She was a Franciscan tertiary and a lay member of the Servants of Mary who reported personal conversations with, and dictations from, Jesus Christ.

Various Biblical experts, historians and scientists continue to support and criticize the book to this day, and yearly conferences on the scientific and theological aspects of her writings are held in Italy.

[4][6][7][8] Valtorta was born in 1897 in Caserta, just north of Naples, in the Campania region of Italy, where her father's military regiment was stationed.

[11][4][14] She studied there until March 1913 when just before her 16th birthday she had to leave Lombardy with her family for Florence, in Tuscany, due to her father's retirement from the military.

[15][11] In 1917 Valtorta volunteered as a Samaritan nurse, and for 18 months worked at a military hospital set up in Florence to care for the wounded soldiers who had returned from the war.

[4][12] In October 1924, when Maria was 27 years old, the Valtorta family moved from Florence to Viareggio, on the coast of the Mediterranean, as part of her father's final retirement.

[17][12][4] Over time, Maria's back injury affected her health in a progressive manner, and the last day she was able to leave her house on her own, given her high level of fatigue, was 4 January 1933.

[17][5] After 1941, except for a brief wartime evacuation to Sant’ Andrea di Compito in Lucca, from April to December 1944, during the Second World War, Valtorta's life was spent in her bed at her house in Via Antonio Fratti in Viareggio.

[4][3] From 1943 to 1947 Valtorta hand wrote about 15,000 pages in her notebooks, 10,000 of which were later selected as the basis of her main book The Poem of the Man-God, and the rest were gradually organized and published after her death.

[5][2] Presiding over the services at Valtorta's "privileged burial" and the relocation of her remains from Viareggio to the Santissima Annunziata Basilica, the mother church of the Servants of Mary was Msgr.

Ernesto Zucchini, a professor of theology, and has been holding yearly conferences on the writings of Valtorta in Viareggio, and presentations about her at various locations in Italy.

Paolo Giulietti, the Archbishop of Lucca who has jurisdiction over the city of Viareggio, and he gave a talk about the life and writings of Valtorta.

On 16 December 1959, the Holy Office placed the 4-volume work on the Index of Forbidden Books;[30] this was formally reported in the 6 January 1960 issue of L'Osservatore Romano.

[29] The front page of this issue of L'Osservatore also included an anonymously written article titled "A Badly Fictionalized Life of Jesus".

The article stated that the book was placed on the Index because it went against rule 1385 of the Code of Canon Law which required an imprimatur prior to publication.