Mauro Biglino

Mauro Biglino (born 1950 in Turin) is an Italian translator and author whose reading of the Hebrew Bible — strictly literal, stripped of two millennia of theological interpretation — has made him the most widely read figure of the contemporary reinterpretive tradition in continental Europe. His authority rests on an unusual credential: before he wrote a single book of his own, Biglino spent years translating the Hebrew Masoretic Text into Italian for Edizioni San Paolo, the Catholic publishing house, which published seventeen books of the Hebrew Bible in his renderings within its interlinear Vulgata Ebraico-Interlineare series. The method that emerged from that translation desk — set aside the theology, take the words in their concrete sense, and "pretend that the Bible is simply telling the truth" — now carries his name; the corpus treats it at full length in the Biglino Method entry. This entry gives the biographical and bibliographical record of the man himself.

Within the contemporary landscape the corpus places Biglino beside Paul Wallis as one of the two most consequential living voices of neo-euhemerism — the tradition that reads the gods of religious memory as remembered visitors. The two figures divide the territory between them: Biglino supplies the translation-desk philology and the Italian mass audience; Wallis, whom the corpus registers as "the principal Anglophone popularizer of the Biglino-adjacent approach," carries the reading into English. They blurb each other's books and appear together on camera; Biglino's standing endorsement of Wallis reads, "Though far apart geographically we are spiritually close! We are a good team."

Biography

Biglino was born in 1950 in Turin, where he has remained based throughout his career. His formation was in religious studies and classical languages, and his working life before the public career was that of a professional translator — a background that matters for understanding both his strengths and the shape of the criticism he attracts. Biglino is not an academic biblical scholar and has never presented himself as one; his repeated self-description is that of a translator reporting what the words on the page say.

The San Paolo years

The foundation of everything that followed was the commission from Edizioni San Paolo — the publishing arm of the Society of St. Paul, a Catholic religious congregation with substantial Vatican connections — to translate books of the Hebrew Bible from the Masoretic Text for the Vulgata Ebraico-Interlineare, a series of interlinear editions presenting the Hebrew text with a word-for-word Italian rendering beneath it. Seventeen books of the Hebrew Bible appeared in Biglino's translations under the San Paolo imprint.

The interlinear format is the crux of the biography. An interlinear translator cannot paraphrase, harmonize, or smooth: every Hebrew word must receive its Italian counterpart in sequence, which forces a sustained word-by-word confrontation with what the text concretely says. Biglino's account of the experience, given in The Naked Bible, is that the work "brought me into direct contact... with the very origins, with the etymology of each individual word. Terms that, time after time, are put back into the context of the stories. Words that gave birth to a mosaic that is totally different from what is traditionally told to us." It is also on record — and the corpus's Biglino Method entry registers the point — that the published San Paolo editions themselves left terms such as Elohim, kavod, ruach, and the tetragrammaton in transliteration: mainstream Catholic biblical publishing conceded, in its own apparatus, that the conventional renderings of these words carry interpretive weight the Hebrew does not settle.

The break and the independent career

In 2010 Biglino published his own first book, Il libro che cambierà per sempre le nostre idee sulla Bibbia ("The book that will forever change our ideas about the Bible"), setting out in public the readings the translation desk had produced. The relationship with San Paolo ended after his own books began to appear — a Catholic publisher could not keep on its Hebrew translation team an author arguing in print that the Hebrew Bible does not speak of God. The sequence is worth stating precisely, because it is sometimes told backwards: the credential came first, the heterodox books second, and the separation followed the books.

The independent career that followed made Biglino a phenomenon of Italian public culture. Il dio alieno della Bibbia ("The alien god of the Bible") followed in 2011, Non c'è creazione nella Bibbia ("There is no creation in the Bible") in 2012, and the stream has continued since — La Bibbia non parla di Dio (2015), La Bibbia non è un libro sacro ("The Bible is not a sacred book"), and a run of later works, increasingly in collaborative formats with co-authors ranging from the journalist Giorgio Cattaneo (La Bibbia nuda / The Naked Bible) to a philosopher of law (La Bibbia non l'ha mai detto). Several titles reached the mainstream Italian market through major publishers; his lectures and seminars on Hebrew Bible reading fill halls; his YouTube and online following is large enough that Italian religious-studies scholarship has taken his audience, not just his claims, as an object of study. English translations, principally through Uno Editori, have carried the work into the Anglophone market from the late 2010s onward — The Bible Is Not a Sacred Book, The Naked Bible (2022), and the consolidated Gods of the Bible.

Method

The method is treated at full length in the Biglino Method entry; here it needs one paragraph. Biglino's three commitments are to work from the original Hebrew text; to set aside the accumulated interpretation of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic exegetical traditions; and to read the words literally, in their concrete sense, unless the text itself signals otherwise. The wager is packaged in his signature formula, facciamo finta che — "let us pretend that" the Bible is simply telling the truth — a deliberately provisional framing: Biglino does not assert that the Bible is true, he proposes reading it as if it were and observing what coherent account results. The methodological precedent is Schliemann's literal reading of Homer, which located Troy; the same Schliemann-to-Bible program was articulated by Jean Sendy in 1969, four decades before Biglino's independent formulation, and the corpus reads the Sendy-Biglino convergence — two translators, two languages, two decades apart, same commitments, same principal observations — as itself evidential. Where honesty about a term's meaning is impossible, Biglino's rule is to leave it untranslated: "It's a question of integrity, since we do not know exactly what they mean."

Key readings

Biglino's principal textual claims, each attributed here to Biglino and argued across the works cited below; several are cataloged, with the corpus's own assessments, in the list of etymological readings.

• The Elohim are a plurality of individuals. The grammatically plural elohim is, on Biglino's reading, exactly what it appears to be: a plural, denoting a group of concrete beings who can be counted, who divide territory, who quarrel and die (Psalm 82's "you shall die like men"). The divine-allotment passage of Deuteronomy 32:8–9, where the Most High divides the nations and Yahweh's inheritance is Jacob, gives Biglino his picture of Yahweh as one governor among many — a reading whose raw data mainstream divine-council scholarship also registers, as the plurality of gods entry documents.
• The kavod is an object. The kavod of Yahweh, conventionally "glory," is read from its root sense of weight and heaviness as a heavy physical thing — something that flies, lands, must be approached with precautions, and in Biglino's mordant phrase was "viewable by appointment." The reading closely parallels the one Wallis reached in English ("It was a machine").
• The ruach moves through air. Ruach, conventionally "spirit," carries the primary sense of wind, breath, moving air; Biglino devotes a chapter of Il dio alieno della Bibbia to reading the ruach of key passages as something physically traversing the sky rather than an immaterial presence.
• The tetragrammaton is a name, and its meaning is unknown. YHWH is a proper name, effaced in translation by the substituted "Lord"; Biglino declines to assign it a settled meaning and treats it as a designation whose referent must be reconstructed from what the text has him do, not from later theology. This is his standing example of the leave-it-untranslated rule.
• "There is no creation in the Bible." The claim that gives the 2012 book its title: the verb bara in Genesis 1, on Biglino's reading, denotes separation, division, and reorganization of pre-existing material rather than creation from nothing — a Genesis that opens with intervention in an already existing world. Here Biglino's argument runs parallel to a proposal from inside the academy: Ellen van Wolde's peer-reviewed case that bara in Genesis 1 means "to separate," published in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament — contested among Hebraists, but a mainstream demonstration that the question is real.

Reception

In Italy: the "fenomeno Biglino"

Biglino's popular reach in Italy has no equivalent elsewhere in the tradition — sustained bestseller status, packed public lectures, and a following substantial enough that the phenomenon itself has been studied. The principal academic treatment, published in the Italian religious-studies journal Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni, analyzes the "fenomeno Biglino" through the categories of paleoastronautics, secularization, religious individualization, and quasi-religion — reading his audience as a post-Catholic public that has left the Church but not the Bible, for whom Biglino's translator persona offers a way of keeping the text while dropping the theology. The study is cited by Biglino's own co-author, and the corpus takes it as the serious sociological registration of his standing: whatever one makes of the readings, the audience is a documented fact.

Mainstream Hebraists

Academic biblical scholarship, where it has engaged Biglino at all, has rejected his conclusions, and the objections deserve statement in their own voice. The philological objection: elohim, though plural in form, governs singular verbs and adjectives in the overwhelming majority of its references to the God of Israel, and Hebrew grammar knows honorific and abstract plurals — so the form alone cannot carry the weight Biglino places on it. The literary objection: strict literalism ignores genre, poetic convention, and the composite, redacted character of the text's transmission; reading Ezekiel's throne vision as an eyewitness technical report mistakes what kind of writing it is. The professional objection: Biglino does not publish in peer-reviewed venues, does not engage the specialist literature, and his lexical arguments — kavod as flying object, ruach as craft — outrun what the comparative-Semitic evidence supports. Italian academic commentary has generally filed his conclusions under pseudoscience and declined further engagement.

Biglino's standing reply is that he is doing translation rather than theology or history — reporting what the words say and inviting anyone with a lexicon to check — and that the burden of the honorific-plural convention is itself an interpretive choice made by the tradition his method suspends. The corpus's own position, argued in the Biglino Method entry, splits the difference: the critiques register legitimate limits of the method applied alone, while the standoff — scholars dismissing Biglino without engaging his specific observations, Biglino dismissing scholarship wholesale — is unhealthy for the interpretive conversation, since several of his observations (the grammatical plurality, the concreteness of the theophany descriptions, the bara question) are ones the academy could productively engage on its own terms.

The 2016 Milan symposium

The standoff had at least one notable interruption. In 2016, before an audience of some six hundred, Biglino spent more than four hours on stage with a panel drawn from the traditions his method contests: the Catholic theologian Ermis Segatti, the Waldensian Hebraist Daniele Garrone (a co-author of standard Hebrew dictionaries), the Orthodox archbishop Avondios, and Ariel Di Porto, chief rabbi of Turin. They examined his translations in public. None adopted his conclusions; by his interviewer's account the exchange turned up "nothing that could undermine his deductive system based on a literal reading of the Old Testament," Di Porto confirmed that Judaism carries no doctrine of original sin, and Garrone allowed that it is unclear where Paul derived the concept. The value of the event, for the corpus, is procedural: it is the one occasion on which the substantive engagement mainstream scholarship otherwise declines took place on the record, with the text open.

Relation to the Wheel of Heaven framework

The corpus's debt to Biglino is methodological and is stated openly: the practice of reading Hebrew terms directly — Elohim as plural, Yahweh as a name, kavod, ruach, and nachash kept in transliteration — follows the program Biglino articulated and Sendy articulated before him, and the corpus adopts it as necessary but not sufficient, integrating it with the precessional framework, the comparative sweep, and the Raëlian source-textual primacy that Biglino's own work does not touch.

The convergence-through-independence framing the corpus applies to Wallis applies to Biglino in modified form. Like Wallis, Biglino arrived at the plural Elohim, the concrete kavod, and the governor-Yahweh from the text, without deriving them from the canon — and two translators reaching the same readings from the same text is worth more evidentially than one. Unlike Wallis, however, Biglino demonstrably knows the Raëlian material: the corpus's source record on Il dio alieno della Bibbia notes Raël's texts in the bibliography. The independence claim for Biglino is therefore narrower and more precise — his readings are argued from the Hebrew, verifiable against the Hebrew, and stand or fall with the Hebrew, whatever else sits on his shelf. Where the canon states its claims as fact, Biglino stops deliberately short: he is a self-declared agnostic who presents his conclusions as what the text says, not as what he believes happened, and he draws no doctrine from them. The corpus reads that reticence not as a defect but as a division of labor — the translator establishes what the words say; the framework argues about what the words record. Biglino's practice also tightened over the years, in a way that bears on this independence. His first book leaned on Zecharia Sitchin's Earth Chronicles as its frame for the Mesopotamian material; the later works quietly drop that scaffolding, re-sourcing the Sumerian and Akkadian parallels to academic Assyriology and leaving Sitchin as a bibliography entry and an occasional "famous and controversial" aside. The drift runs against the usual course in the genre — from the texts toward the mythology of the surrounding literature — and the corpus reads it as the method disciplining its own practitioner.

The three-generation lineage — Sendy (1969), Biglino (2010–), Wallis (2020–) — and its place in the broader tradition is mapped in the neo-euhemerism entry and in the Explainers The Archdeacon and the Dragon and The Translator's Wager, the latter a close reading of Biglino's whole corpus.

Mauro Biglino. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/mauro-biglino/

"Mauro Biglino." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/mauro-biglino/.

"Mauro Biglino." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/mauro-biglino/.

@misc{woh-mauro-biglino,
  author       = {{Wheel of Heaven}},
  title        = {Mauro Biglino},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/mauro-biglino/}},
  note         = {CC0-1.0 public domain}
}