The Gospel of Barnabas ‘hoax’

Until now not one media organisation has reproduced the exact words attributed to Christ
Marco Tosatti
3/4/2012

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. the rest