Thursday, April 14, 2016

More on the Gospel of Barnabas

NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA WATCH: The Gospel of Barnabas a Late Medieval Gospel Forgery: How We Know? (Ronald V. Huggins). This looks like it is taken from a PowerPoint presentation: lots of pretty pictures to go with the interesting content.

Past posts on the Gospel of Barnabas are collected here. This long-since debunked medieval forgery remains of interest because of persistent rumors (which started here) that an ancient Aramaic copy of it has been discovered in Turkey. Like pretty much all the other outlandish claims about this apocryphon, it isn't so. The text is from a Syriac translation of the Gospel of Matthew and the manuscript itself claims to have been copied in the year 1500, but it may be more recent still.