What Is the Gospel of Barnabas?

Anyone who talks about Jesus with Muslim friends, or reads Muslim-Christian debates online, will sooner or later meet the Gospel of Barnabas. It is presented as the true Gospel, written by an apostle who walked with Jesus, in which Jesus denies being the Son of God, foretells Muhammad by name, and escapes the cross while Judas dies in his place. Copies are sold in many Muslim bookshops, and in 2012 news reports suggested that a 1,500-year-old manuscript, seized in Turkey years earlier, might be a copy of it.

Christians often meet the claim unprepared, and some answer it badly, by confusing it with other books that bear Barnabas’s name. The answer is not in doubt: the Gospel of Barnabas is a late medieval forgery, and the true Gospel is the one the Church has proclaimed from the beginning, in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This article sets out the evidence: what the Gospel of Barnabas actually is, where its manuscripts come from, how scholars date it, why many Muslim scholars also reject it, and what really happened in Turkey in 2012.

In brief

The Gospel of Barnabas survives in an Italian manuscript in Vienna, probably copied at the end of the sixteenth century, and in an incomplete Spanish manuscript of the eighteenth century, now in Sydney. No earlier copy, quotation or mention of this text is known. Its contents carry clear marks of late medieval Europe, above all a jubilee that comes "every hundred years," which matches only the Roman jubilee of 1300. It even contradicts the Qur’an by having Jesus deny that he is the Messiah. Scholars disagree over whether it was composed in the fourteenth century or as late as about 1600, but they agree that it is not a first-century work. It is a forgery written under an apostle’s name, with no real claim to be a Gospel. Many Muslim scholars reject it as well. It should not be confused with the early Christian Epistle of Barnabas, which calls Jesus the Son of God, or with a lost "Gospel of Barnabas" named in a sixth-century list.

Thesis: The Gospel of Barnabas is a late medieval forgery written under the apostle’s name, with no real claim to be a Gospel; the case against it rests on the manuscripts and on its own contents, not on Christian bias, and the true Gospel is the fourfold Gospel the Church received from the apostles.

Three different things called "Barnabas"

Much confusion comes from mixing up three different things.

The apostle Barnabas. The Acts of the Apostles introduces "Joses, who was also named Barnabas by the apostles (which is translated Son of Encouragement), a Levite of the country of Cyprus" (Acts 4:36). He brought Paul to the apostles, travelled with him on the first missionary journey, and after a sharp disagreement "took Mark and sailed to Cyprus" (Acts 15:39).¹ The Orthodox Church honours him as an apostle of the Seventy on 11 June. Its tradition holds that he was stoned in Cyprus and buried with a copy of the Gospel of Matthew, which was found with his relics in the reign of the emperor Zeno; the discovery helped the Church of Cyprus keep its independence.²

The Epistle of Barnabas. This is a real early Christian writing, a sermon-like letter that reads the Old Testament as pointing to Christ. It speaks of the Temple as already destroyed "through their going to war," so it was written after AD 70, and it was copied in Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth-century Bible whose New Testament volume is in the British Library, after the New Testament books.³ Eusebius, in the early fourth century, listed "the extant epistle of Barnabas" among the rejected (non-canonical) writings.⁴ Its theology is the opposite of the Gospel of Barnabas: it says the Lord endured "to suffer for our soul," and that "Jesus who was manifested, both by type and in the flesh, is not the Son of man, but the Son of God."⁵ Writers who cite its presence in Codex Sinaiticus as evidence for the Gospel of Barnabas are mistaking one book for another.

A lost "Gospel of Barnabas." A Latin list of approved and rejected books, the so-called Gelasian Decree, names an Evangelium Barnabae among apocryphal works. The Raggs, who first translated the Italian Gospel of Barnabas into English, noted that the decree is generally dated to the century after Pope Gelasius (died 496).⁶ Nothing of that book survives, and no one knows what it contained. A title in a list cannot show that it was the same work as the Italian text found a thousand years later.

What the Gospel of Barnabas says

The Italian text has 222 chapters. It retells the Gospel story at length, borrowing heavily from Matthew and the other canonical Gospels, but with a very different message. Its prologue warns that many, "being deceived of Satan, under pretence of piety, are preaching most impious doctrine, calling Jesus son of God, repudiating the circumcision ordained of God for ever, and permitting every unclean meat: among whom also Paul hath been deceived."⁷

In it Jesus says plainly, "I am not the Messiah whom all the tribes of the earth expect," and the Messiah he promises is Muhammad. Adam, newly created, sees in the air a writing "that shone like the sun," which says, "There is only one God, and Mohammed is the messenger of God."⁸ At the end, when the soldiers come for Jesus, he is taken up to heaven and "Judas was so changed in speech and in face to be like Jesus that we believed him to be Jesus." God "reserved Judas for the cross, in order that he might suffer that horrible death to which he had sold another."⁹ The book thus offers a narrative for the Qur’an’s statement that Jesus was not crucified, "but [another] was made to resemble him to them" (4:157).¹⁰

Where the manuscripts come from

The Raggs’ edition of 1907 (Oxford, Clarendon Press) traces the Italian manuscript as far back as the evidence goes. It was acquired in Amsterdam by J. F. Cramer, lent to the Irish writer John Toland in 1709, given to Prince Eugene of Savoy in 1713, and passed with his library into the imperial library at Vienna in 1738, where it remains. "Further back than the beginning of the eighteenth century we have no certain traces of the Codex."¹¹ The biblical scholar Jan Joosten describes it as "an Italian manuscript probably dating from the end of the sixteenth century."¹²

A Spanish version was known in England in the eighteenth century. George Sale, the translator of the Qur’an, described it in 1734: it said it had been translated from the Italian "by an Arragonian Moslem, named Mostafa de Aranda," and had a preface in which a monk called Fra Marino claimed to have found the Italian original in the library of Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590), hidden it in his sleeve while the pope slept, and become a Muslim by reading it.¹³ That manuscript was later lost. A lacunose eighteenth-century Spanish manuscript was rediscovered in Sydney and described in 1976, and Luis Bernabé Pons edited it in 1998.¹⁴

So the documentary trail begins in the late sixteenth century at the earliest. There is no Greek, Syriac, Latin or Arabic manuscript and no quotation by any ancient writer. Professor Margoliouth, in a note printed in the Raggs’ edition, observed that the great medieval Muslim critics of the Gospels, such as Ibn Hazm (died 1064) and Ibn Taymiyya (died 1328), show no knowledge of it: to them it "would have been very welcome, but the fame of it had not reached their ears."¹⁵ Muslim interest in the book grew after the Raggs’ English translation, which was turned into Arabic very soon afterwards in a project driven by the Cairo-based reformer Muhammad Rashid Rida.¹⁶

Marks of a late medieval world

The contents point in the same direction. The Raggs, who knew Dante and medieval Italy well, listed many features that suit late medieval Italy far better than first-century Palestine. Four are especially clear.

The hundred-year jubilee. In chapter 82 Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that in the Messiah’s time "the year of jubilee, which now cometh every hundred years," will be celebrated every year; chapter 83 repeats the point.¹⁷ The jubilee of the Law of Moses came every fiftieth year (Leviticus 25). A jubilee every hundred years existed only once in history: Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed the first Christian Jubilee in 1300 as a centennial event, and Clement VI shortened the interval to fifty years for 1350. The Raggs concluded that the passage, taken at face value, fits only "the first half of the fourteenth century." Joosten, writing in the Journal of Theological Studies in 2010, called this "the strongest evidence" for a fourteenth-century date and argued that it "has never effectively been countered."¹⁸

Pilate at the Nativity. Chapter 3 begins, "There reigned at that time in Judaea Herod, by decree of Caesar Augustus, and Pilate was governor in the priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas."¹⁹ Pilate governed Judaea decades after Herod the Great’s death, during the ministry of Jesus, not at his birth.

Geography. In chapter 20, "Jesus went to the sea of Galilee, and having embarked in a ship sailed to his city of Nazareth." Nazareth is in the hills, well away from the lake. The Raggs commented that the author "possesses no first-hand knowledge of Palestine, still less of Palestine in the first century of our era."²⁰

Medieval Italy. The Raggs also pointed to wooden wine casks rolled about to be washed (in chapter 152 soldiers are rolled out of the Temple "as one rolleth casks of wood when they are washed to refill them with wine"), to Mary, Martha and Lazarus owning whole villages like medieval lords, and to a picture of the afterlife close to Dante’s: nine heavens with Paradise as the tenth, and a hell arranged by the seven capital sins.²¹ Each detail alone might be explained away. Together they place the author in Christian Europe, probably Italy, many centuries after Christ.

A problem for Muslim readers too

The Gospel of Barnabas does not only contradict the New Testament; it contradicts the Qur’an. The Qur’an calls Jesus the Messiah: "O Mary, indeed Allāh gives you good tidings of a word from Him, whose name will be the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary" (3:45).²² The Gospel of Barnabas has Jesus deny that he is the Messiah and gives the title to Muhammad. The Raggs also noted that the Qur’an speaks of seven heavens, while Barnabas has nine and Paradise.

For these reasons many Muslim scholars reject it. Ustadh Ali Ataie, answering a question for the Islamic teaching organization SeekersGuidance in 2013, wrote that "the vast majority of Muslim academics and scholars of comparative religion have deemed the so-called Gospel of Barnabas as pseudepigraphical, meaning that it is a forgery, probably a pious fraud." He listed its denial of Jesus’ messiahship as "clear conflict with the Qur’an," named anachronisms such as Pilate at the Nativity and the forty-day fast, and warned that Muslims often confuse it with the Epistle of Barnabas. He concluded that Muslims "should approach it with extreme caution."²³ The Oxford Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies lists the Muslim scholar Mahmoud Ayoub as another example of a Muslim author who rejected its authenticity.²⁴ Christians should not pretend that every Muslim relies on this book; many do not.

Who wrote it, and when?

Here scholars genuinely disagree, and it is fair to say so.

• A fourteenth-century Italian original. The Raggs thought the jubilee passage and the Dantean colouring pointed to an Italian writer of about 1300-1350, though they also considered that a sixteenth-century author "possibly the Fra Marino of the Spanish Preface" either copied or invented it. Joosten has defended the fourteenth-century date.²⁵
• A convert’s work, perhaps of about 1600. Others connect it with the Moriscos, the Muslims of Spain forced to convert, and their polemical writings, or with converts to Islam elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The Oxford Centre’s bibliography summarizes several such proposals: Gerard Wiegers argued for an Italian origin in comparison with the Morisco writer Juan Alonso; P. S. van Koningsveld suggested an Italian original written in Istanbul; Theodore Pulcini, looking instead to the collapse of the crusader East, proposed a monk on Cyprus who converted to Islam.²⁶
• Older material reused. Joosten’s 2002 study in the Harvard Theological Review examined the book’s relation to the Diatessaron, Tatian’s second-century harmony of the Gospels, through its medieval Western versions. Philip Jenkins, writing for a general audience, argued that Barnabas in its present form dates from about 1600 but that its authors may have reworked an older Christian text, a view that other scholars dispute.²⁷

None of these views makes the book an apostolic Gospel. On every one of them it is a forgery: a work of the late Middle Ages or later, put into the mouth of an apostle who had died more than a thousand years before. Even if a medieval author drew on a harmony that ultimately goes back to Tatian, that harmony was built from the four canonical Gospels, the same Gospels that the Gospel of Barnabas contradicts on the cross and on the Son of God.

The 2012 "1,500-year-old Bible" in Turkey

In February 2012 Turkish media reported that a manuscript written in gold letters in Syriac, seized from smugglers, was about 1,500 years old and might be the Gospel of Barnabas. The Hürriyet Daily News reported that police had seized it in 2000 in Turkey’s Mediterranean region and that it was kept at Ankara’s courthouse for eight years before being moved to the Ethnography Museum; Syriac Christian representatives asked for it to be handed to their community.²⁸

The textual scholar Peter J. Williams read the published page: "It's just plain Peshitta," the standard Syriac Bible, giving Matthew 28:19-20. He thought the last line of the colophon might read "in the year 1,500 of our Lord," noted that the pointed script was itself a sign that the book was not 1,500 years old, and listed features that "would make me think of it as a modern forgery."²⁹ James Davila, following the story on his PaleoJudaica blog, summarized that the Turkish government had seized an old-looking Syriac manuscript and that any link with the Gospel of Barnabas was "pretty unlikely."³⁰ Nothing published shows that the Ankara book is the Gospel of Barnabas; the one page examined was Matthew.

Objections and responses

"The Church suppressed it. The Gelasian Decree proves it existed."

The decree proves that a book called the Gospel of Barnabas existed in the West around the sixth century. It does not tell us what was in it, and nothing connects it with the Italian text except the name. The Italian Gospel itself is full of features from a much later world, so it cannot be that early book in its present form.

"It agrees with the Qur’an, so it must preserve the true Injil."

Agreement with the Qur’an is what one would expect from a work written by someone who knew Islamic teaching. The real test is the evidence of date, and here the book fails. It also disagrees with the Qur’an on the title Messiah, so it is not even a reliable witness to Islamic belief.

"Christians reject it only because it contradicts their beliefs."

The case against its antiquity uses ordinary historical methods: manuscript dates, the absence of earlier witnesses, and anachronisms. Muslim scholars such as Ali Ataie and Mahmoud Ayoub reach the same conclusion. The same methods applied to the New Testament show papyri from the second and third centuries and quotations by writers of the late first and second centuries; see How Do We Know Which Early Christian Writings Are Authentic?

"Paul corrupted the message, as its prologue says."

The earliest evidence runs the other way. Paul’s letters, written within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion, already pass on the tradition that Christ "died for our sins" and rose, and they show Barnabas working alongside Paul (Galatians 2:1, 9, 13). Even when "Barnabas was carried away" in the dispute at Antioch (Galatians 2:13), the quarrel was over table fellowship, not over the cross.³¹ On Paul’s authority see Was Paul a Self-Appointed Apostle?, and on the crucifixion Was Jesus Really Crucified?

What we can say confidently

• {{very-strong: The Gospel of Barnabas survives only in an Italian manuscript of about the late sixteenth century and in Spanish copies, the surviving one from the eighteenth century.}}
• No ancient manuscript, quotation or reference to this text is known, from Christian or Muslim writers.
• {{strong: The book contains anachronisms, above all the hundred-year jubilee, which fit late medieval Europe and not the first century.}}
• It contradicts the Qur’an by denying that Jesus is the Messiah, and many Muslim scholars reject it.
• It is a forgery written many centuries after the apostle whose name it bears, and it has no real claim to be a Gospel.
• It is a different work from the early Christian Epistle of Barnabas, which calls Jesus the Son of God.
• The page published from the 2012 Ankara manuscript is the Syriac Peshitta text of Matthew, not the Gospel of Barnabas.

What remains disputed

• {{debated: Whether the work was composed in the fourteenth century or around 1600.}} The jubilee points early; the manuscripts and the Spanish Morisco connections point later.
• Who wrote it: an Italian convert, a Morisco circle, a monk on Cyprus, or someone in Istanbul.
• Whether it preserves fragments of older gospel material, such as readings from medieval versions of the Diatessaron, and how many.
• What the Ankara manuscript really is, and how old it is; no full scholarly study has been published that we could consult.

Conclusion

The Gospel of Barnabas deserves a calm answer, not a sneer. For some Muslims it has seemed to confirm what the Qur’an teaches about Jesus. But it carries the fingerprints of its own time: a pope’s jubilee, a Pilate in the wrong decade, a boat to Nazareth, and Dante’s heavens. It is not the testimony of the Levite from Cyprus whom the apostles called the Son of Encouragement. Nor can it rescue the Qur’an’s denial that Jesus is the Son of God and that he was crucified: that denial is false, and the apostles who saw him crucified and risen bore witness against it with their lives.

That Barnabas, the Church remembers, was buried with the Gospel of Matthew on his breast. The Gospel he carried tells of the Son of God who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and rose on the third day. That is the true Gospel, and the Church has received it in four books, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and no others. St. Irenaeus wrote in the second century, "It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are."³² St. John says why his Gospel was written: "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name" (John 20:31).³³

Christians can share that Gospel with Muslim friends with confidence and respect. The best answer to a forged gospel is the real one, with an invitation to believe in the Son of God and be baptized into his Church.

Notes

1. Acts 4:36; 15:39, New King James Version. See also Acts 9:27; 13:2. ↩
2. "Apostle Barnabas of the Seventy," Lives of the Saints, Orthodox Church in America (feast 11 June), oca.org. The OCA page gives the year of the discovery as 448 but also places it under Zeno, who reigned from 474; the Raggs, citing the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum, give the fourth year of Zeno, AD 478 (Ragg, Gospel of Barnabas, xlv, note 1). ↩
3. Epistle of Barnabas 16, trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (1885), newadvent.org. Codex Sinaiticus, British Library Add MS 43725, ff. 200r-347v (New Testament, Epistle of Barnabas, Shepherd of Hermas), catalogue record, searcharchives.bl.uk. ↩
4. Eusebius, Church History 3.25.4, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, NPNF2 vol. 1, newadvent.org. ↩
5. Epistle of Barnabas 5 and 12, ANF 1 (note 3). ↩
6. Lonsdale and Laura Ragg, eds. and trans., The Gospel of Barnabas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), xlv, citing the Decretum Gelasii vi.10. archive.org. ↩
7. Gospel of Barnabas, prologue, Ragg translation, as transcribed at sacred-texts.com. ↩
8. Gospel of Barnabas 96 and 39, Ragg translation (archive.org text, note 6). The Raggs’ printed text reads "shone." ↩
9. Gospel of Barnabas 216 and 217, Ragg translation (note 6). ↩
10. Qur’an 4:157, Saheeh International translation, quran.com. ↩
11. Ragg, Gospel of Barnabas, x-xi (note 6). ↩
12. Jan Joosten, "The Gospel of Barnabas and the Diatessaron," Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 1 (2002): 73-96, opening extract, cambridge.org. ↩
13. George Sale, preface "To the Reader" in his translation of the Qur’an (1734), quoted in Ragg, Gospel of Barnabas, xi-xii (note 6). ↩
14. Joosten, "Gospel of Barnabas and the Diatessaron," extract (note 12), citing John Fletcher, "The Spanish Gospel of Barnabas," Novum Testamentum 18 (1976): 314-320, and Luis F. Bernabé Pons, El texto morisco del Evangelio de San Bernabé (Granada, 1998). ↩
15. "Note by Professor Margoliouth," in Ragg, Gospel of Barnabas, xlviii (note 6). The death dates are converted from the hijri dates he gives (456 and 728 AH). ↩
16. "The Gospel of Barnabas," starter bibliography, Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies, Oxford, cmcsoxford.org.uk. ↩
17. Gospel of Barnabas 82 and 83, Ragg translation, with the Raggs’ note on the papal jubilee (note 6). ↩
18. Ragg, Gospel of Barnabas, xli-xlii (note 6). Jan Joosten, "The Date and Provenance of the Gospel of Barnabas," Journal of Theological Studies 61 (2010): 200-215, quoted in "Why the Gospel of Barnabas Is a Medieval Fake," Catholic Answers, catholic.com; the journal article itself was not accessible to us. ↩
19. Gospel of Barnabas 3, Ragg translation (note 6). ↩
20. Gospel of Barnabas 20; Ragg, Gospel of Barnabas, xxi (note 6). ↩
21. Gospel of Barnabas 152; Ragg, Gospel of Barnabas, xxxix-xli (note 6). ↩
22. Qur’an 3:45, Saheeh International translation, quran.com. ↩
23. Ali Ataie, "What Is the Islamic View on the Gospel of Barnabas?" SeekersGuidance, 15 July 2013, seekersguidance.org. ↩
24. CMCS Oxford bibliography (note 16), citing Mahmoud Ayoub, "Muslim Views of Christianity: Some Modern Examples," Islamochristiana 10 (1984): 49-70. Ayoub’s article itself was not consulted. ↩
25. Ragg, Gospel of Barnabas, xlii-xliii (note 6); Joosten 2010 (note 18). ↩
26. CMCS Oxford bibliography (note 16), summarizing Gerard Wiegers (Bibliotheca Orientalis, 1995), P. S. van Koningsveld (Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 20, 1996) and Theodore Pulcini ("In the Shadow of Mount Carmel: The Collapse of the Latin East and the Origins of the Gospel of Barnabas," Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 12, 2001). These studies themselves were not consulted. ↩
27. Joosten 2002 (note 12); Philip Jenkins, "Muslims and Barnabas," Christian Century, 22 February 2012, christiancentury.org. ↩
28. "Syriacs Stake Their Claim on 1,500-Year Old Bible," Hürriyet Daily News, 2012, hurriyetdailynews.com. ↩
29. P. J. Williams, "The Antique Syriac Bible," Evangelical Textual Criticism, 25 February 2012, evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com. ↩
30. James R. Davila, "Syriac Apocryphal Gospel Manuscript in Ankara?" PaleoJudaica, 24 February 2012, with updates, paleojudaica.blogspot.com. ↩
31. 1 Corinthians 15:3; Galatians 2:1, 9, 13, New King James Version. ↩
32. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.11.8, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885), newadvent.org. ↩
33. John 20:31, New King James Version. ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Gospel of Barnabas. Edited and translated from the Italian manuscript in the Imperial Library at Vienna by Lonsdale and Laura Ragg. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907.
• The Epistle of Barnabas. Trans. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.
• Eusebius. Church History. Trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert. NPNF2, vol. 1. 1890.
• Codex Sinaiticus. British Library Add MS 43725, catalogue record.
• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• The Qur’an. Saheeh International translation. quran.com.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Irenaeus. Against Heresies. Trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885.
• "Apostle Barnabas of the Seventy." Lives of the Saints. Orthodox Church in America. oca.org.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Joosten, Jan. "The Gospel of Barnabas and the Diatessaron." Harvard Theological Review 95 (2002): 73-96. (Opening extract consulted.)
• Joosten, Jan. "The Date and Provenance of the Gospel of Barnabas." Journal of Theological Studies 61 (2010): 200-215. (Quoted at second hand.)
• Jenkins, Philip. "Muslims and Barnabas." Christian Century, 22 February 2012.
• Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies, Oxford. "The Gospel of Barnabas." Starter bibliography, 2017.
• Williams, P. J. "The Antique Syriac Bible." Evangelical Textual Criticism, 25 February 2012.
• Davila, James R. "Syriac Apocryphal Gospel Manuscript in Ankara?" PaleoJudaica, 24 February 2012.
• "Syriacs Stake Their Claim on 1,500-Year Old Bible." Hürriyet Daily News, 2012.
• "Why the Gospel of Barnabas Is a Medieval Fake." Catholic Answers. catholic.com. (Used only for its quotation of Joosten 2010.)

Sources from the Islamic tradition

• Ataie, Ali. "What Is the Islamic View on the Gospel of Barnabas?" SeekersGuidance, 15 July 2013.
• Ayoub, Mahmoud. "Muslim Views of Christianity: Some Modern Examples." Islamochristiana 10 (1984): 49-70. (Cited through the CMCS bibliography; not consulted.)