Historical documentation of the apparition
The primary historical documents supporting Our Lady of Guadalupe's apparition
account are, one, the Nahuatl-language Huei tlamahuiçoltica ("here it is recounted"),
a tract about the Virgin which contains the aforementioned Nican mopohua, and which
was printed in 1649; two, a Spanish-language book about the apparitions titled
Imagen de la Virgen María ("Image of the Virgin Mary"), printed in 1648;three,
a seventeenth-century engraving by Samuel Stradanus which used the Virgin's image
to advertise indulgences; and four, the Codex Escalada, a pictographic account
of the Virgin on Tepeyac, printed on deerskin and said to date back to 1548.
The apparition account is also said to be strengthened by a document called the
Informaciones Jurídicas of 1666,which is a collection of transcribed oral histories
gathered near Juan Diego's hometown of Cuautitlan:oral histories are considered
to be important in cultures without a strong written tradition. In this document,
various persons reaffirmed, in interview format, basic details about Saint Juan Diego
and the Guadalupan apparition story.
Problems with documentation of the apparition
Various historians and clerics, including the U.S. priest-historian Stafford Poole,
the famous Mexican historian Joaquín García Icazbalceta, and former abbot of the
Basilica of Guadalupe, Guillermo Schulenberg, have expressed doubts about the
historicity of the apparition accounts. Schulenberg in particular caused a stir
with his 1996 interview with the obscure Catholic magazine Ixthus, when he said
that Juan Diego was "a symbol, not a reality."
One problem with the apparition tradition is that Juan Diego is said to have met
the Virgin in 1531. The first extant account published about their meeting was
written by a man named Luis Laso de la Vega in 1648. Some historians and devotees
of the Virgin respond that the Nican mopohua was actually written in the 1500's by
a man named Antonio Valeriano, and that de la Vega was merely the first person to
publish a Nahuatl account of the apparition. The debate over the authorship of the
Nican mopohua is vigorous.
When dealing with the argument of the "117 years of silence" between the apparition
and the earliest extant published accounts of it, some historians also point to the
Codex Escalada, which tells the story of the meeting on Tepeyac and which dates to
1548. Finally, the archived oral histories provide some support for the
apparitionists.
There is no explicit mention of Juan Diego nor the Virgin of Guadalupe in any of
Zumárraga's extensive writings. In a catechism he wrote the year before his death
he clearly stated: “The Redeemer of the world doesn’t want any more miracles, because
they are no longer necessary.” His silence and his position on later-day miracles
lead some historians to believe that the legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe was
started after his death.
Zumárraga's successor, the archbishop Fray Alonso de Montúfar, is said to have commissioned
Marcos Aquino to paint the Virgin around 1556, the same year the first Basilica de Guadalupe was built:
the church built in 1533 would have been originally dedicated to the Spanish icon.
Montúfar sent a reproduction of the image to King Phillip II of Spain in 1570.