The Epistle of Barnabas is an early Christian treatise, written in Greek sometime between about 70 and 130 AD, which argues that the Hebrew scriptures were never meant to be taken literally — that from the first page they are a coded book about Christ. Admired by teachers like Clement of Alexandria and bound into Codex Sinaiticus, one of the world's oldest complete Bibles, it came closer to the New Testament than almost any book that did not make it in.
It is also one of the strangest reading experiences early Christianity has to offer: kosher food laws become moral fables, the 318 servants of Abraham become a cipher for the cross, and the whole Old Testament becomes a locked cabinet to which the author claims the key. This guide covers what the epistle is, what it teaches, how close it came to the canon, who wrote it, and why it fell out.
The Epistle of Barnabas is a 21-chapter Greek treatise dressed as a letter. It opens by greeting its readers as sons and daughters, but there is no named sender, no named congregation, and no local news — less a letter than a teacher's tract meant to circulate.
The work falls into two unequal halves. Chapters 1–17 are the doctrinal core: a sustained argument that the scriptures of Israel — the only Bible Christians had at the time — point to Christ, and that reading them as literal law was always a misunderstanding. Chapters 18–21 change register entirely, closing with the "Two Ways," a compact moral catechism of the way of light and the way of darkness.
The author repeatedly calls his teaching gnosis — special insight — though he is not a Gnostic in the later sectarian sense. He is a confident Bible teacher who believes everyone before him has read the text wrong.
The epistle was written in the shadow of catastrophe. The Jerusalem temple had been destroyed in 70 AD, and the author treats that event as proof of his thesis: God never wanted a building, animal sacrifices, or literal observance in the first place. The true temple, he argues, is the believer in whom God dwells; the true sacrifice is a contrite heart; the true fast is justice toward the oppressed.
His boldest claim goes further than almost any other early Christian writer was willing to go. Where most of the early church taught that God's covenant with Israel was genuine and later fulfilled in Christ, Barnabas argues that Israel lost the covenant at the very beginning — forfeited at Mount Sinai when the people turned to the golden calf and Moses shattered the tablets — so that it belongs to the church alone. He even suggests that a deceiving angel led Israel to take commands like circumcision literally, when the real intent was always circumcision of the heart.
Chapter by chapter, he works through fasting, sacrifice, circumcision, the food laws, the Sabbath, and the temple, re-reading each one as an allegory. Along the way he preserves details of real historical value — including one of the earliest surviving references to Christians gathering on the eighth day, the day after the Sabbath, in celebration of the resurrection.
Two examples made the epistle famous.
First, the food laws. In chapter 10, Barnabas insists Moses was never talking about diet at all. The command not to eat pork is a warning against being like swine — people who forget their master when full and squeal for him only when hungry, remembering God only in need. The ban on eagles, hawks, kites, and crows is a warning against living like birds of prey, seizing what belongs to others instead of working for your own bread. Scaleless fish that hug the mud stand for people who wallow in hopeless godlessness, and the remaining forbidden animals he reads as warnings against sexual immorality. Israel's mistake, he says, was to hear a menu where God had spoken morals.
Second, the cipher. In chapter 9 he takes up the note in Genesis that Abraham's household included 318 men. In Greek — and the author read his Bible in Greek, in the Septuagint — letters double as numerals. Eighteen is written iota-eta, the first two letters of the name Jesus; three hundred is the letter tau, shaped like a cross. So Abraham, circumcising his 318 men, was — on this reading — silently prophesying Jesus and the crucifixion. It is the earliest surviving example of Christian letter-number interpretation, and the author is openly proud of it: "No one has learnt a more genuine word from me," he writes. The trick only works in Greek — a telling clue about the language in which the early church read its scriptures.
Other set pieces follow the same method. The two goats of the Day of Atonement become a double portrait of Jesus — one sacrificed, one cursed, crowned with scarlet wool and driven into the wilderness. The red heifer whose ashes purified Israel becomes another figure of the cross. And the Sabbath becomes a map of history: six days of creation standing for six thousand years of the world, with the true Sabbath rest still to come.
All 21 chapters in clear modern English — the allegories, the Two Ways, and the full argument that shaped early Christian Bible-reading. Members read free.
Get the Epistle of Barnabas →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryThe last four chapters shift from allegory to ethics. There are two ways, the author teaches: a way of light governed by the angels of God, and a way of darkness governed by the angels of Satan. Each way comes with a catalog — love of God and neighbor, generosity, humility, and protection of the vulnerable on one side; idolatry, arrogance, greed, and oppression of the poor on the other.
Readers of the Didache will find this section startlingly familiar. The Didache opens with the same teaching, framed as the way of life and the way of death, with much of the same material in a different order. Scholars long debated which text borrowed from which; the prevailing view today is that neither did — both independently adapted an older Jewish "Two Ways" manual. A closely related teaching about two spirits, one of light and one of darkness, appears in the Community Rule among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which shows how deep its Jewish roots run.
The irony is quiet but real: the epistle that argues most aggressively against Judaism closes with a block of teaching inherited, nearly intact, from a Jewish source.
Closer than most readers expect. Around 200 AD, Clement of Alexandria quoted the epistle as scripture and attributed it to the apostle Barnabas, Paul's companion. His successor Origen called it a "catholic epistle," language normally reserved for books like James and 1 Peter.
The most striking evidence is physical. Codex Sinaiticus, the great fourth-century Bible discovered at Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai desert, includes the Epistle of Barnabas immediately after Revelation, alongside the Shepherd of Hermas. Whoever commissioned that volume considered Barnabas worth binding into a Bible — at the very moment the church was finalizing its canon lists.
The tide, however, was already turning. Eusebius of Caesarea, cataloging Christian books early in the fourth century, placed Barnabas among the disputed and spurious works rather than the accepted ones. When Athanasius circulated the first list of exactly our 27 New Testament books in 367 AD, Barnabas was not on it. Jerome thought the letter valuable but classed it outside the canon — and once a book fell out of church reading, scribes gradually stopped copying it.
The transmission story is a small drama of its own. For centuries the complete Greek text was lost: one family of manuscripts was missing the opening chapters entirely, and part of the letter survived only in an old Latin translation. Two nineteenth-century discoveries restored it — Sinaiticus in 1859, which supplied the first complete Greek text, and an 1873 find in Constantinople of a medieval codex containing another full copy. That same manuscript also contained the only surviving copy of the Didache, reuniting the two "Two Ways" texts after seventeen centuries.
Almost certainly not Barnabas. The letter itself is anonymous — nowhere does the author give his name — and the attribution to Paul's companion appears only later, in writers like Clement. The internal evidence points away from the apostolic generation: the author writes after the temple's destruction in 70 AD, shows no personal connection to Jesus or the apostles, and it is hard to imagine Barnabas the Levite, a man of the Jerusalem community, arguing that Israel never truly held the covenant at all.
Most scholars therefore read the epistle as the work of an unknown Christian teacher writing between about 70 and 130 AD. Alexandria in Egypt is the most common guess for its home: the city was the capital of allegorical interpretation, Jewish and pagan alike, and the epistle's earliest and warmest readers, Clement and Origen, were both Alexandrians.
Strictly speaking, the letter sits at the edge of the pseudepigrapha — works circulating under the name of a famous figure who did not write them. The author never claimed to be Barnabas; admirers attached the name for him. But the effect was the same: an apostolic name gave an anonymous tract an authority that nearly carried it into the Bible.
The honest, historical answer involves the same tests the early church applied to every candidate book. Was it written by an apostle or an apostle's associate? Barnabas's authorship could not be verified, and doubts were recorded early. Was it used universally in worship? Its popularity was real but regional, strongest in Alexandria. Did its teaching match the faith the church confessed everywhere? Here the epistle stumbled hardest: its claim that Israel never possessed the covenant went beyond what the mainstream church taught, and its assertion that the law was never meant literally sat uneasily beside the Gospels themselves.
So when the canon lists of the fourth century were drawn up, Barnabas fell on the far side of the line — not banned, not burned, simply not included, and thereafter copied less and less. Its fate mirrors that of many books that fell outside the canon: exclusion from public reading, centuries of slow disappearance, then rediscovery in the modern era.
Honesty requires naming what is genuinely difficult about this text. The Epistle of Barnabas is one of the earliest and harshest examples of Christian polemic against Judaism. Its argument is not merely that Christ fulfilled the law, but that Israel misunderstood its own scriptures from the start and never rightly held the covenant — a position scholars call supersessionism in its most extreme early form.
Historians read this rhetoric in context. The epistle comes from the raw decades after 70 AD, when church and synagogue — communities that had begun as one — were separating painfully and defining themselves against each other. The author was staking a claim to the Jewish scriptures for a movement that was increasingly Gentile, and he did it with the overheated confidence of a partisan in a family quarrel. Later centuries would put rhetoric like his to destructive use, which is precisely why modern readers should meet it with historical understanding rather than adopt its voice. Read this way, the epistle is not a guide to follow but a primary source: evidence of how early, and how sharply, that tragic parting of ways began.
Set in its era, the epistle becomes one of the most revealing documents of Christianity's first century. It shows that the earliest church's Bible was the Old Testament — read in Greek, searched verse by verse for Christ, at a time when no New Testament canon yet existed. It shows allegory becoming the church's default key to that Bible, a method Alexandria would later refine into a whole school of interpretation. It may even preserve one of the earliest instances of a saying now found in Matthew's Gospel being cited as scripture.
It also captures the canon while the edges were still soft: a book could be quoted as scripture by Clement, bound into a Bible in the fourth century, and still end up outside — a reminder that the New Testament's boundary was drawn over generations, not in a single stroke.
If you are curious how the earliest Christians actually thought, yes — with both eyes open. It is short enough to read in an evening, and few ancient texts deliver more surprises per page: moral fables hiding in the food laws, a crucifixion cipher in Genesis, an ethics manual shared with the Didache, and a front-row seat at the canon debates. Read it alongside the Didache, and with its historical context in mind.
What you get is not devotional comfort but understanding: how the Old Testament became a Christian book, how the New Testament's borders were drawn, and how much passionate, strange, brilliant literature was left standing just outside them.
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