Italian monk, Biblical scholar and archaeologist (1921-2002)
You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (September 2011) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the German article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Bargil Pixner]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Bargil Pixner}} to the talk page.
During World War II, Pixner was sent to the Eastern Front in 1944 after refusing to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler, but he escaped from Silesia in May 1945.[2]
Pixner's theories, linking archaeological sites to events and figures in the Bible, have been met with mixed acceptance by scholars. In particular, he argued for a connection between Jesus and the Essenes and for the identification of the "Essene Gateway" (excavated beginning in 1977) on Mount Zion,[3] and the dating of the crucifixion to Friday, April 7, AD 30.[2] He shared Bagatti and Testa's thesis of a Church of Zion, Jerusalem in the 3rd–4th Centuries.
Pixner also identified a site on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee as the site of Bethsaida in a 1985 article,[4] an identification which the State of Israel made official in 1989 after excavations in 1987. Pixner showed the site to Pope John Paul II in March 2000, declaring a key excavated from the site to be the "key to the first Vatican."[2] The tell had previously been dismissed by William F. Albright in the 1930s as a potential site for Bethsaida, but Pixner discovered Hellenistic and Roman artefacts while walking through Syrian trenches after the Six-Day War.[5]
