sacred landscape continued to develop. The provincial council of Granada accepted the associated relics in 1600, and Castro founded the abbey in 1610. Those were consequential acts, but they did not settle the authenticity of the books. Relics, texts and the historical identities assigned to them were connected in the discovery narrative; they could still become subjects of different judgments. That distinction would eventually allow an institution to survive the rejection of writings closely associated with its foundation.⁶⁸

Getting the objects beyond their local defenders was a long struggle. The books were not merely available for any investigator to carry away. Their location, custody and manner of display mattered to people who regarded them as sacred. Godoy describes disputes over their removal and the reluctance of custodians to surrender control. Moving the originals changed who could examine them and reduced the ability of Granada's supporters to manage the investigation.¹

The collection passed through Madrid before reaching Rome in the early 1640s. There, the question could be pursued by scholars of Oriental languages and ecclesiastical authorities less bound to the devotional expectations of the hillside. Examination required reading, transcription and comparison, not simply looking at an ancient-looking surface. The celebrated names associated with the Roman study included Athanasius Kircher and Ludovico Marracci. Their presence did not make the process quick or free of disagreement.¹

The defenders continued their efforts. Supporting the books involved correspondence, representatives, money and appeals to influential people. A dispute that began with objects found in earth had become a sustained institutional campaign. Godoy reproduces evidence of the financial strain that defending the collection placed on its supporters. That is a different kind of evidence from the alleged martyrdoms: the campaign itself left a record that could be followed without accepting the sacred history it promoted.¹

In 1682, under Pope Innocent XI, the texts were condemned. The finding treated them as fabrications containing teachings incompatible with Catholic faith. Their authority could no longer be invoked as their champions had wished. The decision came almost a century after the tower discovery, long after Castro's death and after the people most directly affected by the political pressures of the 1590s had faced a different catastrophe.¹⁸

The condemnation did not mean that the entire hillside was demolished or that every associated devotion was erased. The status of the texts and the veneration of the relics did not receive the same treatment. Granada's sacred geography had acquired an institutional life beyond the writings that helped establish it. A visitor could continue to encounter a Christian shrine without the books being admitted as genuine apostolic scripture.⁸

The physical books survived too. They were not melted down into the anonymous metal from which they had been made. Their continued existence would eventually make a different form of inquiry possible: examining them as products of the early modern world. The question would change from whether they should be believed as revelation to how people had written, translated, defended and used them. For that investigation, a forgery could be valuable evidence precisely because it belonged to its makers' time.¹

Who wrote the revelation?

The most familiar accusation points to Luna and Castillo, the interpreters who helped make the documents intelligible. Godoy argued for their involvement and tried to distinguish different hands and habits within the collection. His argument drew on their linguistic position, the themes of the writings and connections with Luna's other work. It was a historical attribution, not a confession recovered from the cave. That difference can disappear when a complicated argument becomes a short encyclopedia entry.¹

Luna had already presented himself as the translator of an allegedly ancient Arabic account of Spain's conquest. His True History of King Rodrigo offered a version of the past that could rehabilitate Arabic figures and traditions within a Spanish narrative. The title's claim to truth should not be confused with the work's reliability. For investigators of the lead books, it supplied an important comparison: another apparently recovered Arabic history made available through the same interpreter.¹

Such parallels help explain suspicion, but they do not identify the hand that cut every letter into lead. Composing the writings, making the objects, arranging their discoveries and translating them need not have been the work of a single person. Nor must everyone who accepted an early date have known that the claim was false. The first successful readers could include both people controlling the deception and people sincerely trying to understand it.¹

Recent scholarship continues to regard Luna as a likely major author while distinguishing his knowledge from Castillo's. In his 2025 study, Gerard Wiegers stresses Luna's apparent command of the parchment's difficult forms and codes. His treatment of later interpreters is more differentiated than the familiar picture of two physicians jointly manufacturing an entire revelation. This does not establish who composed or manufactured every object.⁴

Motive is equally difficult to compress. The books could elevate Arabic ancestry, offer hope to a threatened population, satisfy Catholic devotion and advance Granada's claims to sacred antiquity. These purposes were not all compatible, and they were not all necessarily the purposes of the original makers. A forged object can change direction as patrons, translators and believers adopt it. Its consequences may be easier to document than the intention behind its first concealed leaf.¹

There is also a difference between explaining deception and assigning collective guilt. The books emerged from a world in which Moriscos supplied essential linguistic expertise while facing suspicion and coercion. Their involvement does not make an entire population responsible for the forgery. The claim that particular people manufactured the texts needs evidence about those people. A category imposed by the state cannot take the place of an account of who did what.¹

The unresolved parts of authorship remain historical questions, not grounds for reviving the supposed apostolic date. The books' makers could be uncertain while their claim to represent ancient revelation was false. Those are different levels of knowledge. Investigating the people behind the objects should sharpen the distinction, rather than turn uncertainty about a workshop or a collaborator into an argument that the buried history might have been true after all.¹

After the exile

Beginning in 1609, the Spanish monarchy ordered the expulsion of the Moriscos. The books had not secured a place for the community whose Arabic ancestry they could dignify. Yet their story did not remain confined to Granada or Rome. Copies, translations and recollections travelled with people who left Spain, allowing texts buried under a Christian city's soil to acquire new readers across the Mediterranean.⁴

One was Ahmad al-Hajari, also known in Spain as Diego Bejarano. He had translated the tower parchment before leaving for North Africa. In later writings, he preserved and interpreted material connected with the discoveries. Oumelbanine Zhiri's 2024 study examines how his work defended Islam and challenged Spanish Catholic claims. The reader in exile did not occupy the same position as a translator working for an archbishop in Granada.⁵

Wiegers's 2025 research distinguishes imperfect memories from more precise transmission through copies and named intermediaries. It also finds selective readings that brought the books closer to the religious expectations of their new setting. The finds could remain ancient and sacred in a believer's account while their meaning changed. Their failure to gain Roman approval did not prevent them from offering other readers a prophetic future.⁴

The originals eventually returned to Granada in 2000. Their return was a transfer of historical objects, not a verdict restoring them as genuine first-century scripture. The abbey now presents them within its history, alongside material documenting the debates, the local council and the efforts to translate them. The metal has become evidence of the controversy rather than a successful escape from it.⁶⁷

As of November 2026, the serious questions concern authorship, translation and reception, not whether new apostolic gospels were uncovered in the hillside. The discoveries helped build a shrine, but the people who read them never agreed on the past or future they promised. The surviving lead leaves, and the competing versions made from them, are now evidence for that later history.¹⁵