The Christians' fear of the Apostle's testimony
Christians are afraid of the testimony of the Apostle Barnabas, peace be upon him, because if what he says is true, namely that not Jesus but Judas Iscariot was crucified, then the whole new Christianity would collapse.
What is repeatedly claimed by professional Christians like Schirrmacher or Slomp, that the Gospel of Barnabas is the forgery of a 16th-century Jewish convert to Islam, is, as they say in Cologne, “old hat,” dating from yesterday and long since refuted by research. The reason for the stubbornness of these people is simply that they have a bestial fear that this legacy might be true.
Among Christians, more precisely, Pauline-influenced Christians (which today means almost all of them), the Gospel of the Apostle Barnabas is rightly considered the most feared document of all. For if it is true that there was never a killing of Jesus, peace be upon him, and he was never crucified, which, as is well known, is also claimed by the Holy Quran, the Last Testament of the Merciful God to humanity, then this Christianity is finished, over, done. For without the death on the cross, there is no resurrection, no Easter.
While the Quran only says that Jesus was not killed and not crucified, but that it only "appeared" so to them at the time ("wa lakin schubbiha lahum" (4:157)), the explosiveness of the testimony of the Apostle Barnabas, which is more than a thousand years older, lies precisely in the fact that it tells in great detail what that appearance was all about and how it came to be that it appeared so to them. Namely, that when the henchmen came to arrest him, the Lord Jesus was taken up to the third heaven by four angels, while Judas Iscariot, the traitor, received Jesus' appearance and voice by divine command, so that not only the soldiers but even the disciples themselves and Jesus' family believed that it was he who had been arrested, crucified, and killed (cf. Gospel of Barnabas, Chap. 216 ff., p. 298 ff.), since all this actually happened to Judas. This is precisely the precise meaning of the Quranic "shubbiha", and it also makes the back and forth of Judas's suffering between the Sanhedrin and Governor Pilate understandable with unprecedented clarity.
And it is also precisely this that almost forces Christians today to deny the authenticity of the Gospel of Barnabas and to cling like a drowning man to the thesis that this sacred legacy is in truth a forgery by a Jewish convert to Islam from the 16th century, which the Schirrmachers and Slomps still propagate today, even though recent research has long proven the unique status and great age of the Gospel of Barnabas.
The text of this particular scripture, known as the "Gospel of Barnabas," has increasingly attracted the interest of high-profile researchers from various disciplines because much suggests that, apart from a few marginal changes from more recent times, it must be a testament dating back to the earliest times of Jewish Christianity.
THE TOMB OF APOSTLE BARNABAS NEAR SALAMIS (CYPRUS)
Religious scholars, linguistic analysts, and experts in ancient languages, especially the crucial Aramaic, who have studied the Gospel of Barnabas, have come to the conclusion that the work is an authentic expression of a Jewish-Christian tradition which, temporarily silenced in Pauline Christianity, has curiously continued to develop in Islam to this day. That the Gospel of Barnabas surprises both Muslims and Christians by appearing "Islamic" is not the result of an Islamic forgery, as the aforementioned lobbyists would have it, but rather a beautiful expression of the fact that Jewish Christianity and Islam unexpectedly prove to be intimately related, indeed representing a consistent line of development of redemptive revelations, in contrast to which Pauline Christianity can only appear as a heresy.
A very important study on the significance of the Gospel of Barnabas was a dissertation submitted by Luigi Cirillo and Paul Fremaux in 1975 at France's elite university, the Sorbonne. Luigi Cirillo's work, graded summa cum laude – he later became Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Naples and an expert in the fields of Jewish Christianity and Manichaeism – was preceded by a detailed introduction by Henry Corbin, one of the leading Orientalists of his time. In this study, Cirillo was able to show that the Viennese text of the German edition of the Gospel of Barnabas published by Spohr Verlag [cf. Vienna State Library: Cod. 2662 Eug] is based on a Jewish-Christian gospel of Eastern origin, which, however, like all early Christian texts, had undergone several metamorphoses during its long history.
In fundamental agreement with the Catholic Cirillo is the Jewish religious scholar Professor Shlomo Pinés, who found traditions in the Gospel of Barnabas that are known from apocryphal Jewish-Christian writings of the first centuries. A good example is the story of Abraham's childhood, which finds its parallel in the Apocalypse of Abraham, a rare apocryphon from the first century AD, which, having remained unknown for many centuries, reappeared in the public eye in the 19th century in the form of an Old Church Slavonic translation. The latest edition of this text refers several times in its apparatus to the Gospel of Barnabas, which, increasingly recognized by outstanding scholars, unexpectedly gains in significance.
In a series of lectures given at the Christian University of Jerusalem in 1976, Professor Henri Corbin revealed astonishing parallels between the Gospel of Barnabas, Shiite prophetology, and the early Christian journeys of Peter, which are still misleadingly referred to as "Pseudo-Clementine" in the terminology of Pauline-influenced religious studies.
Finally, the Aramaic specialist Jan Joosten, Professor at the University of Strasbourg, published a detailed study in the January 2002 issue of the Harvard Theological Review entitled "The Gospel of Barnabas and the Diatessaron," which provides clear evidence that large parts of the Gospel of Barnabas correspond to Tatian's "Gospel Harmony," which was compiled in Aramaic around 180 AD.
The indicated works of the scholars just mentioned now deserve to be decisively weighed with the answers they provide and the far-reaching questions they raise. Compared to them – it can already be said – the forgery accusation pamphlets of the Slomps and Schirrmachers and all those who mindlessly parrot them will prove to be second- or third-rate and factually unsustainable agitations full of errors and arbitrary assumptions, an unpleasantly tedious read. That both Christians and Muslims fall victim to such stereotyped and incorrigible forgery propaganda is, in this respect, somewhat bitter, as it is precisely Muslims who could have most easily discovered the special value of the Gospel of Barnabas, since they are factually and genealogically so close to it, as the religious historian H. J. Schoeps clearly recognized, who concludes his groundbreaking work "Das Judenchristentum" with the remarkable sentence: «And thus, as a paradox of truly world-historical dimensions, the fact emerges that Jewish Christianity, though it perished within the Christian church, has been preserved in Islam and thereby extends some of its driving impulses into our present day.»
In other words, it can be said that the true heirs of Jesus Christ, the true Christians of today, are those who are now called Muslims.
In conclusion, it should be said that the stunningly wonderful legacy of the Apostle Barnabas, which we encounter in his Gospel, still carries a very specific blessing today, which profoundly uplifts and delights the reader, regardless of their religious affiliation.
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