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The Gospel of Barnabas

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Matt Smith:

The gospels of the New Testament, being Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are well known but earlier in the history of the church there were many other gospels that were studied and circulated. I'd be your host Matt Smith and this would be a La Trobe University podcast. Our guest today is Dr Rod Blackhirst from the School of Religious and Spiritual Studies at La Trobe University. Dr Blackhirst has been studying one of these agnostic gospels, the Gospel of Barnabas.

Rod Blackhirst:

In early Christianity there was an explosion of literature. A lot of that literature concerns the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth of course and literature based on what is usually called a gospel. There was a proliferation of this. Eventually the church authorities, the councils of the church, decided that four of those, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, were to be accepted, and the others were to be rejected, so that there's now a large body of apocryphal literature, gospels, which tell different versions of the life of Christ, compared to the conventional ones, or the accepted ones, which of course are now regarded as gospel.

Matt Smith:

So what is about the four accepted gospels that meant they made the cut?

Rod Blackhirst:

That's highly debatable, as to why those ones were accepted and not. Different churches favoured different gospels. For instance, the Syrian Church and some of the churches in that region favoured the gospel of Thomas which was ultimately rejected. It's hard to say why those four were accepted; three of them are called the synoptic gospels, three of them are very similar – Matthew, Mark and Luke – three different versions of the same story, essentially. The gospel of John is very different. It seems to have been accepted because some of the Greek-speaking churches really favoured it. It was to do with the negotiations in the early settlement of Christianity. Different churches favoured different gospels. The question arises, I guess, as to why didn't they just accept one. The answer again is because there was a multiplicity of churches and points of view. They eventually settled – well, we'll have to accept these four.

Matt Smith:

Tell me about the Gospel of Barnabas then, and we'll start with, who was Barnabas and did he actually write this gospel?

Rod Blackhirst:

Barnabas is a character who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament in the accepted scriptures of the Christian religion. He is supposed to have been a wealthy Jewish man from Cyprus. He didn't meet Christ himself but he joined the apostles shortly afterwards and donated his lambs and money to the church. Then we are told he went travelling with St Paul. Eventually they had a sort of a falling out over various issues. He went his own way and he became the patron saint of Cyprus. Did he write a gospel? That's a highly debatable question. There is in the early literature, in the early records of the church, in two places at least, there is a reference to a gospel according to Barnabas but that document doesn't appear to have survived. Late in the Middle Ages there does appear a gospel called Gospel according to Barnabas. Some people want to say that that's the early document. That seems highly unlikely. The document that we have is clearly a medieval document but whether it owes a debt to an earlier document called the Gospel of Barnabas or not is a matter of debate.

Matt Smith:

So there's two existing manuscripts at the moment isn't there? There's an Italian translation and a Spanish one, is that right?

Rod Blackhirst:

A Spanish one, that's right.

Matt Smith:

Can you tell me a bit about the actual manuscripts? What are the history of those and where did they come from?

Rod Blackhirst:

That's a really interesting history. We're not exactly sure when they first appeared although they're first referred to by the Irish deist John Toland, in the 1600s, early 1700s rather. He says that there are two versions of this – Italian and Spanish. Some of the European students of Islam, like George Sale, also refer to the Spanish version but then those documents went missing. We're not sure what happened to them and where they went but eventually the Italian version turned up in the collection of Prince Eugene of Savoy, who was a book collector, and now resides in the National Library in Austria. The Spanish version however, went completely missing and in the early twentieth century a guy named William Axen, he went looking for the Spanish version and he searched the libraries of Europe. He had a complete description put together by George Sale, who had seen it, and it had seemed to have been in his possession, but it had gone missing, and William Axen searched everywhere for it and couldn't find it and eventually gave up. Strangely enough, it reappeared in the 1970s in Sydney, Australia, or a copy of it did anyway. There were some library staff at the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, they were searching through some boxes of books which had belonged to Sir Charles Nicholson, who was one of the founders of the University of Sydney from the 1840s, round about there. He was one of the early founders of the colony of New South Wales. They found in a box of books a copy of the Spanish version of the Gospel of Barnabas. How it got to Australia is also a mystery. Probably Sir Charles Nicholson had purchased it, just bought boxes of books from Europe and carted them to Australia in ships and that box of books was never opened until the 1970s and there it was.

Matt Smith:

So we've got two different versions, two different translations of the Gospel of Barnabas to learn from I suppose. So, what is it about the text itself that tells us about the life of Jesus Christ, because I understand there's some sort of contention and controversy about its contents.

Rod Blackhirst:

It's a very unorthodox version of the life of Christ – it's very long for a start. The Italian version goes for 222 chapters, at least twice as long as any of the conventional gospels. And it seems to be inflated with a lot of medieval sermonising, but leaving that aside, it presents a very unorthodox view of the life of Christ and it specifically seems to cater to Islamic expectations of the version of the life of Christ known to Muslims. For Muslims, Jesus not being the son of God is rather the prophet Isa as he's called, Muslims have their own version of the life of Christ which is very different of course than the Christian version, and the Gospel of Barnabas to some extent caters to that. So that, for instance, Muslims don't believe that Christ died on the cross. They reject the story of the crucifixion. In the Gospel of Barnabas, that's what you have – Christ doesn't die on the cross but instead Judas Iscariot dies on the cross.

Matt Smith:

So it's got a different way of looking at Jesus so it treats him like a prophet. So he's not the son of God.

Rod Blackhirst:

No. In fact in the Gospel of Barnabas, he specifically rejects the idea that he's the son of God and he presents himself as a prophet according to Muslim expectations. And this is really quite explicit because he prophesises that the coming of one after him, and in the Gospel of Barnabas, he is named as Mohammed.

Matt Smith:

Well, to start with, I can see why it hasn't been accepted to be put in the bible then. From that stand point. If that's the case, is there a chance that it's been written by a Muslim, that the Gospel of Barnabas has been written by somebody who's directly trying to appeal to that audience?

Rod Blackhirst:

Well, that seems to be the case, although when you look at it carefully, the author of the document, in the present version at least, doesn't seem to know a great deal about Islam and in fact gets many things wrong. For instance, there's no evidence in the document that the author is familiar with any aspects of the Koran – there's no quotes from the Koran or allusions to the Koran, and also Christ in the Gospel of Barnabas prophesises as I say the coming of Mohammed and Mohammed is exclusively referred to as the Messiah in the Gospel of Barnabas. Well, that's not orthodox Islam either because Muslims don't believe that Mohammed is the Messiah. Whoever wrote it seems to have very, very strange or unusual views of the Islamic religion. So I don't think it's written by a Muslim, certainly not a mainstream Muslim, more likely, it's written by someone who's got a second hand version of Islam and has added that perception of Islam to the document.

Matt Smith:

Can you tell much from the documents themselves from the original one? Have you viewed them and studied them?

Rod Blackhirst:

Yes, I have viewed them and studied them. They're very strange. The Italian one for instance, that's the complete one, because the Spanish one is missing a large number of chapters, but the Italian one is a very strange document. For instance, Italian doesn't seem to have been the first language of the author. It has very, very strange spelling, very peculiar. It has Arabic margin notes written in very bad Arabic. So again, whoever wrote the margin notes – Arabic doesn't seem to have been their first language. In fact, one scholar offered the opinion that there's no other medieval document that presents quite such a confusing array of linguistic evidence as the Italian Gospel of Barnabas. It's a very, very strange document indeed.

Matt Smith:

So what sort of research have you been doing with the gospels?

Rod Blackhirst:

I've been examining every aspect of the Gospel of Barnabas that I can, in all sorts of directions, but mainly I've been interested in trying to track down the people who are mentioned in the preface to the Spanish version. When we found the Spanish version we recovered a preface that purports to tell us where the Gospel of Barnabas came from. But it too seems to be a very tall tale. It's supposed to be a preface written by a person named Fra Marino or Brother Marino, and it names names. It names certain Italian families who it says were involved in a cover up to propagate this highly unorthodox, indeed heretical Islamic gospel, which in the preface, says the Roman Catholic Church had hidden the Gospel of Barnabas in the library of the Pope and it was stolen from the library by this Fra Marino. That's the story told in the preface, so I've been trying to track down, who is this Fra Marino? And who wrote the preface? What's the purpose of it? And so on.

Matt Smith:

It sounds like the opening for Indiana Jones, really.

Rod Blackhirst:

It does, or a Dan Brown novel. It really is like that. It's a real life mystery of stolen texts and clandestine groups meeting in secret and heretical documents and so on. Yes.

Matt Smith:

What about the other unofficial gospels as well? What's the benefit that you can get from reading these other versions of what's taken as official?

Rod Blackhirst:

In some cases one can suspect that for instance, the Gospel of Thomas, let's talk about that. It has a wide following. One suspects that it contains early material, possibly even direct sayings of Jesus of Nazareth, according to some people anyway. It contains sort of a lost heritage of early Christian teachings that was officially sidelined by the canonisation of the four main gospels. It gives you a much broader perspective of the diversity of early Christianity. Early Christianity was very, very diverse. After its councils and so forth, it settled down into an orthodoxy that some people would regard as quite narrow. If you're interested in the diversity of early Christianity, that's what you can get from the other gospels. Also, we discovered in the 1940s the collection of Gnostic Gospels at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and that contains a wide array of literature that we thought had been lost, we knew only by title. And again it is testimony to a great deal of diversity in early Christianity, before the whole thing was sewn up in what became orthodoxy.

Matt Smith:

That's all the time we've got for the La Trobe University podcast today. If you have any questions, comments or feedback about this podcast, or any other, you can send us an email at podcast@latrobe.edu.au. Dr Rod Blackhirst, thank you for your time today.

Rod Blackhirst:

OK, thanks.