No, the Gospel of Barnabas was never part of the beliefs of any Christian group. There is a great deal of evidence that it cannot have been compiled earlier than the 14th century AD and it was probably written in Spain (interestingly, a Spain not yet freed from the Moors). The Epistle of Barnabas not only was but still is a perfectly genuine Christian document, just not part of the canon (and you clearly have no real grasp of either the process of the formation of the canon, nor what it means for a text to be either canonical or not). The Gospel of Barnabas was never correct, never accepted by anyone apart from a few Muslim apologists with vested interests. Even your story of it being found on the body of St. Barnabus is a fabrication. The text found in his tomb was, as unanimously described by contemporaries of the discovery, the Gospel of Matthew. Forgive me if I tend to disregard the opinions of 'scholars' who are willing to make barefaced lies to support their position.
I guess you are validating the Protestant movement as well as the mormon and JW, because according to them all those who preceded them had it wrong. so who exactly has it right then.
No, the people preceding me had it right - none of them ever accepted this 'gospel'. You're having a laugh, accusing an Orthodox Christian of change. You really have no clue! Our beliefs have not changed at all, even the Liturgy we use every week is centuries older than this rubbish you claim Barnabas penned.
Who, give me names of people scholars and their evidence.
but you have provided no evidencd so how is it clear.
I presume from this response that you are incapable of producing any positive evidence for the validity of this forgery. So be it.
Would you accept this as a reference to its being a fake? (doubt it as you clearly have a vested interest):
As regards the "Gospel of Barnabas" itself,
there is no question that it is a medieval forgery ... It contains anachronisms which can date only from the Middle Ages and not before, and shows a garbled comprehension of Islamic doctrines, calling the Prophet the "Messiah", which Islam does not claim for him. Besides it farcical notion of sacred history, stylistically it is a mediocre parody of the Gospels, as the writings of Baha Allah are of the Koran. (Cyril Glassé,
The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989, p. 65, bold added)
As to evidence, how much do you want? Just as few examples, the author:
- Clearly doesn't understand that Christ and Messiah mean the same thing, proving he's not a first century Hellenised Jew.
- Clearly has no grasp of the geography of the Holy Land, proving he'd never been there
- Refers to coinage that only existed in medieval Spain (do you think Barnabas used currency fromn the future?)
- Refers to jubilees of 100 years, which only occurred under the medieval Roman Catholic Church (they were supposed to be 50 years in Judaism)
- Refers to Eve eating an apple, even though this popular belief is solely a construct of the fourth century Latin Vulgate translation, thus putting the text's composition late in time and somewhere in the west.
- Appears to quote Dante's Divine Comedy on more than one occasion, setting the text firmly in the Renaissance and contradicting Islamic cosmology in the process.
There's plenty more, but those will do for starters.
The case for the 'Gospel' of Barnabas being genuine is so poor it's untrue. Anyone who claims that it isn't, clearly prefers their own fantasy world over reality, I'm afraid. Look, I respect your right to believe what you believe, even though I'm convinced you're wrong, but you lose all credibility when you try to prop up those beliefs with a spurious document. It just makes the Islamic case look so much weaker when you see Muslim apologists resort to such ridiculous measures. If you can't argue your point without making things up, how much of a point can you actually have?
James
