126 Jesus, Prophet of Islam
This is because the Gospel of Barnabas confirms that Jesus was
not God, nor the 'son' of God, and that he was neither crucified in
the first place, nor subsequently 'raised from the dead' thereafter.
As we have already seen, it was Paul himself who pointed out that
if Jesus was neither crucified nor raised from the dead, then the
bottom falls out of the Paulinian thesis:
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is use
less and so is your faith. More than that, we are then
found to be false witnesses about God, for we have tes
tified about God that he raised Christ from the dead ...
(1 Corinthians 15:14-15).Accordingly virtually all the established churches, however near
or far they are to each other, have united in their various efforts to
discredit the English version of the Gospel of Barnabas by discredit
ing the Italian edition from which it was translated.
In a manner reminiscent of the way in which the Russian edi
tion of The Protocols oftheEIders ofZion has been constantly branded
as ' a forgery' inordertodiscreditanytranslationof it into another
language, so with the Spanish and English translations of the Gos
pel of Barnabas, it has been claimed that the Italian version is a for
gery - and, by implication, that even the much earlier Hebrew and
Greek versions which, as we have just seen, are known to have
existed at a very early stage in the history of Christianity, must
also have been 'forgeries'!
Perhaps the most sustained and scholarly attempt aimed at dis
crediting the English edition of the Gospel of Barnabas has been the
book written by David Sox entitled, somewhat misleadingly, 'The
Gospel of Barnabas'. Only a few lines of the English translation are
actually quoted by him, and the underlying purpose of his book is
clearly to putoff asmanypeopleaspossiblefromactually reading
the Gospel of Barnabas itself and making their own minds up about
its authenticity!
Given that David Sox's brief was to 'prove' that the Italian ver
sion of the Gospel of Barnabas is a forgery, his methodology is trans
parently clear: Having ascertained that the binding of the manu
script in Vienna dates from approximately the 16th or 17th century
- although not necessarily the manuscript itself, which may date
from an earlier period and which could have been bound and re
http://www.islamicbulletin.com