Epistle of Barnabas

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The Epistle of Barnabas is an anonymous Greek Christian treatise of the early second century, cast in the form of a letter, which argues that the laws of Moses were never meant to be kept as written — that their sacrifices, dietary rules, and circumcision were figures of Christ and the Christian life, misread from the beginning by those who took them at face value. The name is an attribution, not a signature: nothing in the text claims authorship, and the link to Barnabas, the Levite who travelled with Paul, comes from later readers. Most scholars place its composition somewhere between roughly 70 and 135, after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and before or around the second Jewish revolt; the author and his city remain unknown, though Alexandria is the usual guess.

For most of Christian history the work was known only in fragments and secondhand report. That changed with the recovery of the Codex Sinaiticus, the great fourth-century Bible found at the monastery of Saint Catherine in the nineteenth century, where Barnabas stands directly after the Book of Revelation — copied, in that manuscript, as part of scripture itself. It belongs to the loose collection modern editors call the Apostolic Fathers, the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, and in some early lists it hovered at the edge of the canon before being left out.

Its argument is sustained and uncompromising. The author holds that there is one covenant, and that it was always the Christians’; that Israel forfeited it at Sinai when the people turned to the golden calf, so that the Law’s literal observance was a misunderstanding rather than a stage later surpassed. Read rightly — read, in his word, with gnosis, knowledge — every commandment points elsewhere. The dietary prohibitions become warnings about kinds of people; the sabbath becomes the world’s coming rest; the temple becomes the believer’s heart. This is among the sharpest expressions of the early Christian claim to inherit the Hebrew scriptures while denying their plain sense to the Jews who held them, and modern readers have found it correspondingly hard: a document prized for its antiquity and troubling for its supersessionism, both at once.

The treatise closes with a section unlike the rest: the teaching of the Two Ways, the Way of Light and the Way of Darkness, a catalogue of virtues and vices set before two angelic powers. The same material appears, in a closely related form, in the Didache, and the relationship between the two — which drew on which, or whether both drew on a shared Jewish source — is an old and unsettled question. What can be said is that Barnabas preserves, in its allegories and its Two Ways alike, a layer of Christian thought still working out what it would keep of the inheritance it claimed, and on what terms.

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