On 23 April 1943, Good Friday, Maria Valtorta – a Franciscan tertiary – reported the voice of Jesus suddenly speaking to her and asking her to write. From then until 1951 she produced over 15,000 handwritten pages in 122 notebooks, mostly detailing the life of Jesus as an extension of the gospels. Her handwritten notebooks containing close to 700 reputed episodes in the life of Jesus were typed on separate pages by her priest and reassembled, given that they had no temporal order, and became the basis of her 5,000-page book "The Poem of the Man God"

“I was greatly impressed on finding in Maria Valtorta’s work the names of at least six or seven towns, which are absent from the Old and New Testaments. These names are known but to a few specialists, and through non-biblical sources… […] Now, how could she have known these names, if not through the revelations she claims that she had?” – Fr. Dreyfus, of the French Biblical and Archaeological School, Jerusalem

“It is the gospel proclaimed with new vigor and detail. It is a powerful light beamed on the person of Jesus Christ and his eternal teachings. Indeed this work appears to be the only true vision-and-word revelation on the gospels ever granted to mankind.” – Fr. Gino C. Violini, Calgary Alberta, Canada