The Epistle of Barnabas, another one of the “Apostolic Fathers,” was a popular book in the early centuries of Christianity; one of our oldest manuscripts of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus (375 CE or so) includes it among the books of Scripture.  But I think we can be glad, on the whole, it was not included in the end.  It presents one of the strongest attacks against Jews and Judaism from the early second century.  It is nonetheless an intriguing work that continues to be studied rigorously by experts of early Christianity today.

I begin explaining it by providing a fifty-word one-sentence summary:

The Epistle of Barnabas argues that the Jewish people broke their covenant with God as soon as they received it and so have always misunderstood their own Scriptures and mis-practiced their religion; only followers of Jesus are God’s people, and the Old Testament is a Christian, not a Jewish, book.

I can now begin to unpack the major themes and emphases of the book.   I am taking much of this from my discussion in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press).   This will take two posts.

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Barnabas has traditionally been called an epistle, even though it reads more like an essay directed to a group of people.  Unlike ancient letters, the opening contains a greeting but neither its author nor its recipients are named.

The second- and third-century Christians who first referred to the book claimed that it had been written by Paul’s companion Barnabas (hence its name; see Acts 11–15), but they may have been simply guessing. Indeed, these later authors may have ascribed the book to a companion of the apostle to elevate its importance.

The earliest writer to mention the book, Clement of Alexandria, includes it among the writings of the New Testament, as do other Christian writers in Egypt through the fourth century. Most scholars, however, date the book to a period long after the real Barnabas’s death. Several comments in the text itself suggest a date of around 130 c.e. or so. For instance, the book mentions the destruction of the Temple, which occurred in the year 70 c.e. (16:3), and refers to the possibility of its soon being rebuilt (16:4). That possibility was very much alive during the first decades of the second century, but it more or less evaporated when the Emperor Hadrian (132–134 c.e.) had a Roman shrine constructed over the Temple’s ruins.

Given the popularity of the epistle among Christians in the city of Alexandria, many scholars think it was written there. Alexandria had a large Jewish population, and the city eventually came to house one of the largest Christian churches in the empire. Relations between Jews and Christians there were occasionally tense and sometimes even volatile.

For understanding the letter it is important to realize that Alexandrian Jews had long practiced allegorical methods to interpret the Scriptures. One of the most famous of them was the first-century philosopher Philo, whose methods of interpretation are comparable to those used by the second-century Gnostics, many of whom also came from Alexandria. The author of Barnabas, whoever he was, also utilizes an allegorical mode of interpretation, taking the text to mean something other than what a literal reading would suggest; but he uses his allegorical readings not to support Judaism, as Philo did, but to attack it.

Barnabas (as I’ll continue to call him) understood the Old Testament to be a Christian book that had always been misinterpreted by the Jews, who, in his opinion, foolishly maintained that their religion had been given them by God. He claims that they were misled in this by an evil angel, who persuaded them to take the laws of the Old Testament literally rather than as figurative pointers to Christ and the religion that he was to establish (9:5).

Barnabas himself considers only parts of the Old Testament to be literally true, especially the parts that recount the repeated acts of disobedience by the children of Israel. For him, for example, it is literally true that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai after receiving the Ten Commandments, he smashed the two tablets of the Law into bits, having seen the idolatry and immorality of the Israelites in the camp below. This act showed that God’s covenant had been broken, quite literally, by the Jews, a disobedient and immoral people; and once broken, the covenant could never be renewed (4:6–8).

In the author’s view, Jews failed to understand the figurative meaning of the Law that was given to Moses. Barnabas devotes most of his energies to driving home this basic point, time and again giving the “true” interpretation of the Jews’ Law in opposition to their own literalistic understandings of it.

For example, when God spoke of honoring the Sabbath day and keeping it holy, he did not mean that Jews should refrain from work on the seventh day. As unholy people, Barnabas claims, Jews could not possibly keep the day itself holy. God was instead referring to his own act of creation in which he spent six days making the world before resting on the seventh. Moreover, as the Scriptures themselves testify, “with the Lord a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet 3:8; Ps 90:4). The six days of creation, then, refer to a period of six thousand years in which God is actively involved with the world, to be followed by a seventh day of rest in which he will finally put an end to sin and bring peace on earth once and for all.

The injunction to keep the Sabbath day holy is therefore not to be interpreted as a commandment to refrain from work; it is an instruction concerning the future apocalypse in which God’s millennial Kingdom will come to earth. Only then will there be a completely holy people who can keep “the day” holy (15:1–8).

I will continue from here in the next post.