The Epistle of Barnabas — The Near-Miss That Bore an Apostle's Name

Part of the series: The New Testament Canon—How 27 Books Survived the Ancient Gauntlet

What is the Epistle of Barnabas?

Here is a book that had almost everything the canon asked for. It carried an apostle’s name. It was quoted as Scripture by the most learned Christian teacher of its age. It was cited as an authority by the greatest biblical scholar of the ancient Church. And it was copied out, in one of the oldest complete Bibles that survives, in the physical position a twenty-eighth book would occupy—immediately after the Revelation of John. By every outward sign, the Epistle of Barnabas was on its way in.⁠¹

And yet the New Testament closes at twenty-seven books, and Barnabas is not one of them. What makes its exclusion worth studying is not that the early Church overlooked it—it did not—but that the Church looked at it squarely, weighed it, and set it down. The name that recommended the letter turned out not to hold, because the letter is plainly too late to be the work of Paul’s companion, and on that ground the ancient Church let it fall. But there was a second reason to be glad of the outcome, one the Church would only articulate in the centuries that followed. Read whole, the letter runs to a place the Church would refuse to go: a sweeping allegory that empties the Law of any literal force, and a claim that the covenant God made with Israel was never really Israel’s at all.

That second point is what sets Barnabas apart from the other near-misses in this series. 1 Clement was excluded because Clement, for all his closeness to the apostles, was not one of them. The Shepherd of Hermas was excluded because everyone knew it was recent. Barnabas is the rarer case: a book with a genuine claim on the apostolic name, set aside on the plain ground of its date, whose exclusion a Catholic can also read, in hindsight, as a doctrinal deliverance. This is the story of how a letter got that close, why the name did not save it, and why—from a Catholic point of view—the Church was right twice over to leave it outside.

The name on the title

Almost nothing in the letter tells us who wrote it. It names no author and no recipients; it opens with a warm greeting to “sons and daughters” and proceeds, for twenty-one chapters, in the voice of an anonymous teacher pressing his readers toward a “perfect knowledge”—a gnosis—of what the Scriptures really mean. The name Barnabas is nowhere in the text. It comes entirely from the tradition of the men who copied and quoted the letter.⁠²

But what a name it was. Barnabas is no minor figure. Luke introduces him in the fourth chapter of Acts as “Joseph, a Levite, of the country of Cyprus,” to whom the apostles gave the surname Barnabas, “which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation.” He is the man who vouched for the newly converted Saul when the Jerusalem church was still afraid of him, who was sent to shepherd the young Gentile mission at Antioch, who traveled with Paul on the first missionary journey, and who—after a sharp falling-out with Paul over John Mark—sailed for Cyprus to carry on the work alone. He is, in short, a figure of the apostolic generation, ranked in the earliest sources with the apostles even though he was not one of the Twelve.⁠³

To attach that name to a letter was to give it a pedigree the other near-misses could only envy. And the men who attached it were serious. Clement of Alexandria, around the year 200, does not merely quote the letter; he calls its author “the apostolic Barnabas” and adds, in an aside, that “he was one of the seventy, and a fellow-worker of Paul”—placing him among the seventy disciples of Luke’s Gospel and beside the Apostle to the Gentiles in the same breath.⁠⁴ Here was a book that seemed to reach back, through a named companion of Paul, into the apostolic age itself.

The trouble is that the letter cannot have been written by that Barnabas. And the reason is a matter of arithmetic.

When it was written

The decisive evidence sits in the letter’s sixteenth chapter, where the author turns to the Jerusalem Temple. He argues that the Jews erred in trusting a building, and then makes a remark about its fate that is very hard to reconcile with an early date. The Temple, he says, was destroyed by Israel’s enemies in war—and now, he goes on, the very servants of those enemies are to build it up again.⁠⁵ A Temple pulled down in war and being raised again by the servants of the enemy points naturally to the aftermath of the Second Jewish Revolt, when the emperor Hadrian, around the year 130, began to raise a temple of Jupiter on the ruined Temple Mount. On that reading, the letter was written around AD 130—roughly two generations after the biblical Barnabas would have died.

The dating is not airtight, and honest scholarship keeps a range open. An older tradition, whose ablest champion was the great Anglican patristic scholar J. B. Lightfoot, fastened on the letter’s fourth chapter, where the author reads the prophecy of Daniel about ten kingdoms and a “little horn” as a coded reference to a succession of Roman emperors; counting the reigns, Lightfoot placed the letter under Vespasian, around AD 70 to 79. Others, counting differently, arrive at the reign of Nerva in the late 90s.⁠⁶ But the modern consensus has settled on the Hadrianic date, in the neighborhood of 130 to 132, on the strength of the Temple passage. The whole plausible range—from the 70s to the 130s—matters less than what every point on it has in common. Even the earliest date proposed puts the letter a full generation past the lifetime of Paul’s companion. Whoever wrote it, it was not the Barnabas of Acts.

Who, then? The letter’s own character supplies the likeliest answer. Its method—an intricate, unrelenting allegory that finds hidden Christian meanings in the smallest details of the Law—is the method that would flourish a century later in the Alexandrian school of Clement and Origen, and it is precisely in Alexandria that the letter is first quoted and prized. The overwhelming scholarly judgment is that the author was an otherwise unknown Christian teacher, most likely of Alexandria, writing under the shadow of the Second Revolt, whose work was later attached to the honored name of Barnabas.⁠⁷

The book that was almost Scripture

Set the authorship question aside for a moment, and look at how the letter was actually treated. For a book that would end up outside the canon, the Epistle of Barnabas kept remarkably distinguished company.

Quoted as the work of “the apostle Barnabas”

The learned took it as seriously as a name like Barnabas invited them to. Clement of Alexandria—a man who knew the difference between an apostle and a later imitator—quotes the letter repeatedly in his Stromateis, and quotes it as authoritative teaching. He introduces one passage with the flat phrase “the Apostle Barnabas says,” and elsewhere expands on the point: Barnabas, he writes, “who in person preached the word along with the apostle in the ministry of the Gentiles.”⁠⁸ For Clement, this was not a piece of edifying second-century prose. It was the word of a man who had stood beside Paul, and it could be cited to settle a question the way one would cite an apostle.

Cited as a “catholic epistle”

Origen, the most formidable biblical scholar the ancient Church produced, went a step further in the technical language he used. Answering the pagan critic Celsus, who had sneered that Jesus chose disreputable men for his apostles, Origen traces the charge to its source and calls that source, without apology, “the general Epistle of Barnabas”—in the Greek, the catholic epistle, the same word the Church applied to the letters of James, Peter, John, and Jude.⁠⁹ To reach for that word was to reach for the vocabulary of Scripture. Origen quoted Barnabas the way he quoted books he regarded as holy, and he was not alone among the Alexandrians in doing so.

Bound into a Bible

The most eloquent evidence is not a quotation but an object. Codex Sinaiticus, the fourth-century Greek Bible that is the oldest surviving copy of the complete New Testament, contains the whole of the Old and New Testaments—and then, after the Revelation of John, without any break in the manuscript’s own reckoning, it copies out the complete text of the Epistle of Barnabas, followed by the Shepherd of Hermas.⁠¹⁰ The letter is not tucked into an appendix. It stands where a twenty-eighth book would stand, in a Bible that a great church commissioned at enormous expense. Whoever assembled Sinaiticus judged that Barnabas belonged, physically and canonically, with the Scriptures.

The historian of the early Church knew this world well. Eusebius, cataloguing the writings of Clement of Alexandria, notes that Clement had commented on Barnabas in his lost Hypotyposes, giving “abridged accounts of all canonical Scripture, not omitting the disputed books,—I refer to Jude and the other Catholic epistles, and Barnabas and the so-called Apocalypse of Peter.”⁠¹¹ Barnabas moved, in other words, in exactly the company of books whose canonicity was still an open question at the turn of the third century—Jude, the catholic epistles, the Apocalypse of Peter. In Alexandria, at least, the borders of the New Testament were still soft enough that a letter under Barnabas’s name kept turning up on the inside.

The book that was left out

And then the borders hardened, and Barnabas was on the wrong side of them.

The same Eusebius who reports its use in Alexandria gives it, in his own careful sorting of the books, a decidedly cooler place. In the twenty-fifth chapter of his third book—the most influential single survey of the canon the ancient Church produced—Eusebius divides the Christian writings into the acknowledged, the disputed, and the rejected. Barnabas he assigns to the last group: “Among the rejected writings must be reckoned also the Acts of Paul, and the so-called Shepherd, and the Apocalypse of Peter, and in addition to these the extant epistle of Barnabas, and the so-called Teachings of the Apostles.”⁠¹² The Greek word behind “rejected” is notha—illegitimate, not genuine. Barnabas keeps company here with the other great near-misses of this series, the Shepherd and the Apocalypse of Peter, and with the Didache, the “Teachings of the Apostles.” These were not condemned as heretical; they were simply not Scripture.

Jerome, a century later, reaches the same verdict with the same courtesy. In his catalogue of illustrious churchmen he gives Barnabas a full and honorable entry as a man—“Barnabas the Cyprian, also called Joseph the Levite, ordained apostle to the Gentiles with Paul”—and then disposes of the letter in a single clause: he “wrote one Epistle, valuable for the edification of the church, which is reckoned among the apocryphal writings.”⁠¹³ The man is honored; the book is apocryphal. That distinction—esteemed author, non-canonical writing—is exactly the one the Church would keep.

By the time the canon was formally settled, Barnabas had disappeared from the reckoning altogether. It appears in no version of the definitive twenty-seven-book list. When Athanasius, in his decisive Festal Letter of 367, enumerated the canon and then named a handful of further books “appointed by the Fathers to be read” to new converts, he listed the Didache and the Shepherd—but not Barnabas, not even for edifying reading. The oldest Latin canon list, the Muratorian Fragment, does not mention it; neither do the North African councils of the 390s that ratified the list Western Christianity would keep.⁠¹⁴ A book that had once been bound into a Bible had fallen out of the conversation entirely.

The apostolic name that did not hold

Why did the pedigree fail? The answer returns us to the arithmetic. The deepest criterion governing the canon was apostolicity—a book had to carry the authority of the apostolic generation, from an apostle or from a companion writing within that first circle. In principle, a genuine letter of Paul’s fellow-worker Barnabas would have met that test handsomely. That is the credential 1 Clement lacked and Barnabas seemed to possess.

But apostolicity is not a matter of the name on the cover; it is a matter of whether the book actually comes from that world. And here the letter’s own date betrayed it. A writing that presupposes the aftermath of the Second Jewish Revolt—that watches Hadrian’s men rebuild on the Temple Mount—cannot have been written by a companion of Paul who had died two generations earlier. The Church did not need modern paleography to sense this. Eusebius and Jerome, who honored Barnabas the man, quietly declined to credit him with the letter, and their instinct was sound. The apostolic name, when tested against the letter’s contents, simply came loose. Barnabas is the near-miss whose problem was not that it lacked a great name but that the great name would not stay attached.

What the letter actually says

There was a second reason, and it is the one that makes Barnabas more than a curiosity of dating. When you read the letter whole, you meet a mind of real force and real strangeness—and a theology the Church would, in the end, refuse to follow. This is where the exclusion becomes a doctrinal judgment and not merely a historical one.

The key hidden in a number

Begin with the passage that has fascinated readers for eighteen centuries, because it shows the author’s method in miniature. In the ninth chapter, arguing that even Abraham secretly foresaw Christ, the author fastens on a detail from Genesis: Abraham circumcised the men of his household, and the number circumcised was three hundred and eighteen. That number, he says, is a revelation. Written in Greek, which used letters for numerals, three hundred and eighteen is tau-iota-eta. And so the author reads it:

Learn the eighteen first, and then the three hundred. The ten and the eight are thus denoted—Ten by Ι, and Eight by Η. You have [the initials of the name of] Jesus. And because the cross was to express the grace [of our redemption] by the letter Τ, he says also, Three Hundred. He signifies, therefore, Jesus by two letters, and the cross by one.⁠¹⁵

The iota and the eta, which spell eighteen, are the first two letters of Iēsous, Jesus; the tau, which stands for three hundred, is shaped like a cross. Abraham’s three hundred and eighteen servants are, secretly, Jesus and his cross. It is the earliest surviving example of Christian gematria turned to the exegesis of Scripture—the reading of hidden meaning from the numerical value of letters—and the author is so pleased with it that he adds, “No one has been admitted by me to a more excellent piece of knowledge than this.” Whatever one makes of the exegesis, it opens a window onto how a second-century Christian could read the Old Testament as a coded book whose every particular pointed forward to Christ.

The Law as allegory

That same method, turned on the Law of Moses, produces the letter’s most distinctive and most troubling argument. The author’s thesis is that the commandments were never meant to be kept literally. When God forbade the eating of pork, he did not mean pork; he meant, “Thou shalt not join thyself to men who resemble swine.” The prohibition of the hare, the hyena, and the weasel is a coded warning against particular vices. The Jews, the author says, took these commands “according to fleshly desire, as if he had merely spoken of literal meats,” and so missed their spiritual point entirely.⁠¹⁶

He applies the same solvent to circumcision, the Sabbath, and the Temple. Circumcision of the flesh, he argues, was a misunderstanding from the start—God had always meant the circumcision of the ears and the heart—and he makes the astonishing claim that the Jews were led into the literal rite by a deceiving spirit: “circumcision was not of the flesh, but they transgressed because an evil angel deluded them.”⁠¹⁷ The Sabbath points not to the seventh day but to a coming “eighth day,” the day of the new creation and the resurrection: “we keep the eighth day with joyfulness, the day also on which Jesus rose again from the dead.”⁠¹⁸ That last line is one of the earliest and most fully developed Christian meditations on Sunday as the eighth day, and it is among the letter’s genuine contributions. And the Temple, the author insists, was never meant to be a building at all; God dwells not in a house of stone but in the believer, so that “in our habitation God truly dwells in us.”⁠¹⁹

The cross written into the Old Testament

Much of this typological reading is entirely at home in the Church’s own tradition, and it is why the letter is still prized. When the author finds the cross prefigured in Moses stretching out his arms to defeat Amalek, or in the bronze serpent lifted on a pole, he is doing what the Fathers would do for centuries and what the New Testament itself does with the serpent in John’s Gospel.⁠²⁰ When he reads the scapegoat and the red heifer of the Levitical ritual as figures of Christ, he stands in a line that runs straight to the Letter to the Hebrews. Barnabas is, among other things, our earliest sustained example of Christian typology—the reading of the Old Testament as a system of shadows cast by Christ—and as a witness to how the sub-apostolic Church read its Bible, it is close to priceless.

The covenant that was “ours”

The problem is that the author does not stop at typology. He pushes past the Church’s reading of the Old Testament into a reading against it. For the mainstream of the Fathers, the Old Covenant was real and God-given, and fulfilled in Christ. For Barnabas, the Old Covenant was never validly Israel’s in the first place. The Jews forfeited it at the very moment Moses received it, when they turned to the golden calf, and it passed instead to the Christians. The argument is stated with a bluntness that still startles:

The covenant is both theirs and ours. But they thus finally lost it, after Moses had already received it. For the Scripture says … And Moses understood, and cast the two tables out of his hands; and their covenant was broken, in order that the covenant of the beloved Jesus might be sealed upon our heart.⁠²¹

This is not the “fulfillment” model of supersession that most of the Fathers taught, in which Israel’s covenant is genuine and reaches its intended goal in the Church. It is something harder—a model of displacement, even of expropriation. Israel is not a people whose valid covenant is transfigured; it is a people who never truly possessed the covenant, who were deceived by an evil angel into a fleshly misreading of their own Law, and who have been supplanted. It is, by common scholarly consent, the most severely anti-Jewish text among the Apostolic Fathers, and its argument turns not on a living quarrel with the synagogue so much as on a theological need to claim the whole inheritance of Israel for the Church.⁠²²

Scholars disagree about what social reality, if any, lay behind this hostility. Some read it as evidence of a real and bitter contest with a living Judaism in the author’s city; others, more influentially in recent decades, read the “Jews” of Barnabas as a largely rhetorical figure, a foil the author needs in order to define what his own community is. The debate is unsettled, and the letter is compatible with more than one reading.⁠²³ What is not in doubt is the shape of the theology: the covenant was never really theirs, and the Law they kept was a delusion. And that is a claim the Church, in the end, would not receive.

Why leaving it out was a doctrinal judgment

It is tempting to treat the exclusion of Barnabas as a purely historical accident—the letter was late, the name would not hold, and so it fell away. And on the plain historical record, that is largely what happened: Eusebius and Jerome set the letter aside on grounds of authorship and date, not doctrine, and the Alexandrians who most prized it, Clement and Origen, were themselves supersessionist and untroubled by its covenant theology. But the outcome looks different in hindsight than it did to the men who reached it. The Church that declined to canonize Barnabas went on, over the centuries, to affirm the very opposite of the letter’s governing thesis—so that what was decided as a judgment about a date reads, in retrospect, as a deliverance from a doctrine.

For Barnabas, Israel’s covenant was forfeited, false, never truly given. For the Catholic Church, the Old Covenant stands. The Catechism could not be more direct: the books of the Old Testament “retain a permanent value,” it teaches, “for the Old Covenant has never been revoked.”⁠²⁴ The Second Vatican Council, in Nostra Aetate, taught that “God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues”—and, in a sentence that reads almost as a direct answer to Barnabas, that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”⁠²⁵ Pope John Paul II, speaking at Mainz in 1980, called the Jewish people “the people of God of the Old Covenant, never revoked by God.”⁠²⁶ Where Barnabas said the covenant was lost, the Church says it was never revoked; where Barnabas said the Jews were deceived and displaced, the Church says they remain most dear.

There is a nearer parallel still. The Catechism, a few lines further on, warns against a specific ancient error: the Church, it says, “has always vigorously opposed the idea of rejecting the Old Testament under the pretext that the New has rendered it void,” naming the heresy of Marcion.⁠²⁷ Barnabas is not Marcion—it keeps the Old Testament, indeed clings to it as a book of hidden Christian meanings. But its expropriating reading is a cousin of the same error, and it is guarded against by the same instinct. To have canonized Barnabas would have been to fold into Scripture a book whose central argument the Church would later have to teach against. The discernment that left it out was protecting not only the boundary of the canon but the integrity of a doctrine.

This is worth stating carefully, because it can be misheard. The Church has never repudiated the typological reading of the Old Testament that Barnabas practiced with such energy; it reads the bronze serpent and the scapegoat as figures of Christ to this day. What it refused was the further step—the claim that Israel’s covenant was a fiction and its Law a snare. One can prize a book’s method and still judge its thesis wrong. That is very nearly the Church’s exact posture toward the Epistle of Barnabas.

The Two Ways, and what Barnabas keeps

None of this makes the letter worthless—far from it. Strip away the polemic and Barnabas preserves things a historian would not want to lose.

The last four chapters turn from argument to moral instruction, and set out what the author calls the two ways: “There are two ways of doctrine and authority, the one of light, and the other of darkness. But there is a great difference between these two ways.”⁠²⁸ The Way of Light is a catalogue of virtues and commands—love your Maker, guard your soul, do not murder the child in the womb or the newborn, share all things with your neighbor—and the Way of Darkness a catalogue of the vices that lead to death. This “Two Ways” teaching also appears, almost word for word in places, in the opening chapters of the Didache, and the relationship between the two has occupied scholars for generations. The likeliest explanation is that neither copied the other: both drew independently on an older Jewish and Jewish-Christian catechism of the two ways, a form with deep roots in Second-Temple Judaism.⁠²⁹ In Barnabas we are looking, in other words, at one of the oldest windows we have onto how the early Church taught converts to live.

There is more. The letter’s meditation on the “eighth day” is a foundational text for the Christian theology of Sunday. Its Christology is strikingly high for so early a work: the Son is present at the creation, the one to whom God says “Let us make man in our image.”⁠³⁰ And the whole letter is a rare, vivid photograph of a particular kind of second-century Christianity—most likely Alexandrian—working out, in real time and with real intensity, how the new faith stood to the Scriptures and the people it had grown out of. That the Church judged the answer wrong does not make the question, or the witness, any less valuable.

Why it is still worth reading

The Epistle of Barnabas is the near-miss that had the one thing the others lacked and still did not make it in. It bore an apostle’s name; it was quoted as Scripture in Alexandria; it was bound into one of the greatest Bibles of antiquity. And the Church, looking at it clearly, left it out—first because the name would not survive the letter’s own date, and then because its theology ran to a place the Church would not go.

That double judgment is exactly what makes the letter instructive. A book could carry a great name, circulate widely, and be read as holy, and still fall outside the canon—and Barnabas did, on the plain fact of its date. But the fall looks, in hindsight, like more than an accident of chronology. Its allegory dissolved the Law it claimed to honor; its supersession disinherited the people from whom the Savior came. The Church kept the typology and refused the expropriation, and in the end canonized neither the book nor its thesis.

Read it anyway. There is no better place to watch the sub-apostolic Church read its Bible with more daring, or more danger. In its finest pages—the cross hidden in a number, the eighth day of the new creation, the two ways set before every soul—you can hear the mind of the early Church at full stretch. And in its worst, you can see precisely the road the Church declined to take, and understand a little better why the road it took instead runs where it does. The Epistle of Barnabas is not the Word of God. It is something almost as useful to know: a book the Church was right to leave behind, and right never to forget.⁠³¹

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was the Epistle of Barnabas not included in the Bible?

For two reasons that reinforced each other. First, the letter fails the test of apostolicity: although it bears the name of Barnabas, Paul’s companion, its own contents—especially a reference to the Temple being rebuilt, most naturally read as Hadrian’s works around AD 130—place it two generations after that Barnabas would have lived, so the attribution could not hold. Second, its theology ran to an extreme the Church would not follow: an allegorism that emptied the Mosaic Law of any literal force, and a supersessionism that claimed Israel never truly possessed the covenant at all. Eusebius classed it among the “rejected” books and Jerome among the apocrypha; it appears in no version of the settled canon.

Who wrote the Epistle of Barnabas, and when?

The letter is anonymous; it names no author. Ancient tradition—especially in Alexandria, where Clement quoted it as “the apostle Barnabas”—attributed it to the biblical Barnabas, the Levite of Cyprus who worked with Paul. Modern scholarship rejects that attribution on grounds of date and content and takes the author to be an otherwise unknown Christian teacher, most likely of Alexandria. The date is debated: an older view (Lightfoot) argued for the reign of Vespasian around AD 70–79, but the modern majority places it under Hadrian, around AD 130–132, on the strength of the sixteenth chapter’s reference to the Temple being rebuilt.

What is the Epistle of Barnabas about?

It is a sustained argument that the Old Testament, rightly read, is a Christian book from beginning to end, and that the Jews misunderstood their own Scriptures by taking the Law literally. Through an intense allegorical method, the author reads the food laws, circumcision, the Sabbath, and the Temple as coded spiritual lessons; finds the cross and the name of Jesus hidden in the number of Abraham’s servants (chapter 9); and reads the Old Testament rituals as types of Christ. It closes with a moral catechism, the “Two Ways” of light and darkness, closely parallel to the Didache.

What does the Epistle of Barnabas say about the Jews and the Old Covenant?

It takes the hardest line of any of the Apostolic Fathers. Rather than teaching that Israel’s covenant is genuine and fulfilled in Christ, Barnabas argues that the Jews forfeited the covenant at Sinai, when they worshiped the golden calf, so that it was never really theirs—“the covenant is both theirs and ours. But they thus finally lost it”—and that they were deceived by “an evil angel” into keeping the Law in a fleshly, literal way. This is a model of displacement rather than fulfillment, and it is one important reason the Church did not receive the letter. Catholic teaching holds the opposite: that “the Old Covenant has never been revoked” and that the Jewish people remain most dear to God.

Was the Epistle of Barnabas ever considered Scripture?

In some times and places, effectively yes. It was quoted as authoritative by Clement of Alexandria and Origen, cited by Origen with the technical term used for the “catholic” epistles, and physically bound into the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus immediately after the Book of Revelation. In Alexandria around the year 200 its canonical status was still an open question. But when the canon was formally settled in the fourth century, Barnabas was left out—absent even from the list of books Athanasius approved for edifying reading.

Is the Epistle of Barnabas the same as the Gospel of Barnabas?

No, and the two should not be confused. The Epistle of Barnabas is an early Christian letter, most likely written around AD 130. The so-called Gospel of Barnabas is an entirely separate and much later work—a medieval composition, surviving in Italian and Spanish manuscripts of the sixteenth century, that recasts the life of Jesus along broadly Islamic lines. There is also a fifth-century Acts of Barnabas, a Cypriot account of the apostle’s martyrdom. Only the Epistle belongs to the world of the early Church and the canon debates.

Does the Catholic Church accept the Epistle of Barnabas today?

The Church honors it as an early and valuable Christian witness without treating it as Scripture or endorsing its theology. It is prized as our earliest sustained example of Christian typological exegesis, as a foundational witness to the theology of Sunday, and as a source for the “Two Ways” catechesis. But its central thesis—that the Old Covenant was forfeited and Israel displaced—runs directly counter to Catholic teaching, which holds that the Old Covenant has never been revoked. From a Catholic perspective, Barnabas is a book worth reading and worth arguing with, but rightly left outside the canon.

Footnotes

1. 1. The standard critical texts and translations of the Epistle of Barnabas are J.B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers (London: Macmillan, 1891); Kirsopp Lake, The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912); Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library 25 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). Quotations here follow the public-domain Roberts-Donaldson translation (ANF 1) unless otherwise noted. On the letter's reception and exclusion generally, see Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); and, for the fullest recent study, James Carleton Paget, The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background, WUNT 2/64 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994).

2. 2. Epistle of Barnabas 1 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1). The letter is anonymous throughout and repeatedly promises its readers a “perfect knowledge” (gnosis); see, e.g., Barn. 1.5. The attribution to Barnabas rests entirely on external tradition, above all the Alexandrian witnesses discussed below (nn. 8–11).

3. 3. Acts 4:36–37; 9:26–27; 11:22–26; 13–15, including the separation from Paul over John Mark at Acts 15:36–39. On Barnabas the man see Jerome, De viris illustribus 6 (n. 13 below), who honors him as a Levite and companion of Paul.

4. 4. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 2.20 (trans. ANF 2): “the apostolic Barnabas (and he was one of the seventy, and a fellow-worker of Paul).” The reference is to the seventy (or seventy-two) disciples of Luke 10:1.

5. 5. Barn. 16.3–4, where the author says the Temple, thrown down in war, is now being built up again by the servants of Israel's enemies. This is the linchpin of the Hadrianic reading, taking the rebuilders to be the Romans then raising a temple on the Temple Mount around AD 130. See Paget, Epistle of Barnabas; and Reidar Hvalvik, The Struggle for Scripture and Covenant, WUNT 2/82 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996).

6. 6. Barn. 4.4–5, adapting Daniel 7:7–8, 24. For the Vespasianic date see J.B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, who concluded that the letter belongs “during the reign of Vespasian (A.D. 70–79)”; for a Nervan date (c. 96–98), see the discussion in Paget, Epistle of Barnabas. Lightfoot championed the earliest date and should not be cited for the c. 130 consensus.

7. 7. On Alexandrian provenance and anonymous authorship, see Paget, Epistle of Barnabas; the early Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Epistle of Barnabas” (“The extremely allegorical character of the exegesis leads to the supposition that the author of the letter was an Alexandrian”); and Metzger, Canon. A minority of scholars proposes Syria–Palestine or Asia Minor; the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean is as far as the evidence certainly reaches.

8. 8. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 2.6 (“the Apostle Barnabas says”) and 5.10 (“Barnabas, too, who in person preached the word along with the apostle in the ministry of the Gentiles”), trans. ANF 2. Clement quotes or alludes to the letter repeatedly across the Stromateis (e.g., 2.7, 2.15, 2.18).

9. 9. Origen, Contra Celsum 1.63 (trans. ANF 4): “Now in the general Epistle of Barnabas, from which perhaps Celsus took the statement that the apostles were notoriously wicked men, it is recorded that Jesus selected His own apostles, as persons who were more guilty of sin than all other evildoers.” The Greek word rendered “general” is katholikē, the term used of the catholic epistles; the quotation draws on Barn. 5.9.

10. 10. Codex Sinaiticus (London, British Library, Add MS 43725; mid-4th c.) contains the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas after the New Testament, in that order, following Revelation. The Barnabas text is complete; the Shepherd breaks off in the Mandates. Sinaiticus preserves the complete Greek text of Barnabas, including the opening chapters (1.1–5.7a) previously known only in a Latin version. On the codex and its discovery by Constantin von Tischendorf at St. Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai (43 leaves in 1844; the bulk, with the New Testament, in 1859), see Metzger, Canon.

11. 11. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.14.1 (trans. A.C. McGiffert, NPNF2 1); cf. 6.13.6, where Eusebius notes that Clement drew “testimonies from the disputed Scriptures . . . and those of Barnabas, and Clement and Jude.”

12. 12. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25.4 (trans. McGiffert, NPNF2 1). The Greek term is notha. Eusebius is not perfectly consistent—he elsewhere brushes Barnabas toward the “disputed” books—but the formal list of 3.25 places it among the rejected. The “Teachings of the Apostles” is the Didache.

13. 13. Jerome, De viris illustribus 6 (trans. E.C. Richardson, NPNF2 3). The Latin inter apocryphas scripturas legitur is literally “is read among the apocryphal writings.” Jerome elsewhere reports the tradition, following Tertullian, that the Letter to the Hebrews was the work of Barnabas (De viris illustribus 5)—a separate question, concerning Hebrews, not this epistle.

14. 14. Athanasius, 39th Festal Letter (367), which lists the Didache (“Teaching of the Apostles”) and the Shepherd among books appointed for the reading of catechumens but does not mention Barnabas. The Epistle of Barnabas is likewise absent from the Muratorian Fragment and from the canons of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397). See the series pillar, [The New Testament Canon](/new-testament-canon/), and Metzger, Canon.

15. 15. Barn. 9.7–8 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1); the number is drawn from Genesis 14:14 and 17:23–27. In Greek numerals 318 is written TIH (T = 300, I = 10, H = 8). This is the earliest surviving Christian example of gematria applied to the exegesis of Scripture; an earlier instance of the technique is the cipher of the number 666 in Revelation 13:18. The author's boast (“No one has been admitted by me to a more excellent piece of knowledge than this”) follows immediately.

16. 16. Barn. 10 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1). Clement of Alexandria reproduces several of these dietary allegories in the Stromateis.

17. 17. Barn. 9.4 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1): “circumcision was not of the flesh, but they transgressed because an evil angel deluded them.”

18. 18. Barn. 15.8–9 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1). Barnabas is one of the earliest and most fully developed witnesses to the Christian theology of the “eighth day,” though not unambiguously the earliest witness to Sunday observance; compare Ignatius, Magnesians 9, and Didache 14.

19. 19. Barn. 16.1–2, 7–8 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1); the wretched, the author says, “trusted not in God Himself, but in the temple, as being the house of God” (16.1–2).

20. 20. Barn. 12 (Moses' outstretched arms against Amalek, and the bronze serpent); cf. Exodus 17:8–13; Numbers 21:8–9; John 3:14. The scapegoat and red heifer are read as types of Christ at Barn. 7–8; cf. Hebrews 9–10.

21. 21. Barn. 4.6–8 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1). The point is repeated at Barn. 14, where the author concedes that God did give the covenant but says the people “were not worthy to receive it, on account of their sins,” so that Moses “received it, but they proved themselves unworthy.”

22. 22. That Barnabas is the most anti-Jewish of the Apostolic Fathers is a commonplace of the scholarship; see Paget, Epistle of Barnabas; and Reidar Hvalvik, The Struggle for Scripture and Covenant. On the “displacement” or expropriation model of its covenant theology, see the primary evidence at Barn. 4.6–8; 9.4; 13–14.

23. 23. For the reading of Barnabas's “Jews” as a largely rhetorical or theological construct in the service of Christian self-definition, see Miriam S. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity: A Critique of the Scholarly Consensus (Leiden: Brill, 1995), and Judith Lieu, Image and Reality: The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996). For the view that a real contest with living Judaism stands behind such texts, see William Horbury, Jews and Christians in Contact and Controversy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998); Ferdinand R. Prostmeier reads the polemic as chiefly inner-Christian. The debate is genuinely unsettled.

24. 24. Catechism of the Catholic Church 121: “The Old Testament is an indispensable part of Sacred Scripture. Its books are divinely inspired and retain a permanent value, for the Old Covenant has never been revoked.”

25. 25. Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate 4 (28 October 1965), which cites Romans 11:28–29.

26. 26. Pope John Paul II, Address to representatives of the Jewish community, Mainz, 17 November 1980. The phrase was later echoed in the Catechism (n. 24) and in the 2015 document of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, “The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable” (Rom 11:29).

27. 27. Catechism of the Catholic Church 123: “Christians venerate the Old Testament as true Word of God. The Church has always vigorously opposed the idea of rejecting the Old Testament under the pretext that the New has rendered it void (Marcionism).”

28. 28. Barn. 18.1 (trans. Roberts-Donaldson, ANF 1). The Two Ways material runs through chapters 18–20; chapter 21 is a closing exhortation. The prohibition of abortion and infanticide is at Barn. 19.5.

29. 29. Compare Barn. 18–20 with Didache 1–6. The dominant scholarly view is that both drew independently on a common, earlier “Two Ways” source of Jewish origin, rather than one copying the other; the tradition is often compared with the “two spirits” teaching of the Qumran Community Rule (1QS III–IV). See Metzger, Canon; and, on the source relationship, Robert A. Kraft, Barnabas and the Didache, The Apostolic Fathers 3 (New York: Nelson, 1965).

30. 30. Barn. 5.5 and 6.12 (Genesis 1:26 read as the Father's address to the pre-existent Son); the eighth-day meditation is at Barn. 15.8–9 (n. 18).

31. 31. Accessible modern translations are available in Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., and Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, LCL 25; the older Lightfoot, Lake, and Roberts-Donaldson (ANF 1) versions are in the public domain. For the letter's place among the near-misses of the canon, see the companion essays on [1 Clement](/1-clement/) and [The Shepherd of Hermas](/shepherd-of-hermas/).