The Company Barnabas Keeps: Two Shelves

How a book gets onto the shelf

Three tests put a book here. The same words, where the words survive. The same story elements in the same order, where a story has been retold. And a telling difference — a place where the two texts share a shape but one element has been changed on purpose, which shows a hand at work on one side or the other rather than a shared memory. A loose resemblance of theme does not qualify; dozens of those were set aside.

For every book that passes, two questions follow. When was it written? And could a reader in Italy between 1300 and 1550 have held it? The second answer is yes for almost everything below, which is exactly why the first question matters. A late-medieval writer could reach both shelves. The question is which shelf the text keeps company with — and what the date of each book says about how old the shared material must be.

The old shelf: books written before 600

A monk’s tunic

Start with a story from the Egyptian desert. Palladius, a bishop who had lived among the monks, wrote it down around 420; it passed into Latin in the Lives of the Fathers, one of the most copied books of the Middle Ages, and into Tuscan Italian in the fourteenth century through Domenico Cavalca’s Vite dei Santi Padri.^[1]

Serapion was called the Sindonite because he owned nothing but one linen garment. He sold himself into slavery to convert the household that bought him, and a second time to relieve a distressed widow. Freed, he was given a cloak, a tunic and a book of the Gospels. He gave the cloak to a poor man and the tunic to someone freezing. Asked who had stripped him, he pointed to the book: This it is that hath stripped me. Later he sold the book too, for someone in need, and explained that the Gospel seemed continually to cry to me: Go, sell all thou hast, and give to the poor.^[2]

Now open Barnabas, chapters 187 and 188. A young disciple named Hosea gives away his mantle, and when his master asks who took it, Hosea replied: ‘The book of Moses.’ He gives away his tunic: The book of Moses hath taken away my tunic. He gives away the book itself, and a fellow disciple reports in alarm that Hosea hath gone mad, for he saith the book of Moses hath taken away from him the book of Moses. Then raiders seize a widow’s son, and Hosea goes to Hebron, where Hosea sold himself, and gave the money to the widow.^[3]

The Italian keeps the shape of the Latin joke: mia leuato la tonicha (it has taken my tunic); il libro di moisse lia leuato il libro di moisse (the book of Moses has taken from him the book of Moses); doue ossea uendette se stesso he dono li danari alia uedoua (where Hosea sold himself and gave the money to the widow). Three story elements in the same order — self-sale for a widow, garments stripped by the book, the book itself sold — with one difference. Where Palladius has the Gospel, Barnabas has the book of Moses. One of the two texts changed the book, and the change runs toward the Law, the direction Barnabas takes everywhere. Hold on to that; it will come back. As for date: the story is on record by 420. If Barnabas drew on Palladius, the drawing was done by a hand that knew the desert fathers; if both drew on an older tale, the tale is older than 420. Either way the match is ancient.

A widow’s son

A second desert story stands beside the same chapters. In the Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great, written in 593, Paulinus of Nola sells himself to the Vandals in place of a widow’s son.^[4] Barnabas’s Hosea does exactly that, in Hebron. Cavalca translated the Dialogues too; both stories were on the same Italian shelf, but both were written more than seven hundred years before he put them there.

The pinnacle of the Temple

In Barnabas the priests ask Jesus to preach from the pinnacle — the high point of the Temple roof: This people desireth to see thee and hear thee; therefore ascend to the pinnacle, and if God give thee a word speak it in the name of the Lord (chapter 12). Later a scribe’s pinnacle becomes Jesus’s regular pulpit (chapters 127 and 129).^[5]

The oldest record outside Barnabas gives this scene to someone else. Hegesippus, a Christian writer of the second century, is quoted by Eusebius in his Church History — a book available in Latin from Rufinus’s translation of 403. He tells how the scribes and Pharisees set James, the brother of Jesus, on the Temple’s summit: Take thy stand, then, upon the summit of the temple, that from that elevated spot thou mayest be clearly seen, and thy words may be plainly audible to all the people.^[6] The reason given — seen and heard by all the people — is the reason Barnabas’s priests give. In one text the pinnacle belongs to James and a martyrdom; in the other to Jesus and a sermon. Which came first is not something the two texts settle on their own. What they settle is that the scene, with its reason, is at least as old as the second century.

A Senate decree, turned inside out

Barnabas has the Roman Senate rule on Jesus. After a near-rebellion in Judaea, the governor writes to Rome, wherefore the senate had compassion on Israel, and decreed that on pain of death none should call Jesus the Nazarene, prophet of the Jews, either God or son of God (chapter 98). The decree returns in chapters 157 and 210.^[7]

There is a Senate story about Jesus in early Christian writing, and it runs the other way. Tertullian, a Christian writer in Carthage, writing around 197, says that the emperor Tiberius brought the matter before the senate, with his own decision in favour of Christ. The senate, because it had not given the approval itself, rejected his proposal.^[8] In Tertullian the Senate refuses to make Christ a god; in Barnabas the Senate forbids anyone to call him one. The same legend, told to opposite ends; one of the two turned it around. Tertullian supplies a second touch as well. He says of Pilate that, after the crucifixion, now in fact a Christian in his own convictions, he sent word of Him to the reigning Caesar.^[9] Barnabas introduces its governor as one who secretly loved Jesus (chapter 217). Both touches are on record by 197.

The flight to Damascus

After the arrest, there went all, saving twenty-five of the seventy-two disciples, who for fear had fled to Damascus (chapter 221). The Recognitions of Pseudo-Clement — a fourth-century story about Peter, copied all through the Middle Ages — has the believers flee Jerusalem before dawn while their persecutor should go to Damascus with his letters… because he believed that Peter had fled to Damascus.^[10] Acts 9 gives the letters and the Damascus road; the Recognitions adds the fear and the flight. Barnabas’s single sentence contains both. The scene is weighed in full, against the Dead Sea Scrolls as well, on Witnesses Found After the Manuscript, the test of the text against books found after 1709.

The magician who changed a man’s face

Barnabas has Judas arrested in Jesus’s place and protest to Pilate that he is not Jesus, who is a magician, and by his art hath so transformed me (chapter 217).^[11] The charge of magic is the charge the Acts of Pilate puts in the mouths of Jesus’s accusers: He is a magician, and by Beelzebul prince of the demons he casts out the demons.^[12] The idea of a man transformed so that he is mistaken for Jesus is older still. Irenaeus, a bishop writing around 180, reports the teaching of Basilides, a teacher in Alexandria whom the Church rejected: Simon of Cyrene, being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them.^[13] In Barnabas the transformed man is Judas — a version that an eighth-century Muslim biographer, quoted by a later commentator, already attributes to some Christians, as If Fabricated? records. The transformation itself is on record by 180.

Enoch and Elijah — and one more

Enoch… was translated into paradise; and there he abideth until the judgment (for when the end of the world draweth nigh he shall return to the world with Elijah and one other) (chapter 144).^[14] The two witnesses who return before the end are a fixture of how the Latin West read Revelation 11, and they speak for themselves in the Gospel of Nicodemus, a Latin text of the fifth or sixth century: I am Enoch, who was translated by the word of God: and this man who is with me, is Elias the Tishbite… we… are now about to return at the coming of Antichrist — Elias being Elijah’s name in Greek and Latin.^[15] Barnabas has the one other as well, and names him elsewhere: with me shall come Enoch and Elijah (chapter 52).

A birth without pain

The virgin was surrounded by a light exceeding bright, and brought forth her son without pain (chapter 3).^[16] The Latin Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew has both details in one place: a cave so full of light that neither by day nor night was light wanting as long as the blessed Mary was there, and the midwife’s report that there has been no spilling of blood in his birth, no pain in bringing him forth.^[17] The motif itself goes back to the Protevangelium of James in the second century. The Qur’an, for its part, describes the pains of Mary’s labour (19:23) — one of the places where Barnabas keeps company with the Latin shelf and not with the Qur’an.

A hell with seven floors

Barnabas’s hell has seven regions, one for each of the seven deadly sins, and in each the punishment is shaped to the sin: the proud plunged into the lowest centre under the feet of Satan, the glutton fed live scorpions, the angry man with his tongue fastened by a hook (chapter 135).^[18] The list of seven sins was fixed by Gregory the Great around 590. The hell where each punishment fits its sin is the plan of the Latin Vision of Paul, a fifth-century text that medieval Italy read in its own language. The seven gates are shared with the Qur’an (15:44), the direction of that agreement left open as it is elsewhere on this page. None of it comes from Dante, whose hell has nine circles — a comparison If Fabricated? takes apart.

That is the old shelf: Palladius, Gregory, Hegesippus and Eusebius, Tertullian, the Recognitions, the Acts of Pilate and Irenaeus, Pseudo-Matthew, the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Vision of Paul. Nine matches, all with books written before 600, all involving whole scenes.

The new shelf: books written after 1200

The Golden Legend, twice

Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend — a collection of saints’ lives compiled around 1260, and in Italian by the fourteenth century —, matches Barnabas in two places.^[19] The fifteen signs before Judgment Day (chapter 53) follow its list in substance, reordered: the sea rising and standing all day like a wall, the plants that weep blood, the stones that dash against each other, the heaven rolled up like a book. The tradition of fifteen signs is older than the Legend — it runs back through Peter Comestor to a text attributed to Jerome — but the form Barnabas has is the Legend’s, down to the bloody dew, and that form is not older than the eleventh century whichever way the dependence runs. The ending is Barnabas’s own, and it keeps company with the Qur’an rather than with the Legend: The fifteenth day the holy angels shall die, and God alone shall remain alive.^[20] The second match is the family property of Lazarus — possessing with his sister Magdala and Bethany (chapter 194) — which is the Legend’s division of the estates in its chapter on Mary Magdalene.^[21]

Elijah’s mountain

Barnabas tells the Pharisees that their name means seeketh God in the language of Canaan, that in Elijah’s day there were twelve mountains inhabited by seventeen thousand Pharisees, and that Elijah wrote a little book wherein he included all human wisdom with the law of God our Lord (chapters 144–145). A widow’s son is seized hard by Mount Carmel, where the prophets and Pharisees abode (chapter 188).^[22] Elijah as the founder of a mountain brotherhood on Carmel, with a rule in writing, is the foundation story of the Carmelite order, set down in its classic form by Philip Ribot around 1380.^[23] The historian Theodore Pulcini has argued from this very cluster that the text took shape in the shadow of Mount Carmel.^[24] The Carmel chapters are the clearest case on either shelf of content — not vocabulary, content — that cannot be older than the thirteenth century.

A hundred-year jubilee

The year of jubilee, which now cometh every hundred years (chapters 82 and 83).^[25] The Church’s jubilee was proclaimed in 1300 as a once-a-century event and shortened to fifty years in 1343. One sentence, one window. If Fabricated? and Contradiction Claims weigh what a single sentence can and cannot date.

The furniture of an Italian town

The money is Italian: sixty mites to a gold piece (chapter 54), thirty pieces of gold for Judas (chapter 214), money put into the bank for a tenfold return (chapter 16). The props are Italian: casks rolled out to be washed and refilled with wine (chapter 152), acorns for the prodigal’s swine where the Latin Bible has carob pods (chapter 146), fig-sellers and apple-peel-sellers at market (chapters 132–134), a condemned man clad in white as the fools are clad (chapter 217). And the Latin shows through the Italian: the Feast of Tabernacles is Senofegia (chapter 30), and the pool of Bethesda is Probatica (chapter 65).^[26] These are the fingerprints of a translation’s time and place. Contradiction Claims lists them for that purpose. They say nothing about the age of the stories they sit in, any more than sixty mites dates the parable it illustrates.

That is the new shelf: the Golden Legend, the Carmelite legend, a jubilee, and the furniture. Two books, one sentence, and a vocabulary.

What the two shelves tell us

The scenes keep ancient company; the surface keeps medieval company. Count what each shelf holds. From before 600: the monk’s tunic, the widow’s son, the Temple pinnacle, the Senate decree, Pilate’s secret sympathy, the flight to Damascus, the magician’s transformation, Enoch and Elijah, the painless birth, the seven-floored hell. From after 1200: the fifteen signs in their Legend form, Lazarus’s estates, Elijah’s mountain, a jubilee, and the coins and casks. The medieval shelf accounts for perhaps a dozen chapters of content and a layer of vocabulary. The ancient shelf accounts for the narrative furniture of the whole book outside the Gospel story.

Both shelves were within reach of an Italian desk — which is why this is not a proof. Every book on the old shelf was in Latin manuscript across medieval Italy, and most were in print by the early sixteenth century. A writer in 1450 could have taken down Palladius as easily as the Golden Legend. So the sorting does not show what a writer could or could not have read. It shows what the text’s matches look like once they are dated, and the two pictures of the text predict different things here. If the book was assembled at an Italian desk, its assembler passed over the books of his own century again and again to reach for books that were already old when the Decretum Gelasianum was drawn up — strange behaviour for a forger, and ordinary behaviour for someone editing or translating something old. If the book’s framework is older than the desk, this is simply what an old text looks like: its company is old, and the few medieval matches mark the places where later hands added or dressed. The shelf fits the second picture without strain. It fits the first only with an explanation attached.

The old shelf is the Decretum’s own list. Set the two side by side. The Decretum’s catalogue of rejected books names the Gospel in the name of Barnabas. A few lines away it names the Recognitions (the Itinerary in the name of Peter the apostle), the Revelation which is called Paul’s, the Repentance of Adam — the Latin Life of Adam and Eve, which has the devil’s refusal to bow to Adam that Barnabas tells in chapter 35 — and the book of the nativity of the saviour and of Mary or the midwife.^[27] Four of the books on Barnabas’s old shelf stand on the same page of the decree as Barnabas’s title. There are two ways to read that. Either the Italian Barnabas descends from the world the decree was describing, or those apocryphal books were simply the standard reading of the Middle Ages, which the decree had condemned and the monasteries had copied anyway. Both are true of the shelf. Only one of them is true of the title.

Somewhere in the text’s history, one hand had a signature. Where Palladius has the Gospel, Barnabas has the book of Moses. Where Tertullian’s Senate refuses, Barnabas’s Senate forbids. Where Hegesippus has James, Barnabas has Jesus. Where Irenaeus has Simon, Barnabas has Judas. The same substitution runs through the Gospel quotations, where my Son becomes my servant and the Baptist’s role passes to Jesus. These are not the marks of a library copied at random. They are the marks of a consistent reading — the Law before the Gospel, the prophet before the Son — applied from the first chapter to the last. Whether that reading belongs to the author of the whole, or to the editor and translator of something older, is the question the rest of this site asks. The shelf cannot answer it. But it can say what kind of reader left the marks: one who knew the Latin Fathers (the early Christian writers in Latin) well, the Latin apocrypha (the early books left outside the Bible) better, and the Jewish-Christian habit of mind best of all.

And a third company stands beside both shelves. The Passion story’s sequence, the four angels’ duties, the forty years of darkness, the food of Paradise: these keep company with Muslim tradition, and no Latin shelf explains them. On this site’s reading they are not a third shelf but the oldest one — material a later tradition could confirm, not material a later hand put in. The reason for reading them that way is in the text itself: a series of its statements depart from the Qur’an in ways no trained Muslim scholar would write — the nine heavens above all — as the homepage sections on the heavens and the Messiah show. A hand that knew the Qur’an well enough to add the first set would have corrected the second. That question has its own pages; the shelf only notes where it stands.

The company is catalogued. Two shelves, and the old one holds the book up. Which hand took the books down — and whether an older book lay on the desk before any of them — is the question A Historical Hypothesis takes up. What the shelf weighs beside the rest of the evidence is set out in The Case as It Stands, the site’s summing-up.