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Date Posted: 23:07:36 04/13/06 Thu
Author: Witch of Endor
Subject: The Druze Conspiracy
In reply to: Barnabas 's message, "The Oracle at Delphi" on 23:04:21 04/13/06 Thu

In the Hebrew Bible, the Witch of Endor of the First book of Samuel, chapter 28:4–25, was a witch, a woman "who possesses a talisman", through which she called up the ghost of the recently deceased prophet Samuel, at the demand of King Saul of Israel. After Samuel's death and burial with due mourning ceremonies in Ramah, Saul had driven all necromancers and magicians from Israel. Then, in a bitter irony, Saul sought out the witch, anonymously and in disguise, only after he received no answer from God from dreams, prophets or the Urim and Thummim as to his best course of action against the assembled forces of the Philistines. The prophet's ghost offered no advice but predicted Saul's downfall as king.

Saul sinned further in consulting this woman; the practice of necromancy was forbidden by the Torah.

In Judaism, some rabbis taught that the spirits of the dead hovered around the body for a year after a person died; this made the spirit of the dead person amenable to being truly summoned during this time, and indicated that the spirit so summoned truly was Samuel, and that Samuel was indeed supernaturally summoned by the witch.

The Church Fathers and some modern Christian writers have debated the theological issues raised by this text, however. If you take the Bible literally, it would appear to affirm that it is or was possible for humans to summon the spirits of the blessed dead by magic. Medieval glosses naturally suggested that what the witch actually summoned was not the ghost of Samuel, but a demon taking his shape. Christian author Hank Hanegraaff argues that although it is impossible for humans to summon the dead, Samuel did appear before Saul and the witch by a sovereign act of God. Hanegraaff interprets the passage to mean that the witch was surprised by these events.

Regardless of the reality of the witch's power, the story can be seen as a satire on Saul. Once Saul was the righteous king who upheld God's law by his sword; having fallen from God's favour, he is reduced to participating in forbidden rituals. He is given no counsel from the ghost of Samuel, who instead appears to confirm his doom.

Some scholars of the New Testament suggest that the name "Judas" was intended as an attack on the Judaeans or on the Judaean religious establishment held responsible for executing Christ. The English word "Jew" is derived from the Latin Judaeus, which, like the Greek Ιουδαίος (Ioudaios), could also mean "Judaean". In the Gospel of John, the original writer or a later editor may have tried to draw a parallel between Judas, Judaea, and the Judaeans (or Jews) in verses 6:70-7:1, which run like this in the King James Bible:

6:70 Jesus answered them, Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil? 6:71 He spoke of Judas Iscariot the son of Simon: for he it was that should betray him, being one of the twelve. 7:1 After these things Jesus walked in Galilee: for he would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him.
In Greek, the earliest extant language of the Gospels, the words Judas -- Jewry -- Jews run like this: Ιούδας (Ioudas) -- Ιουδαία (Ioudaia) -- Ιουδαίοι (Ioudaioi). In Latin, the language of the Catholic Vulgate Bible, they run Judas -- Judaea -- Judaei. Whatever the original intentions of the original writers or editors of the Gospel of John, however, there is little doubt that the similarity between the name "Judas" and the words for "Jew" in various European languages has contributed powerfully to anti-Semitism. In German the same words run Judas -- Judäa -- Juden; in Spanish Judas -- Judea -- judíos; and in French Judas -- Judée -- juifs.

Over time Judas came to be seen as the archetypal Jew. He was said to have red hair, which was proverbially called "Judas-colored", and the ancient stereotype of Jews was that they had red hair too: in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice the Jewish money-lender Shylock is said to have been portrayed with red hair on the Elizabethan stage. Judas's betrayal of Christ for money was also seen as a typical piece of Jewish venality and avarice.

A few modern critics of European culture assert that in paintings and art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, while the other apostles are portrayed as powerfully built Northern Europeans, Judas was given stereotypically Jewish characteristics. Specific examples of such portrayals in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, however, are hard to come by.

A more modern example, however, can be found in John Fiester's monument clock, the Apostolic Clock. Judas is half the height of the other eleven apostles, hunched over, and possesses an exaggerated nose. The notes provided at the Hershey Museum, where it is on display, claims the artist made Judas shorter because he considered him to be less of a man than the other apostles, not because of anti-Semitism.

The Gospel of Barnabas is a work purporting to be a depiction of the life of Jesus by his disciple Barnabas. The two earliest known manuscripts have been dated to the late sixteenth century, and are written in Italian and in Spanish; although the Spanish version survives now only in an eighteenth century copy. It is about the same length as the four canonical gospels put together (the Italian manuscript has 222 chapters); with the bulk being devoted to an account of Jesus' ministry, much of it harmonised from accounts also found in the canonical gospels. In some, but not all, respects it conforms to the Islamic interpretation of Christian Origins; and consequently its authorship and textual history remain the subject of continued controversy.

The Gospel is considered by the majority of academics (including Christians and some Muslims) to be late, pseudepigraphical and a pious fraud; however, some academics suggest that it may contain some remnants of an earlier apocryphal work edited to conform to Islam, perhaps Gnostic (Cirillo, Ragg) or Ebionite (Pines) or Diatessaronic (Joosten), and some Muslim scholars consider it genuine. Some Islamic organizations cite it in support of the Islamic view of Jesus; Islamic views are treated below.

A "Gospel according to Barnabas" is mentioned in two early Christian lists of apocryphal works: the Decretum Gelasianum (whose attribution to Pope Gelasius I, 492-496 CE is apocryphal but which is no later than the 6th century), as well as the 7th-century List of the Sixty Books [1]. These lists are independent witnesses, but in neither case is it sure that the compiler had actually seen all the listed works. In both cases, GoB is paired by juxtaposition with a Gospel of Matthias (presumed to refer to a surviving Traditions of Matthias.) However, these lists provide no details about the contents of the work, and there is no reason to assume that the text of the 6th-7th century GoB was the same as this one. M. R. James, New Testament Apocrypha (1924) disputed whether the work mentioned in those lists ever existed.

This work should not be confused with the surviving Epistle of Barnabas, which may have been written in 2nd Century Alexandria. There is no link between the two books in style, content or history other than their supposed attribution to Barnabas. On the issue of circumcision, the two authors clearly hold very different views, that of the 'Epistle' in rejecting Jewish practices and that of the 'Gospel' in promoting Muslim ones. Neither should it be confused with the surviving Acts of Barnabas, which narrates an account of Barnabas' travels, martyrdom and burial; and which is generally thought to have been written in Cyprus sometime after 431.

In 478, during the reign of the Emperor Zeno, archbishop Anthemios of Cyprus announced that the hidden burial place of Barnabas had been revealed to him in a dream. The saint's body was claimed to have been discovered in a cave with a copy of the canonical Gospel of Matthew on its breast; according to the contemporary account of Theodorus Lector, who may well have been present when both bones and gospel book were presented by Anthemios to the emperor. Some students who maintain the antiquity of the Gospel of Barnabas propose that the text purportedly discovered in 478 should be identified with the Gospel of Barnabas instead, but no contemporary witness supports this opinion. According to a medieval tradition preserved in the monastery of Sumela south of Trabzon, the relics were presented to that monastery by Justinian; but were lost a century later when Persian forces occupied the Pontic Alps in their campaigns against Heraclius.

In 1986, it was briefly claimed that an early Syriac copy of this gospel had found near Hakkari (cf. Hamza Bektaş in İlim ve Sanat Dergisi of March-April 1986, and «Türkiye» from July 25, 1986, "Barnabas Bible Found", in Arabia 4/1985/ 1405/ No. 41/ Jan.-Febr./ Rabi Al-Thani, p. 46, "Original Bible of Barnabas Found in Turkey", in The Minaret 12, 3; 1.+ 16. April, 1985, n.p.)[2] However, shortly afterwards it was reported that this manuscript actually merely contained the canonical Bible (Ron Pankow, "The Barnabas Bible?", in: Arabia 1985/1405//March-April/ Rajib, n.p.)[3]

The earliest mention of a book which is generally agreed to refer to the one found in the two known manuscripts, is reported to be contained in Morisco manuscript BNM MS 9653 in Madrid, written about 1634 by Ibrahim al-Taybili in Tunisia. While describing how, in his opinion, the Bible predicts Muhammad, he speaks of the "Gospel of Saint Barnabas where one can find the light" ("y asi mesmo en Elanjelio de San Barnabé donde de hallara luz"). It was mentioned again in 1718 by the Irish deist John Toland, and was mentioned in 1734 by George Sale in The Preliminary Discourse to the Koran:

The Mohammedans have also a Gospel in Arabic, attributed to St. Barnabas, wherein the history of Jesus Christ is related in a manner very different from what we find in the true Gospels, and correspondent to those traditions which Mohammed has followed in his Koran. Of this Gospel the Moriscoes in Africa have a translation in Spanish; and there is in the library of Prince Eugene of Savoy, a manuscript of some antiquity, containing an Italian translation of the same Gospel, made, it is to be supposed, for the use of renegades. —The Preliminary Discourse to the Koran, p. 79.
This appears to allude to versions of both the known manuscripts: the Italian and the Spanish.

The manuscripts
Italian Ms. Prince Eugene's Italian manuscript had been presented to him in 1709 by John Frederick Cramer; it appears to date to the end of the sixteenth century. It was transferred to the Hofbibliothek in Vienna in 1738 with the rest of his library, and still survives there, in the Austrian National Library. The pages of the Italian manuscript are framed in an Islamic style, and contain chapter rubrics and margin notes in often ungrammatical and incorrect Arabic (with an occasional Turkish word, and many Turkish syntactical features), the margin notes forming a rough Arabic gloss of selected passages. Its binding is Turkish, and appears to be original; but the paper appears Italian, as does the handwriting (albeit with many idiosyncrasies of spelling). There are catchwords at the bottom of each page, a practice common in manuscripts intended to be set up for printing. The manuscript appears to be unfinished - in that the 222 chapters are provided throughout with framed blank spaces for titular headings, but only 27 of these spaces have been filled. In addition, there were originally 38 whole framed blank pages preceding the text - into which, it may be presumed, some other work was intended to be copied. It is the Italian version that the Raggs' 1907 translation, the most commonly circulated in English, is based on. It was followed in 1908 by an Arabic translation by Khalil Saadah, published in Egypt.

The complete Italian text is transcribed with an English translation and introduction:

Ragg, L and L - The Gospel of Barnabas. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, England, 1907).

A second Italian edition - in parallel columns with a modernised text:

Eugenio Giustolisi and Giuseppe Rizzardi, Il vangelo di Barnaba. Un vangelo per i musulmani? (Milano: Istituto Propaganda Libraria, 1991).

The complete text of the Italian manuscript has been published in photo-facsimile; with a French translation and extensive commentary and textual apparatus:

Cirillo L. & Fremaux M. Evangile de Barnabe: recherches sur la composition et l'origine, Paris, 1977, 598p

Spanish Ms. The known Spanish manuscript was lost in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries; however an eighteenth century copy of it was discovered in the 1970s in the University of Sydney's Fisher Library among the books of Sir Charles Nicholson, labelled in English "Transcribed from ms. in possession of the Revd Mr Edm. Callamy who bought it at the decease of Mr George Sale...and now gave me at the decease of Mr John Nickolls, 1745". J. E. Fletcher, The Spanish Gospel of Barnabas, Novum Testamentum vol. XVIII ((1976), p. 314-320.

Its main difference from the Italian manuscript is that the surviving transcript does not record a substantial number of chapters—which had, however, still been present in the Spanish original when it was examined by George Sale. The Spanish text is preceded by a note claiming that it was translated from Italian by Mustafa de Aranda, an Aragonese Muslim resident in Istanbul. The Spanish manuscript also contains a preface by one assuming the pseudonym 'Fra Marino', claiming to have stolen a copy of the Italian version from the library of Pope Sixtus V. Fra Marino, reports that, having a post in the Inquisition Court, he had come into possession of several works, which led him to believe that the Biblical text had been corrupted, and that genuine apostolic texts had been improperly excluded. Fra Marino also claims to have been alerted to the existence of the Gospel of Barnabas, from an allusion in an (otherwise unknown) work by Irenaeus against Paul; in a book which had been presented to him by a lady of the Colonna family (Marino, outside Rome, is the location of the Palazzo Colonna).

The text of the Spanish manuscript has been published with extensive commentary:

Bernabe Pons L. F. El Evangelio de San Bernabe; Un evangelio islamico espanol, Universidad de Alicante, 1995, 260p

Origins
Some students of the work argue for an Italian origin, noting phrases in Barnabas which are very similar to phrases used by Dante and suggesting that the author of Barnabas borrowed from Dante's works; they take the Spanish version's preface to support this conclusion. Other students have noted a range of textual similarities between passages in the Gospel of Barnabas, and variously the texts of a series of late mediaeval vernacular harmonies of the four canonical gospels (in Middle English and Middle Dutch, but especially in Middle Italian); which are all speculated as deriving from a lost Old Latin version of the Diatessaron of Tatian (Jan Joosten, "The Gospel of Barnabas and the Diatessaron," Harvard Theological Review 95.1 (2002): 73-96). This would also support an Italian origin.

Other students argue that the Spanish version came first, regarding the Spanish preface's claims of an Italian source as intended to boost the work's credibility by linking it to the Papal libraries. These scholars note parallels with a series of Morisco forgeries, the Sacromonte tablets of Granada, dating from the 1590s; or otherwise with Morisco reworkings of Christian and Islamic traditions, produced following their expulsion from Spain (G.A.Wiegers, "Muhammad as the Messiah: A comparison of the polemical works of Juan Alonso with the Gospel of Barnabas", Leiden, Bibliotheca Orientalis, LII, no 3/4, April-Juni 1995, pp.245-292).

The lost Spanish manuscript claimed to have been written in Istanbul, and the surviving Italian manuscript has several Turkish features; so - whether the language of origin was Spanish or Italian - Istanbul is regarded by most students as the place of origin of the present text. This view has added credibility, in that many early Christian and patristic texts might still be found, in the 16th Century, in the Greek libraries of Istanbul - ancient Constantinople - and the city contained substantial Greek, Italian and Spanish speaking communities.

After 1492, following the conquest of Moorish Granada, Mudejar and Sephardi populations (Muslims and Jews who refused to convert to Christianity) were expelled from Spain. Although some found initial refuge in Italy (especially Venice), most resettled in the Ottoman Empire, where Spanish speaking Jews established in Istanbul a rich sub-culture with a flourishing Hebrew and Ladino printing industry. Numbers were further agumented after 1550, following campaigns of persecution by the Venetian Inquisition against Italian anti-Trinitarians and Jews. Although Muslim teaching at this time strongly opposed the printing of Islamic or Arabic texts, non-Muslim printing was not, in principle, forbidden; indeed attempts were made in the 1570s by anti-Trinitarians to establish a printing press in the Turkish capital to publish radical Protestant works. In the Spanish preface, Fra Marino records his wish that the Gospel of Barnabas should be printed, and the only place in Europe where that would have been possible in the late 16th Century would have been Instanbul.

A minority of students are, however, suspicious of the apparent 'Turkish' features of the Italian manuscript; especially the Arabic annotations, which they adjudge to be so riddled with elementary errors as to be most unlikely to have been written in Istanbul (even by an Italian scribe). In particular, they note that the glossing of the Italian version of the shahada into Arabic, does not correspond exactly with the standard ritual formula recited daily by every Muslim. These students are inclined to infer from these inconsistencies that both manuscripts may represent an exercise in forensic falsification, and they tend to locate their place of origin as Rome.

Few academics argue that the text, in its present form, dates back any earlier than the 14th–16th centuries; although a minority see it as containing portions of an earlier work, and almost all would detect the influence of earlier sources—over and above the Vulgate text of the Latin Bible. Consequently most students would concur with a stratification of the surviving text into at least three distinct layers of composition:

an editorial layer dating from the 1590s; and comprising, at the least, the Spanish preface and the Arabic annotations,
a layer of vernacular narrative composition, either in Spanish or Italian, and dating from no earlier than the mid 14th century,
a layer derived from earlier source materials, almost certainly transmitted to the vernacular author/translator in Latin; and comprising, at the least, those extensive passages in the Gospel of Barnabas that closely parallel pericopes in the canonical gospels; but whose underlying text appears markedly distinct from that of the late medieval Latin Vulgate (as for instance in the alternative version of the Lord's Prayer in chapter 37, which includes a concluding doxology, contrary to the Vulgate text, but in accordance with the Diatessaron and many other early variant traditions);
Much of the controversy and dispute concerning the authenticity of the Gospel of Barnabas can be re-expressed as debating whether specific highly transgressive themes (from an orthodox Christian perspective) might already have been present in the source materials utilised by a 14th–16th century vernacular author, whether they might be due to that author himself, or whether they might even have been interpolated by the subsequent editor. Those students who regard these particular themes as primitive, nevertheless do not generally dispute that other parts of the Gospel may be late and anachronistic; while those students who reject the authenticity of these particular themes do not generally dispute that other parts of the Gospel could be transmitting variant readings from antiquity.

Analysis
This work bears strong parallels with the Islamic faith, not only mentioning Muhammad by name, but including the shahada (chapter 39). It is strongly anti-Pauline and anti-Trinitarian in tone. In this work, Jesus is described as a prophet and not the son of God, while Paul is called "the deceived". Furthermore, the Gospel of Barnabas states that Jesus escaped crucifixion by being raised alive to heaven; while Judas Iscariot the traitor — miraculously transformed — was crucified in his place. These beliefs; in particular that Jesus is a prophet of God and raised alive without being crucified; conform with Islamic beliefs. Other passages however conflict with the text/teachings of the Qur'an; as for instance in the account of the Nativity, where Mary is said to have given birth to Jesus without pain; or as in Jesus's ministry, where he permits the drinking of wine and enjoins monogamy. Narrative themes, and some highly distinctive phraseology, are shared with the Divine Comedy of Dante (Ragg). If (as most students surmise) the Gospel of Barnabas is seen as an attempted synthesis of elements from both Christianity and Islam, then sixteenth and seventeenth century parallels can be suggested in Morisco and anti-Trinitarian writings; but there are no known earlier precursors.

The Spanish version includes an account of the discovery of the Gospel of Barnabas in the private study of Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590), an account which appears to many students to be historically incongruous; and this, together with paleographic inconsistencies in the surviving Italian manuscript, has led a number of scholars to conclude that the two known manuscripts may have been prepared in support of an exercise in forensic falsification, intended to discredit or incriminate some leading Catholic ecclesiastic in the Roman Curia of the 1590s (David Sox; The Gospel of Barnabas 1984). There are a number of contemporary parallels for such an exercise - most notably the "Casket Letters" supposedly forged to incriminate Mary Queen of Scots. Some scholars who maintain this view consequently dismiss the entire Gospel as a hoax; but the majority would consider it more likely that the supposed forgers made use of a pre-existing heterodox text.

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