Anonymous (sub-apostolic)
late 1st–2nd c. · 2nd c. · 1 work
The Epistle of Barnabas is an anonymous early Christian treatise, written in Greek and counted among the works of the Apostolic Fathers, the Christian writers of the late first and early second centuries. Though the text itself names no author, identifying only a teacher addressing fellow believers, later tradition ascribed it to Barnabas, the missionary companion of Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles; modern scholarship regards this attribution as unlikely. It is usually dated to the period between roughly A.D. 70 and 130, with its references to the Jerusalem Temple often taken to point toward the reign of Hadrian. Its place of origin is commonly thought to be Alexandria in Egypt, where its pronounced allegorical method found a congenial home.
The epistle is essentially a treatise on the Christian use of the Old Testament, and its dominant interpretive technique is typological and allegorical. The author reads the Mosaic law not as binding ceremony but as a veil of figures pointing forward to Christ, treating dietary rules, sacrifices, the Sabbath, and circumcision as prefigurations of spiritual realities and of the Passion. On this reading the scriptures conceal a Christ-centered meaning that becomes visible only through Christian eyes. The work thus represents an early and influential, if idiosyncratic, attempt to claim the Hebrew scriptures wholly for the church.
Bound up with this method is a sharply anti-Jewish polemic that distinguishes the epistle even among early Christian writings. The author argues that the Jewish people misunderstood their own law by observing it literally, and in his most extreme claim suggests that they had forfeited or never rightly possessed the covenant with God, which now belonged to Christians alone. This supersessionist stance goes beyond the apostle Paul and reflects the painful separation of church and synagogue in the period. Readers today encounter the text as a historical witness to that estrangement rather than as a model of charity.
The closing chapters present the doctrine of the Two Ways, contrasting the way of light with the way of darkness, that is, the path of good and the path of evil. This moral catechesis closely parallels the corresponding section of the Didache, and the two works are generally thought to draw on a shared earlier source or tradition. In its own time the epistle enjoyed a near-canonical standing, especially in Egypt where Clement of Alexandria treated it as scripture, and it was copied immediately after the New Testament books in the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus. As the canon was fixed in the fourth century, however, it was ultimately excluded from the New Testament.
Sources: Encyclopædia Britannica — Letter of Barnabas · Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent) — Epistle of Barnabas