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 traveled 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.

The dating turns on the text itself. In its sixteenth chapter the author looks at the ruined sanctuary and marvels that men still expect its servants — the very power that pulled it down — to raise it again, a remark read by most as written within sight of the temple’s fall in the year 70 and before any rebuilt sanctuary stood, whether the rebuilt one hoped for by Jews under Nerva or the shrine to Jupiter that the emperor Hadrian was reported to plan on the site before the revolt of 132. An earlier passage strains over a vision of four kingdoms and a string of ruling powers, the kind of count later readers have tried to match to a Roman succession; the matches never quite close, and the window stays open across two generations. What is not in doubt is the world the treatise speaks into: the decades after the first revolt, when the institutions of the older covenant lay in rubble and the question of who now held the scriptures was raw and contested.

The shape of the letter

For all the title, the work reads less like a letter than like a teacher’s address. It opens with a warm greeting to sons and daughters, names the writer’s joy at the spirits of those he addresses, and promises to share not a fragment but the whole of what he has come to understand — a perfect knowledge of the faith, set beside their own. From there it moves in two unequal movements. The long first part, running through some seventeen chapters, is exposition: a running demonstration that the older scriptures, rightly read, were always speaking of Christ, the sacrifices and feasts and laws taken one by one and turned to their hidden sense. A short second part, the Two Ways, is moral instruction, and the two are joined by a single conviction — that the believer who grasps the cipher of the past is the one fit to walk the way of light. Over the whole hangs an eschatological urgency. The author writes as a man who believes the last days are near, that a final stumbling-block is coming, and that the time left for getting the scriptures right is short; the demonstration is not antiquarian but a matter, in his telling, of standing where one ought to stand before the end.

A single covenant, read with knowledge

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. Where other early writers grant the older covenant its season and then declare it fulfilled, this one will not concede even the season: the tablets, on his telling, were broken before they were ever rightly held, and the people who went on keeping the commandments by their letter were keeping a thing they had already lost the key to. Read rightly — read, in his word, with gnosis, knowledge — every commandment points elsewhere. The knowledge meant here is not a secret cosmology but an art of reading: the conviction that the surface of the law is a veil and that the spiritual sense beneath it was the only sense ever intended, available to the one taught to look for it and closed to the one who stops at the letter.

The treatise works this claim out commandment by commandment, and the readings are concrete and strange. The dietary prohibitions become warnings about kinds of people: the swine forbidden as food a warning against men who forget God in plenty and remember him in want, the birds of prey a warning against the idle who live off others’ labor. The two goats of the Day of Atonement, one slain and one driven out, become a double figure of Christ — the one killed, the one cursed and sent away — and the ashes of the red heifer, sprinkled for cleansing, a figure of the same. Even the chewing of the cud and the divided hoof, the marks by which the older law sorted clean beasts from unclean, become marks of the right kind of company — to dwell on the words of the Lord and to walk toward the age to come. Circumcision is turned inside out: the cutting that marked the flesh was always meant for the ears and the heart, and the patriarch Abraham, the author insists, circumcised his household already looking forward in the spirit. The cut in the flesh, on this reading, was a sign misread as the thing signified, a knife taken for a doctrine — and an angel of error, he warns, had led the people to dwell on the letter. Here the treatise reaches for the period’s number-lore. Abraham’s servants, three hundred and eighteen of them, are read through the Greek figures in which the count was written — the eighteen as iota and eta, the first letters of the name of Jesus, the three hundred as tau, the shape of the cross — so that the patriarch’s household carries the name and the instrument of the one to come. The sabbath becomes the world’s coming rest, a seventh age after six thousand years, and beyond it an eighth day, the day the author keeps with gladness as the day Jesus rose. The temple itself becomes the believer’s heart, a dwelling God builds in those who receive the word, set against the handmade house that has fallen and will not, in the author’s reckoning, rightly rise again.

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 claim that the older people never held its own covenant, both at once. The treatise belongs to the long, painful record of how the two communities that read the same books pulled apart, and its voice in that record is unusually absolute. It is read today, by Christian and Jewish scholars alike, as evidence — a window onto a second-century quarrel over who owned the scriptures — rather than as a verdict; the supersessionist core is the document’s own claim, set down at a moment when the line between the traditions of the second temple and the new movement was still being cut, and not a teaching the later mind is asked to take up.

The Alexandrian habit of reading

The method is as telling as the conclusions. To read a law as a cipher for something it never literally says is the signature move of the Alexandrian mind, and it is the chief reason the treatise is so often assigned to that city. The same habit had been turned, a lifetime earlier and in the same place, on the Pentateuch by Philo, the Jewish exegete for whom the literal commandment and its hidden sense stood together, the body and the soul of the text; the difference is that Philo kept the body even while he prized the soul, and the author of Barnabas throws the body away. The Christian teachers who came after him in Alexandria made the allegorical reading a discipline. Clement of Alexandria quoted the treatise as scripture and named its author an apostle; Origen called it a catholic epistle, fit to be cited beside the letters that the wider church received. The figural reading of the older scriptures that those two raised to a system — the conviction that the text hides Christ in every law and every story, available to the reader who comes with knowledge — has one of its rawest early statements in this letter, which already treats the whole of the Law as a coded book and the Jewish reader as the one who lost the code. The same impulse runs through the contemporary expansions of the patriarchal narratives, the kind preserved in the Book of Jubilees, where the Old Testament is retold to carry a hidden order; Barnabas takes that inherited library and reads it, end to end, as a Christian text in disguise.

Survival and the edge of the canon

For most of Christian history the work was known only in fragments, in an old Latin version that breaks off before the Two Ways, and in secondhand report. The Greek had to be reassembled. A family of later manuscripts preserved the letter only in a mutilated form, its opening chapters severed and grafted onto the end of the genuine letter of Polycarp, so that the two ran together as one defective text and the first quarter of Barnabas was missing from the record. 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, and followed in turn by the Shepherd of Hermas. A second complete Greek text turned up in 1873, in the same Constantinople manuscript that gave back the Didache, so that the treatise long pieced together from quotations and read in a maimed Greek could at last be read whole, opening and all. It belongs to the loose collection modern editors call the Apostolic Fathers, the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, and its standing within them was always intermediate. In some early lists and manuscripts it hovered at the edge of the canon, read in churches and bound with scripture, before the process of canonization left it out — close enough to be quoted with respect, far enough to be set aside, much like the deuterocanonical books whose place the same centuries were still fixing. That it survived at all owes more to the manuscripts that treated it as scripture than to the verdict that finally did not.

Texts and scholarship

The Greek text is read today in the critical edition prepared by Pierre Prigent and Robert A. Kraft for the Sources Chrétiennes series, Épître de Barnabé (SC 172, Paris: Cerf, 1971), which builds on Kraft’s earlier Barnabas and the Didache (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1965) and on Prigent’s source study, Les Testimonia dans le christianisme primitif: L’Épître de Barnabé I–XVI et ses sources (Paris: Gabalda, 1961). The standard student texts pair Greek and English: Bart D. Ehrman’s The Apostolic Fathers in the Loeb Classical Library (LCL 25, Harvard University Press, 2003), and Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations (3rd ed., Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). The fullest modern study of the letter’s setting and aim is James Carleton Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background (WUNT 2/64, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), which lays out the dating arguments and the case for Alexandria; Reidar Hvalvik’s The Struggle for Scripture and Covenant (WUNT 2/82, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996) reads the whole as a move in the second-century contest between Christians and Jews over who held the scriptures. The numerology of the three hundred and eighteen has its own literature, including a close treatment in the journal New Testament Studies arguing over whether the author truly worked by gematria. A current map of editions and translations is kept in the University of Helsinki’s research guide to the Apostolic Fathers. The Victorian translation of J. B. Lightfoot remains in print and freely readable, the form in which most English readers still meet the letter (Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers).

The two ways and the question of the source

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 catalog of virtues and vices set before two angelic powers. The same material appears, in a closely related form, in the Didache, where it opens that manual as the Way of Life and the Way of Death, and the relationship between the two — which drew on which, or whether both drew on a shared Jewish source of moral instruction — is an old and unsettled question. The two angelic governors, light against darkness, have the flavor of the dualism found in the literature of the period, the kind that set two spirits over the human heart; the Christian moralists took the scheme and filled it with their own commandments. 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.

→ Related: The Shepherd Of Hermas · Pentateuch · Book Of Jubilees · The Didache · Apostolic Fathers · Clement Of Alexandria · Origen · Second Temple Judaism · Golden Calf · Circumcision · Canonization