The Gospel of Barnabas is a book depicting the life of Jesus, purporting to be by Jesus’ disciple Barnabas. It should not be confused with the surviving Epistle of Baranbas which is included in the earliest complete manuscript of the Bible – the Codex Sinaiticus – on display at the British Library in London.
The Gospel of Barnabas is universally recognised by academics as a 16th century forgery, and not surprisingly contains a large number of anachronisms. To use it for dawah purposes is unwise.
Categories: Islam
It depicts the unhistorical Islamic narrative of Jesus not dying, but being saved miraculously, even Judas being crucified instead.
So Islam needs a forgery for this unhistorical fairytale, just like in Christianity the trinity in the first letter of John.
Islam rejects forgeries. Hence the science of hadith criticism developed to sift out the inauthentic from the reliable.
But where are the gospels’ isnads?
The barnabas gospel came AFTER the Quran. How can it rely on a forgery that comes after it? That document even teaches that Muhammad (saw) was the Messiah which is completly unIslamic.
We could use it to compare the Bible’s anachronisms, just to point out that anachronisms are found in both, and thus, both are forgeries and should be rejected.