The Letter of Barnabas.

The view Christians were to take of the Jewish scriptures was a serious problem for the early Church for almost a century and a half. What were Christians to think of the Jewish Law? How were they to regard the utterances of the prophets? The Letter to the Romans and the Gospel of Matthew had grappled with these questions, and Marcion and Justin in the middle of the second century took opposite views on them. But about A.D. 130 a Christian teacher, probably in Alexandria, offered a compromise. The Jewish scriptures were true, not literally, as the Jews believed, but allegorically. When Genesis declared that Abraham circumcised 318 males of his household (14:14; 17:23), it meant to predict Jesus on the cross, for the Greek figures for 18 are iota eta (I H), the first two letters of Jesus' name, and the Greek figure for 300 is tau, or T, which could be taken as representing the cross. The allegorizing teacher who offered this interpretation was very proud of it. “No one has learned a truer lesson from me,” he goes on, “but I know that you deserve it” (Barnabas 9:8, 9).

The food laws of Leviticus are also allegorized. They only mean that we are not to be like swine, wild beasts, or birds of prey. The six days of creation are the six thousand years the earth is to last before the Messiah's return, “for a day with him means a thousand years.” So interpreted, the author finds the Jewish scriptures full of religious meaning and of predictions fulfilled in Christ.

One of these seems to date the book, for the writer speaks of the temple as having been destroyed and then rebuilt by those who had destroyed it, and he goes on, “It is happening. For because of the war it was destroyed by the enemy; now even the servants of the enemy will build it up again themselves” (16:14). This points to the heathen rebuilding of the temple of Jupiter on the temple site in Jerusalem, on the eve of the Bar-Cochba War of A.D. 132-35; this would date the Letter about A.D. 130-31, when Hadrian ordered the building of the new city. The literary environment of Barnabas is indicated by his use of Matthew, of Old Testament “testimonies,” and of apocalyptic writings such as I Enoch, II Esdras, and II Baruch.

The Letter of Barnabas begins not in the usual fashion of Greek letters but in the informal epistolary style used in family letters, addressing its readers as “sons and daughters.” Its tone changes suddenly at the end of chapter 17: “So much for this. Now let us pass to another lesson and teaching” (The words are gnosis and didache). What follows is a bold statement of Christian ethics, the Way of Light against the Way of Darkness. It is cast in fifty-one curt commands of the “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not” order, twenty-three of them positive and twenty-eight negative (chap. 19). A brief description of the Way of the Black One follows, and a general exhortation concludes the book.

No one can miss the sharp cleavage at the end of chapter 17. The idle if ingenious fancies of the allegorical interpreter give way to the stern, blunt commandments of the Christian lawgiver, with only the crudest of transitions between. It is evident that two short Christian tracts have been put together. And this impression becomes a conviction when we find that each part has been found by itself in a Latin version. The Latin translation of Barnabas extends only through chapter 17, which is properly finished off with a doxology.

The Greek manuscripts of Barnabas have an interesting history. At first it was known in Greek only in a group of eight manuscripts, all copied directly or indirectly from an earlier manuscript from which several leaves had been lost, so that the text skipped from Polycarp, “To the Philippians” 9:2, toward the end of one sentence to the “Letter of Barnabas” 5: 7, in the middle of another. But in 1859, when Tischendorf found the “Codex Sinaiticus” at St. Catherine's on Mount Sinai, he saw at once that it contained the complete Greek text of Barnabas, and, fearing that the manucript might be taken away from him the next morning, he sat up all night to copy that long-desired text. A few years later, in 1873, Bryennius made his famous discovery of the Constantinople manuscript, from which he published first the full Greek text of I and II Clement (1875), and then the long-lost “Didache” (1883). It also contained the full Greek text of Barnabas, and its readings Bryennius supplied for Hilgenfeld's edition of 1877.

The influence of the “Letter of Barnabas” was considerable, and it was long held in high regard. Clement of Alexandria, toward the end of the second century, accepted it as scripture and commented upon it in his lost “Outlines.” He spoke of Barnabas as an “apostle,” but so, of course, did Acts (14:14). Origen, too, included it among his disputed books, which he himself accepted as scripture. The Sinaitic manuscript includes it in the New Testament, putting it after the Revelation and before Hermas. Jerome speaks of it as being read among the apocryphal writings (“On Illustrious Men,” 6). The “Clermont List,” representing Egyptian usage about A.D 300, has it at the end of the Catholic or general letters, between Jude and the Revelation of John. Eusebius classes it as disputed and rejected (“Church History,” iii. 25. 4). The “List of the Sixty Canonical Books” mentions it among the rejected books, the apocrypha, and the “Stichometry of Nicephorus” (ca. A.D. 850) puts it with the disputed books — the “Revelation of John,” the “Revelation of Peter,” and the “Gospel of the Hebrews — not among the rejected ones.