Question of the Week: How do we know the gospel of Barnabas doesn’t belong in the Bible while Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all do?
Verses: Matthew 24:35, 2 Timothy 3:16
The Bible’s claim to be the inspired word of God calls itself to be held to an extremely high standard of accuracy, preservation, and reliable sources. The original 4 gospels that are called canonical, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are all based on the first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These men went to their deaths claiming this was true, showing the reliability of their claims in these gospels was not something they made up on their own. The objection that the Bible has been changed over time has to deal with the manuscript evidence. The Apostles themselves didn’t pass on these accounts through oral tradition or here say. They wrote down copies and made copies of those copies in such numbers throughout the centuries that the number of them we are aware of total in the hundreds of thousands. And in all of these accounts, the only changes in the text between modern English Bibles and Ancient Greek Texts are the changes in language over time. Even the most liberal of scholars would admit that 7/8 of the New Testament we have today are the same things they were reading in the first century. The remaining 1/8 are errors involving the spelling of proper names and word order. The actual variants in text of the old and new Testaments combined total to one half of one page of text. And in this half page, no major doctrine of Christianity is brought into question. This brings us to the Gospel of Barnabas. The Gospel of Barnabas is popularized by Muslims since it agrees with the Quran’s view of Jesus’ crucifixion never actually happening to Jesus Himself and gives credence to Surah 4:157. The problem is that Barnabas was a first century Christian, and the earliest manuscript accounts of “his” gospel don’t appear until the 15th century during Islam’s Golden years of dominance over the Middle East. Beyond denying proven history and inconsistency with the other eye witness accounts, the evidence it provides to prove itself as actually from Barnabas, let alone the word of God, is not even close enough to be taken seriously as a reliable account of Jesus’ life.
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