Much has been written in the past few days, particularly in Muslim newspapers, on the discovery of a bible in Turkey, a bible that was apparently written in Aramaic – the language Jesus spoke – approximately 1,500 years ago. The bible is written on leather pages in gold letters. The cover has inscriptions in Aramaic and a cross, drawn in a rather rudimentary way. What has attracted the most attention – from the media point of view – is a number of statements made by Jesus where he apparently predicts the coming of Muhammad. Nevertheless, up to now no media organisation has published the exact words attributed to Christ.

But alas, this extraordinary discovery is probably a hoax, the work of a forger who, according to some, could have been a European Jewish scholar from the Middle Ages. The most factual criticisms have come from the Syriacs. Indeed, anyone who speaks modern Assyrian (also known as neo-Aramaic) will find the inscription on the so-called ‘Gospel of Barnabas’ easy to read. However errors are just as easy to make out. Apparently, the main inscription, in a modern transliteration, reads: ‘b-shimmit maran paish kteewa aha ktawa al idateh d-rabbaneh d-dera illaya b-ninweh b'sheeta d-alpa w-khamshamma d-maran’. This apparently means: ‘In the name of the Lord, this book is written by monks of the high monastery in Nineveh in the 1500th year of our Lord.’ There is not enough space here to go through the grammatical and conceptual errors in detail, but experts in modern Assyrian assure us that they are obvious and quite significant. Apart from anything else, the inscription says ‘book’, but one never refers to a bible in Assyrian with the word ‘book’. The Bible is either referred to as New or Old Testament, or Holy Book. It is quite unlikely that monks could have made such obvious mistakes.

However these are not the only issues in a case that raises interesting points – both at the time of its creation and now – only when considered in the light of a rather hostile attitude towards Christians. Today, a fair number of newspapers and media organisations in Muslim Countries have picked up the news, saying that ‘an ancient, 1500-year-old bible predicted the coming of Muhammad.’ Apart from the obvious age confusion between the 1500 years attributed by the media and the date of 1500 AD written in the book’s main inscription, it is clear that predicting in 1500 AD something that occurred in 630 AD is no great prophecy. So we have to ask ourselves why the Islamic media is so ready to approve what seems to be a glaring mistake whatever way you look at it, a mistake which however appeals to followers of Islam, who have always claimed that Jesus, ‘Issa’, was the predecessor of ‘the Seal of the Prophets’.

According to reports in Al Bawaba, the Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism, Ertugrul Gunay, stated that ‘in line with Islamic belief, the Gospel of Barnabas treats Jesus as a human being and not as God. It rejects the idea of the Holy Trinity and the Crucifixion and reveals that Jesus predicted the coming of the Prophet Muhammad.’

However, even from an Islamic point of view, the ‘Gospel of Barnabas’ is far from flawless. For example, it says that there are nine heavens and that the tenth is Paradise, while the Qur’an only mentions seven. The Aramaic text states that Mary gave birth to Jesus without experiencing pain while the Qur’an explicitly refers to the pain of childbirth. Moreover, according to these reports, the apocryphal text says that Jesus apparently told Hebrew clerics that he was not the Messiah and that Muhammad would be the Messiah. This, in fact, would seem to reject the existence of a Messiah and makes it so that Jesus and Muhammad appear as the same person.

That is without even taking into account the historical details. The text mentions three armies the Palestine of the time, each of which was made up of 200,000 soldiers. However the entire population of Palestine 2,000 years ago probably didn’t come to more than 200,000 people, according to some scholars. In short, all of this leads us to believe that we are dealing with a wonderful fake. But when was it written? There is a clue and it is found in chapter 217. The last sentence states that 100 pounds of stone were placed on the body of Christ and this would lead us to believe that the gospel was penned recently: the first use of the pound as a unit of weight dates to the Ottoman Empire in its dealings with Italy and Spain. According to some scholars, ‘the gospel attributed to Saint Barnabas was written by a European Jew in the Middle Ages who was fairly familiar with the Qur’an and the Gospels. He mixed facts and elements from both but his intentions are still unknown.’ Unfortunately, despite the fact that doubts and questions concerning the gospel were well-known, many Islamic media organisations have reported the gospel’s statements on Jesus’ predictions regarding Muhammad as if they were fact, something which will certainly cause problems at a ground-roots level, in terms of relations between Christian and Muslim communities, especially if the latter do not have a high level of education.

They are all interesting from a historical perspective for both believers and historians.

Frances - yes that was my understanding too. There are several copies of the "Gospel of Barnabus" around apart from that one. It originated in either Italy or Spain and was printed in Istanbul, which at that time (around 1500) was the only place it could be printed.

Of course it's pseudo-epigraphical, but then all the scriptures are. The difference is that The Gospel of Barnabus was written about 1400 years after the event
http://aggreen.net/bible/noncanon.html

falah wrote on May 28^th, 2012 at 9:11am:


Repeated by yourself, with a heading referring to the possible global collapse of Christianity.  Do you seriously expect us to believe that you are not suggesting this crap as well?

Frances wrote on May 28^th, 2012 at 9:54am:


It just reflects falah's 'optimism' in the face of unrelenting reality.

Falah you could ignore, but the media across the middle east falling for it is kind of revealing.