Gospel of Barnabas

The Gospel of Barnabas is a book depicting the life of Jesus, which claims to be by the biblical Barnabas who in this work is one of the twelve apostles. Two manuscripts are known to have existed, both dated to the late 16th or early 17th centuries, with one written in Italian and the other in Spanish. The Spanish manuscript is now lost, its text surviving only in a partial 18th-century transcript. Barnabas is about the same length as the four canonical gospels put together, with the bulk being devoted to an account of Jesus' ministry, much of it harmonized from accounts also found in the canonical gospels. In some key respects, it conforms to the Islamic interpretation of Christian origins and contradicts the New Testament teachings of Christianity.

The text of this Gospel is considered by the majority of academics, including Christians and some Muslims (such as Abbas el-Akkad), to be late and pseudepigraphical. However, some academics suggest that it may contain some remnants of an earlier, apocryphal work (perhaps Gnostic,Ebionite or Diatessaronic), redacted to bring it more in line with Islamic doctrine. Some Muslims consider the surviving versions as transmitting a suppressed apostolic original. Some Islamic organizations cite it in support of the Islamic view of Jesus.

This work should not be confused with the surviving Epistle of Barnabas, nor with the surviving Acts of Barnabas.

The earliest reference to a Barnabas gospel, which is generally agreed to correspond with the one found in the two known manuscripts, is in Morisco manuscript BNM MS 9653 in Madrid, written about 1634 by Ibrahim al-Taybili in Tunisia. While describing how the Bible predicts Muhammad, he speaks of the "Gospel of Saint Barnabas where one can find the light" ("y así mismo en Evangelio de San Bernabé, donde se hallará la luz"). The first published account of the Gospel was in 1717, when a brief reference to the Spanish text is found in De religione Mohamedica by Adriaan Reland; and then in 1718, a much more detailed description of the Italian text by the Irish deist John Toland. Both Italian and Spanish texts are referred to in 1734 by George Sale in The Preliminary Discourse to the Koran:

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