Sacred-Texts Islam

The Gospel of Barnabas

trans. Lonsdale and Laura Ragg

[London, 1907]

The Gospel of Barnabas is an apocryphal gospel. That is, it is a life of Jesus purportedly written by a first-hand observer that is at variance with the picture(s) presented in the Bible. However, it is unique among apocrypha in that it is a Muslim gospel; that is, it presents Jesus as a human prophet, not the son of God, and as a forerunner of Muhammad. According to western scholarship, it is a fourteenth-century forgery, extant now only in Spanish and Italian manuscripts, but even among scholars there is disagreement as to whether or not some some of the material contained in the book is older. The Gospel has been picked up by some modern Muslims, though, as an authentic and ancient record of events, and there are many different printed versions available from various Muslim publishing houses, all based heavily on the version by the Raggs presented here. It must be stressed, however, that belief in this Gospel is in no way an article of Islamic faith, and this site is not the place to discuss either the authenticity of the book or how widespread belief in or even knowledge of it is in the Islamic world. A search on Google will turn up dozens of pages and even entire sites devoted to discussion of the Gospel of Barnabas from all manner of perspectives—Christian, Muslim, and scholarly—to which sites we must defer for discussion of the topic. Regardless of the provenance of the document, it is an interesting read, similar to the many religious romances of the Mediterranean world, such as the apocryphal acts of the apostles (located here at the Noncanonical homepage) and the books of sacred history from the east, a few of which are located here at sacred-texts.