Can you provide additional info on the authenticity of the Gospel of Barnabas? You seem very knowledgeable about this topic.
I'm really just a reporter of other people's knowledge. But I'll gladly provide you a few links to some sources that I think might help you. The first is a scholarly magazine (written in a very popular and easy style) the deals with many of the issues that we frequently address regarding Christian history. It is, not surprisingly,
Christian History and Biography magazine. Here is the key line from this article: "Though three early church works claim his name-The Epistle of Barnabas, the Gospel of Barnabas, and the Acts of Barnabas-none are considered to be written by him."
If one does an internet search for the "Gospel of Barnabas", one of the first links you will find is this one from an Islamic perspective --
http://www.barnabas.net/ -- which assumes the book in question to be authentic and seeks to answer the question "How the Gospel of Barnabas survived":
The Gospel of Barnabas was accepted as a Canonical Gospel in the Churches of Alexandria till 325 C.E. Iranaeus (130-200) wrote in support of pure monotheism and opposed Paul for injecting into Christianity doctrines of the pagan Roman religion and Platonic philosophy. He had quoted extensively from the Gospel of Barnabas in support of his views. This shows that the Gospel of Barnabas was in circulation in the first and second centuries of Christianity.
The problem is that we have not just copies of all the accepted New Testament books from the era of Iranaeus, but also copies of Iranaeus' own writings. Though the author of this online website uses the argument advanced in a book written by Muhammad `Ata ur-Rahim,
Jesus a Prophet of Islam, neither this website nor the book is able to cite where Iraneaus is supposed to have written this. Also, there were many lists that reported to state what the canon of scripture was, most in harmony with one another, a few that differed. Some even that suggested some books that were to be considered NOT canonical. And the Gospel of Barnabas is never mention by any of them. It is not listed as one to be accepted, it is not listed as one that is to be rejected. It is not listed as one that is disputed. It is simply not listed at all. It is as if no one had ever heard of the Gospel of Barnabas. This is particularly interesting because they had heard of the Letter of Barnabas which they rejected as not authentic. And even though it was rejected, this Letter of Barnabas still exists today. It was not destroyed, nor was an attempt made to destroy it. In fact it was preserved, and sometimes even quoted by early church fathers. But it was not to be considered canonical. Today one can compare the Letter of Barnabas and the Gospel of Barnabas and see that they are not the same, nor is it likely that the short Letter of Barnabas be confused with the much longer Gospel of Barnabas by those who would have read both.
But perhaps the most telling for those who say that the Gospel of Barnabas was used as canonical by the early church is that nearly every line (not just every book, but nearly every line) of the accepted New Testament is quoted by the pre-Nicene, early Church fathers, yet not one line from the Gospel of Barnabas, a book the size of the Gospel of John (and if truly accepted as canonical, one would assume as significant) is even referenced by any of this group, including Iranaeus. In fact, though those who today believe the Gospel of Barnabas is authentic say, Iranaeus “quoted extensively from the Gospel of Barnabas in support of his views.” It is Irenaeus’ own
Adversus Haereses (
Against Heresies), dated 175-185 CE, that is considered by modern scholarship to provided the first explicit witness to a four-fold gospel canon of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – no mention of Barnabas. In fact, regarding the New Testament canon, one finds in
Adversus Haereses quotations from all the books of the New Testament with the exception of: Philemon, II Peter, III John, and Jude. Plus Iranaeus specifically mentions two other so called gospels and declares his opinion of them. Regarding the
Gospel of Truth, associated with Valentinus, Iranaeus writes:
But the followers of Valentinus, putting away all fear, bring forward their own compositions and boast that they have more Gospels than really exist. Indeed their audacity has gone so far that they entitle their recent composition the Gospel of Truth, though it agrees in nothing with the Gospels of the apostles, and so no Gospel of theirs is free from blasphemy. For if what they produce is the Gospel of Truth, and is different from those which the apostles handed down to us, those who care to can learn how it can be show from the Scriptures themselves that [then] what is handed down from the apostles is not the Gospel of Truth.
And regarding the Gospel of Judas, Iranaeus writes:
Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas.
Note, again, no place in this writing does Iranaeus mention a Gospel of Barnabas. What reason would there be for not finding it, if as previously asserted, “He had quoted extensively from the Gospel of Barnabas in support of his views.”? Could it be that the church preserved only those of Iranaeus’ writings that they later agreed with and destroyed everything else? Though I cannot imagine what a massive undertaking that would be to go through and excise such comments from not just Iranaeus but others who would have also been quoting anything as significant as the Gospel of Barnabas (assuming it was truly accepted as canonical by the church till Nicea), I suppose that such a conspiracy is possible. Except that we also have preserved Iranaeus claiming that The Shepherd of Hermes is scripture, though it is rejected by the others and is never considered to be included in the canon after Nicea. Yet, both Iranaeus’ comment and the book itself are left intact and not destroyed nor altered.
If it once did exist why does it not appear in any documents of the early church, why is it not even mentioned? The above addresses some of it. But there are those that suggest that it did and they cite that about 170 years after Nicea, Pope Gelasianum had a lsit compiled, known as the Gelasian Decree, a list of books that were to be and not to be accepted, to be considered as apocryphal, and still more that were to be considered rejected as “anthema forever”. On the list of apochryphal books is “the Gospel in the name of Barnabas”.
However, I highly doubt that it actually refers to the same book that we know as the Gospel of Barnabas today. There are two reasons I believe this. First, strangely, the Epistle of Barnabas is completely missing from the list. The Epistle of Barnabas was a well known and well preserved work that had a reputation similar to the Shepherd of Hermes which is also listed among the apocryphal books by Pope Gelasianum. (Hence, my guess is that for some unknown reason, the Gelasian Decree mistakenly referred to the Letter of Barnabas as the Gospel – perhaps because there was no other work by a similar name.) But I also find it extremely highly unlikely that Gelasianum would list a work that at this time in church history (after the formulation of the Nicene Creed) which denies the crucifixion of Jesus as does the Gospel of Barnabas, meaning it is known, and yet not list it among the books to be considered as anathema when such a listing was being compiled. As hard as it is for me to conceive that the Pope might accidentally call the Letter of Barnabas the Gospel of Barnabas, it stretches credulity beyond my ability to imagine that Gelasianum would grant the status of being merely apocryphal rather than condemning as heretical something with the content of the Gospel of Barnabas we have today. That is why I think this, the only 5th century reference to a Gospel of Barnabas, is actually intended to be a reference to the Letter of Barnabas and not the supposed gospel.
There are extant copies of the Letter of Barnabas that are actually included in the Codex Sinaticus (an ancient copy of the Bible) that dates to about 350 AD. It is the second oldest complete bible in existence and includes the Old Testament in Greek (including those books sometimes known as the Deuterocanon), the complete New Testament, and the Shepherd of Hermes along with the Letter of Barnabas. (Another reason to think that Pope Gelasianum was referring to the Letter of Barnabas in his list of books.) Other copies of the Letter of Barnabas also exist form the 4th and 5th centuries, but none of the Gospel of Barnabas have been produced dating earlier than the 16th century. This is all the more remarkable because when looking at the Gelasian Decree even those apochryphal works such as the supposed Gospel of Mathais, which is known as the lost Gospel, at least have fragments that date back to the first few centuries of the church still exist, but not even a fragment from the supposed Gospel of Barnabas.
Now, it must be said that supporters of the authenticity of the Gospel Barnabas make two claims that if either proved true would completely change the picture. The first claim is “A Greek version of the Gospel of Barnabas is also found in a solitary fragment. The rest is burnt.” Muhammad `Ata ur-Rahim provides the following information in his book,
Jesus a Prophet of Islam:
There is a solitary fragment of a Greek version of the Gospel of Barnabas to be found in a museum in Athens, which is all that remains of a copy which was burnt:
(page 43)
Here is how the sentence on that fragment translates into English, “Barnabas the Apostle said that in evil contests the victor is more wretched because he departs with more of the sin.” No sentence even close to this can be found in the 16th century version of the book we possess. So, this fragment has to have some other source than the book we today know as the Gospel of Barnabas.
The second claim is reported as follows:
A Turkish journal, 'Ilime ve Sanat Dergisi', [my translation – “The Science and Art Magazine”] had published a write-up regarding the discovery of a ca. 19 centuries old Aramaic manuscript of this Gospel. It was written by Dr. Hamzah Piktash and was published in its issue of March-April, 1986. According to it a voluminous book was found by some people in a cave near the Turkish town of Hakari in 1984. They tore a leaf from it to get some information about it. They contacted Dr. Piktash to identify the manuscript. It had been written in the Aramaic language in Syriac script. It was written on Papyrus. Its dating revealed that it was written circa 19 centuries back. On perusal it came to be the Gospel of Barnabas written in Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ. The discoverers left the photocopy of its only one leaf with Dr. Piktash. They disappeared; and were later arrested by the police while trying to smuggle it out. The manuscript was given in the custody of the Govt. Dr. Piktash states that the text with him was concordant with the English and Arabic translation of the Gospel of Barnabas to a great extent.
But nobody has actually seen this manuscript. The only source we have for this story is that it was a story related by a Mr. Bashir Mahmud Akhtar in a thesis for a masters degree as told by an internet article that is copied from one site to another, but I haven’t even been able to verify the existence of this Dr. Piktash. I hope to be able to contact some of my Turkish friends and family to at least verify the existence of said magazine. To date the only Turkish comment about the Gospel of Barnabas that I am able to obtain that is any different than those sites available on Google has this to say first about the Gospel of Barnabas and then about Barnabas himself:
A Gospel written by Barnabas who wrote exactly what he saw and heard from ‘Isa, was found and published in English in Pakistan in 1973.
It is written in Qamus al a’lam: “Barnabas was one of the earliest apostles. He was a son of Mark’s uncle. He was a Cypriot. He believed in ‘Isa soon after Paul came forward, with whom he travelled [sic] to Anatolia and Greece. He was martyred in Cyprus in the year 63. He wrote a Gospel and some other booklets. He is memorialized on the eleventh of June by Christians.”
As a result, I tend to seriously doubt the credibility of the claim related by Bashir Mahmud Akhtar as the silence regarding such a discovery is deafening, but perhaps my Turkish contacts will be able to aid me with more information later. If so, I will update you.
