Submitted to a Medieval Forgery

Masud Masihiyyen

It is quite baffling to see some Muslims believe in the Gospel of Barnabas although this particular Gospel was proven to be a forgery¹ and to overtly contradict several teachings of the Islamic Scripture. This is why it is a matter of wonder that some Muslims insist on using the fraud named “the Gospel of Barnabas” in their theological and historical debates with Christians. What could be the source of this unconditional Muslim love for this fake document dating back only to the Middle Ages and containing obvious mistakes? In order to answer this question and thus solve the mystery of some Muslim scholars’ adherence to the Gospel of Pseudo Barnabas at the expense of their Islamic creed, we should make a comparison between the allegations and teachings of the fake Gospel of Barnabas and those of the Qur’an. This comparative analysis will lead us to the reasons underlying many Muslims’ baffling reliance on a forgery and in a text unauthorized by the Qur’an.

Some Muslims submit themselves to the fake Gospel of Barnabas because they know that this text is the only document to support their allegations concerning the authenticity of the canonical Gospels and of the basic Christian tenets.  In this respect, it is possible to say that the Islamic scripture fails to provide any evidence for the assertion that Isa (Jesus) of the Qur’an was but a messenger of Allah sent to the house of Israel and taught the Islamic creed six centuries before Mohammad. The fallacious contention that the Qur’an itself sufficed to prove what it claimed with regard to the condition of the former religions and scriptures had caused much trouble and stress for Islamic scholars, who were not taken seriously because of their erroneous argument that the assertion of the claimant should be considered equal to evidence. The Gospel of Barnabas meant a unique gift and blessing for such Muslim scholars because it was presented as an additional piece of evidence illustrating the supposed corruption of the New Testament. This makes it partly understandable why some Muslim scholars became willing to defend and propagate a religious text that contradicted their Qur’an in both form and content: the fake Gospel of Barnabas – far from perfection though – backed up Islam and came to represent a book without which some teachings of the Qur’an remained weak and lacked testimony.

Moreover, Pseudo Barnabas was careful and intelligent enough not to repeat the statements about the former revelations in the Qur’an, which had bothered Muslim scholars by giving birth to controversies between Muslims and Jews/Christians with regard to the confirmation of the Holy Bible by the Islamic scripture. Interestingly, the writers of the Qur’an taught that Allah revealed the final scripture to confirm and support the Holy Bible. For instance:

These remarks in the Qur’an are problematic for many Muslim scholars; for they disregard the discrepancies between the Islamic and Judeo-Christian scriptures and state that the Qur’an came not to correct or replace, but to confirm and preserve the Bible. Being aware of this problem and crisis, Pseudo Barnabas sided with later Muslim scholars and supported their allegations by putting into Jesus’ mouth the claim that the Bible had to be corrupted for the revelation of the Qur’an:

Second, the Gospel of Pseudo-Barnabas is based on a well-developed conspiracy theory that concurred with the Muslim allegations upon the origin of Christianity and Apostle Paul’s involvement in the spread of the Christian faith. Right in the prologue to this so-called Gospel fake Barnabas argues that Jesus was a pathetic messenger whose true teachings had been perverted by some disciples that were led astray by Satan to teach false doctrines:

Additionally, Pseudo Barnabas contends that some of Jesus’ disciples who did not fear God stole Judas Iscariot’s body in order to proclaim that Jesus had risen:

Above all, fake Barnabas’ addiction to anachronism compels him to suppose that Jesus’ true teachings were twisted and contaminated during His prophetic ministry. This is why we read in the medieval forgery that Jesus once overtly denied being the Son of God, God, and the Messiah when questioned by the high priest, who was astoundingly aware of these doctrines:

The Qur’an, on the other hand, is unaware of all these assertions as no verse in it claims that Jesus’ genuine teachings were already twisted during his prophetic ministry. Accordingly, the Jesus in “Mohammad’s Gospel” is made to repudiate the doctrine of the Trinity and His divinity on the Day of Judgment (Surah 5:116-117) rather than during His ministry. Further, there is no implicit or explicit reference in the entire Islamic scripture to a disciple or apostle named Paul. In contrast to the accusations presented by the author of the Gospel of Barnabas, the authors of the Qur’an never taught that some of Jesus’ disciples were deceived and led astray by Satan. For the Qur’an, there were only two groups of people, who fell into disagreement on the basis of their faith: those who believed in Jesus and became His disciples versus those who rejected Jesus and opposed Him. Strikingly, the writers of the Qur’an said that the party of Jesus’ disciples (all of them) had become triumphant against the party of the unbelievers:

Although most of the Islamic scholars blame Paul for contaminating the supposed true Gospel named Injil and inventing today’s Christianity, the Qur’an is not only ignorant of these harsh accusations, but also fails to explain why Christianity in Mohammad’s time had major discrepancies with the Islamic message allegedly delivered by Jesus. Consequently, some Muslim scholars submitted themselves to the fake Gospel of Barnabas because the author of this forgery supposedly knew something that was both beneficial and additional to the Qur’an.

Third, as a massive book consisting of 222 chapters the Gospel of Barnabas gives an enormous amount of information about Jesus and His teachings. Besides, in this so-called Gospel Jesus’ words and acts are narrated in an organized way with more than enough details. The life of Jesus from the period of His annunciation to that of His ascension is explained pretty well and meticulously so as not to leave place for doubts or vagueness. Certainly, the Gospel of Barnabas owes this detailed information about Jesus and its organized form of narration to the author’s deliberate plagiarism from the New Testament: particularly from all of the four canonical Gospels and some other parts of the canonical scripture (Acts of the Apostles, Peter’s First Universal Letter, and even some verses of the Old Testament). However, the Qur’an almost presents zero data about Jesus’ life and His teachings when compared to the Gospel of Barnabas. It will not be unfair or an exaggeration to say that the things stated about Jesus in the Islamic scripture would not exceed four pages if they were extracted from the Qur’an and written on sheets of paper. Actually, the organized and partly flowing narratives about Jesus in the Qur’an occur in two chapters: Surah 19 and 3. Apart from these, there are short verses describing Jesus’ prophetic ministry in a few chapters.⁴ In sharp contrast to the detailed and recurrent narration of Jesus’ various kinds of miracles in the Gospel of Barnabas, the Qur’an summarizes Jesus’ miracles into one sentence⁵:

More to the point, the verses about Jesus in the Qur’an mostly remain silent on various historical and geographical issues and thus appear in the form of obscure and incomplete accounts. For instance, the writers of the Qur’an chose to hide from the readers the name of the place where Jesus was born. Likewise, it is impossible to know the name of a single disciple of Jesus by reading the Islamic scripture. As a result of these deficiencies, some Muslims submit themselves to the fake Gospel of Barnabas because they know that they need it as a primary book of reference with regard to Jesus.

Relevant to the above point, every honest Muslim scholar that reads the Gospel of Barnabas and the Qur’an comparatively is supposed to confess that the former is superior to the latter in both form and content when the Islamic denial of Jesus’ crucifixion is in view. In the entire Qur’an, which contains 114 chapters, there is only one single verse that denies the reality of Jesus’ passion by presenting it as an optical illusion:

This single verse, which belongs to the late period of the supposed revelation of the Qur’an, fails to answer the following questions and leaves its readers in constant suspense, making one also suppose that the Islamic objection to Jesus’ crucifixion is based on nothing but conjecture:

• Was someone else crucified and killed in Jesus’ stead?
• Did the supposed illusion or appearance have a miraculous nature or was it simply the result of a misunderstanding?
• Why was such a deceptive miracle needed?
• Why was someone killed in Jesus’ stead? What made this substitution crucial?
• Who was the person that was allegedly crucified in Jesus’ place?
• What happened to that person’s corpse?

The Islamic scripture cannot answer any of these questions, for it lacks a narrative concerning Jesus’ passion even though it dedicates many verses to the narration of Jesus’ miraculous birth from a virgin in two chapters (Surah 19 & 3). The reason underlying this inconvenience is the fact that the non-canonical Gospels of Jesus’ infancy, which the hands that wrote the Qur’an plagiarized from, were confined to the narratives prior to Jesus’ prophetic ministry and thus lacked the accounts concerning His passion. Seemingly, the hands that devised the Qur’an had no access to either canonical or apocryphal Gospels that contained long and detailed narratives of Jesus’ passion.

In contrast to the inadequacy of the Qur’an in this respect, the Gospel of Barnabas provides answers for all of the questions stated above by simply substituting Judas Iscariot for Jesus and perverting the passion narratives in the canonical Gospels. This is why two long chapters (216-217) in the book of Pseudo Barnabas relate the supposed arrest, crucifixion, and death of Judas the betrayer. In the rest of the chapters until the final one (222) Pseudo Barnabas endeavors to fabricate philosophical and theological reasons for the necessity of Jesus’ seeming death and the deceitful miracle transforming Judas the betrayer into Jesus. The admittance of the medieval Gospel of Barnabas by some Muslims as a reliable religious text indicates those Muslim believers’ gratefulness to Pseudo Barnabas for his favor of saving the Qur’an from deficiencies and vagueness on the subject of Jesus’ passion.

Fourth, some Muslims submit themselves to the Gospel of Barnabas and keep praising it at the expense of the Qur’an because Pseudo Barnabas proved to be a cleverer and more cunning person than the authors of the Islamic scripture. The stories recounted in the Qur’an in association with basic Christian tenets are actually the distorted versions of Jesus’ infancy stories plagiarized from a few non-canonical Gospels.⁶ For instance, the 19^th chapter of the Qur’an, which is named after Jesus’ mother Mary, relates baby Jesus’ miraculous speech in the cradle at the time of Mary’s return to her folk after the delivery:

Certainly, this account is not included in any of the canonical Gospels, but can be found in an apocryphal writing named “Arabic Infancy Gospel”:

The comparison of these two accounts reveals how the authors of the Qur’an made vain efforts to pervert the narrative in the Arabic Gospel of Infancy for the sake of adapting it to the major tenets of Islam and denouncing some of the basic Christian doctrines concerning Jesus’ identity. It is blatant that the falsified Jesus in the 19^th chapter of the Qur’an implicitly denies being the Son of God and makes a miraculous speech in the cradle not to manifest His divinity, but to serve the Islamic presentation of the Messiah as but one of the past prophets. The forced inclusion of Jesus into the alleged chain of Islamic messengers in Mohammad’s fantasy through the modification of the phrase “Son of God” in the original source to “servant of Allah” in the 19^th chapter also turns the words “Logos” and “savior” in the original source into “scripture” and “prophet” in Mohammad’s book, respectively. More to the point, this purely Islamic identification ascribed to Jesus by Mohammad, which exists in the form of a miraculous speech delivered by infant Jesus, is followed by an assertion that aims to rebuke Christians for identifying Jesus as the Son of God:

This intrusion, which betrays the flow of the Islamic narrative, proves that the authors of this chapter tried to present the falsified and distorted version of the story of baby Jesus’ speech as the original account revealed by Allah. In other words, the writers of the Qur’an targeted the authenticity of the Arabic Gospel of Infancy because they presumed that Christians relied on this scripture while worshipping Jesus as the Son of God and Savior. However, the Arabic Gospel of Infancy has never been regarded as an authentic and apostolic writing by any of the Christian Churches. The universal Church in the early era of Christianity considered all of the Gospels of Jesus’ Infancy apocryphal, which meant that such writings – no matter that they did not support heretical doctrines – were not included into the New Testament canon. Consequently, the Qur’an tries to distort an apocryphal Gospel and mistakenly supposes that the textual perversion of the original accounts in such Gospels will cast doubts upon the authenticity of the Christian scripture and tenets. In this respect, the writers of the Qur’an could be likened to a person who goes to a dueling with a knife instead of a gun.

Pseudo Barnabas, on the other hand, is clever and crafty enough not to fall into the same kind of an error; for he dedicates his time and energy to the systematic perversion of the canonical Gospels instead of the apocryphal ones! This is why Pseudo Barnabas attacks the authenticity of the Christian scripture in a far better and more reasonable way than the Qur’an and strives to convince the reader of his basic allegation that his Gospel alone contains the original teachings of Jesus whilst the rest of the writings are falsified and inauthentic. Fake Barnabas’ aim to overshadow the authenticity of the canonical Gospels is mostly reflected in the perversion of the canonical accounts that overtly contradict the Islamic designation of Jesus as the messenger of Allah. For instance, the Gospel of Matthew relates the dialog between Jesus and His apostles with regard to His identity. As the spokesperson of the apostles, Peter responds and says that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus endorses this identification and binds it directly to God:

To compare and contrast this canonical narrative with the medieval Gospel of Barnabas:

Apparently, spurious Barnabas twists this account in accordance with the Islamic repudiation of Jesus’ divinity and craftily combines it with the verses in the same chapter of Matthew’s Gospel which recount Peter’s reprobation on the occasion of his objection to Jesus’ passion:

This ability to abuse the canonical Christian writings for the sake of propagating Islam and backing the alleged falsification of Jesus’ teachings is peculiar to the medieval Gospel of Barnabas, which marks its superiority to the Islamic scripture.

Fifth, the Gospel of Barnabas does not reiterate the gross mistakes and false accusations of the Islamic scripture, being a comparatively more accurate document. We do not mean that the medieval Gospel of Barnabas is free of error, far from it, but for the sake of honesty it should be made plain that most of the mistakes in the medieval Gospel are a direct result of Pseudo Barnabas’ intention to work the four canonical Gospels into one single book and add into his forgery all the cultural peculiarities of his era. The errors in the Gospel of Barnabas become apparent only if the text is analyzed by an objective reader who has enough knowledge of history and geography to compare first century Palestine with the Europe of the Middle Ages. The errors in the Qur’an, on the other hand, stem from its authors’ hasty and rough combination of the data concerning biblical figures and events with the help of faulty and exaggerated analogies. For example, the writers of the Qur’an mistook Jesus’ mother Mary with the Miriam of the Old Testament (Exodus 15:20), who was the daughter of Amram and sister of Aaron. This is why the following verses astonishingly teach that Jesus’ mother Mary was the same person as the daughter of Imran (biblical Amram) and sister of Aaron:

This Qur’anic confusion of the two women bearing the same name most probably resulted from the assimilation of the account about Miriam in the book of Exodus to the non-canonical account concerning Jesus’ mother Mary in the apocryphal Gospels of Infancy. However, Pseudo Barnabas did not repeat this mistake and proved to be both different from and superior to the Islamic scripture when he wrote – in accordance with the traditional teachings of the Church! – that Jesus’ mother Mary was from the tribe of Judah:

More, fake Barnabas exposed the mistake of the Qur’an writers when he talked of Aaron’s sister Miriam as a distinct woman of the Old Testament era:

As for the false accusations in the Qur’an targeting basic Christian tenets, these owe their existence either to the scribes’ ignorance of the genuine and universal teachings of the Church or to the deliberate perversion of the truth for the sake of slandering Christians and making them equal to pagans. The prevalent example of such false accusations is the contention that Christians worshipped three distinct gods and Mary was a part of the Trinity.⁷ The Qur’an seems so sure of this contention that Allah deems it crucial to rebuke Christians through Jesus’ speech:

The medieval Gospel of Barnabas, however, is unaware of this accusation and never claims that Christians worshipped Mary as a part of the Trinity. This is why Jesus is made to deny and rebuke genuine Christian tenets in the Gospel of Barnabas rather than a tenet that Christians were mistakenly presumed to embrace:

Sixth, another good reason that some Muslims have for submitting themselves to the medieval forgery of fake Barnabas is that it endorses some of the traditional Islamic teachings and commentaries which are not supported by the Qur’an. For instance, the Islamic scripture confirms the biblical teaching that God tested Abraham’s love when He asked him to offer his son as a holocaust. To compare the original account in the Bible with the one in the Qur’an:

Apart from being a summarized version of the long biblical narrative, the story in the Qur’an differs from the one in the Bible when it teaches that Abraham revealed his dream to his son, who agreed with his father and willingly submitted himself to Abraham’s plan. This kind of an alteration to the biblical account is rather understandable if the reader of the Qur’an takes into account Mohammad’s wish to make far-fetched associations between the basic Islamic concept of submission (which means “Islam”) and major biblical figures/patriarchs. Nonetheless, Muslims scholars do not give priority to this discrepancy in their religious debates with Jews and Christians, but drastically change the course of dissention when they claim that the son whom Allah asked Abraham to sacrifice was Ishmael rather than Isaac.⁸

Clearly, the account in the 37th chapter of the Qur’an extends zero support to such Muslim scholars by keeping silent on the identity of Abraham’s son. Oddly enough, the writers of the Islamic scripture were not interested in the name of the child that Abraham attempted to offer, and it is not impossible or unreasonable to construe their indifference as the implied endorsement of the name given in the Bible. After all, the Islamic version of the story does not insist on the child’s identification as Ishmael, which would be inevitable if Mohammed had been bothered by and objected to the existence of Isaac’s name in Ishmael’s stead. However, the fact that Ishmael’s name is missing from this account in the Qur’an causes much trouble for Muslim scholars who object to Isaac’s existence in this particular narrative. Most probably, the reason underlying Muslim scholars’ desire to replace Isaac with Ishmael is the link drawn between Abraham’s offered son and the divine promise in the following verses of the Bible:

Muslim scholars’ aim to replace Isaac with Ishmael is significant because it also indicates the Islamic zeal for replacing Israel with Arabs, which perfectly fits Mohammad’s identification as the last messenger and seal of all the prophets. Even though the Islamic form of the narrative about Abraham’s test by God in the Qur’an seems unaware of these aspirations and abandons Muslims in their traditional comments and teachings that the Jewish rabbis distorted the Torah and changed Ishmael to Isaac to negate Mohammad, the medieval Gospel written by Pseudo Barnabas overtly endorses all these allegations. Strikingly, fake Barnabas refers in many places of his book to the traditional Islamic teaching that the son Abraham was asked to offer was Ishmael rather than Isaac. Even at the beginning of Jesus’ prophetic ministry fake Barnabas highlights his disagreement with the biblical account:

Later, fake Barnabas takes the same traditional Islamic comment one step further and links it to the other Islamic charge against the authenticity of the Torah. It is not surprising to see that Pseudo Barnabas reiterates in his medieval forgery all the Islamic interpretations and accusations developed later than the compilation of the Qur’an:

On another occasion fake Barnabas forces Jesus to designate the Torah as a corrupted scripture and declare Ishmael superior to Isaac in terms of Mohammad’s allegedly being a descendant of the former:

The eagerness to mark Ishmael as the child of the promise compels Pseudo Barnabas to conclude that the promised Messiah cannot be Jesus on the basis of His being an Israelite⁹. This conclusion also explains why fake Barnabas makes efforts to replace Jesus the Messiah with Mohammad the supposed Messiah:

In fake Barnabas’ eyes Ishmael’s alleged superiority to Isaac is inextricably bound to the identity of the Messiah due to the racial affiliation of the divine promise with the identity of the son whom Abraham wanted to offer as a sacrifice to God:

It is clear like daylight that Pseudo Barnabas forged the narrative above through the perversion of the dialog between Jesus and the Jewish authorities in John’s Gospel 8:48-59. Barnabas’ systematic perversion is not confined to the New Testament text, for his new teaching that the true Messiah must be a descendant of Ishmael instead of Isaac is bound to the supposed correction of the account of Abraham’s sacrifice in Genesis. This is not the end of the story yet! The doctrines in the Gospel of Barnabas about the identity of the Messiah and the emphasis it lays on the name of the son that Abraham was asked to offer as a holocaust go beyond the Bible and threatens the integrity of the Qur’an. Spurious Barnabas argues that the true book of God must openly deny the statements in the Torah that the son Abraham offered was Isaac and that the promised Messiah is an Israelite. Since the Qur’an fails to do any of these, fake Barnabas implies that the Qur’an cannot be a true book from above and must therefore be rewritten for correction. Muslims scholars who embrace the Gospel of Barnabas as a reliable document know that it is a revised and updated version of their Qur’an in that it includes in the most organized form all the traditional Islamic comments and teachings missing from the Qur’an. All these teachings, which aim to strengthen and defend the Islamic scripture in religious and political debates with Jews, can be found in the medieval Gospel of Barnabas, which functions as the trouble-shooter for Islam and Muslims.

Seventh, the medieval Gospel of Barnabas is much better than the Islamic scripture with regard to the prediction of Mohammad’s prophetic ministry. In the entire Qur’an, there is only one verse in which Jesus allegedly predicts Mohammad’s advent:

This verse, which belongs to the late Medina period of the Qur’an, seems a bit troublesome for a few reasons. Although the adjective occurring in this verse corresponds to the name Ahmad in Arabic and thus links the supposed prophecy with Mohammad due to the similarities between the Arabic names Ahmad and Mohammad, the statement supposedly uttered by Jesus addresses the Jewish community. Accordingly, the reader may get the impression that Ahmad will be sent to Israel because Jesus appeals primarily to the Israelites. However, Mohammad claimed to be a prophet primarily sent to Mecca in Arabia. Further, Jesus’ alleged prediction seems to draw a parallelism between the Torah and Ahmad, for Jesus claims to stand between the Torah and Ahmad and represent present time whilst Torah represents the past and Ahmad the future. Consequently, Ahmad is expected to come to Israel in the same way as the Torah and Jesus.

Keeping this problem aside, Muslim scholars rushed to search for some verses in the New Testament that could possibly confirm Jesus’ prediction in the Qur’an verse. The only Gospel they could abuse for the sake of verifying the Islamic allegations was the one written by John the Apostle. Jesus’ farewell discourse in John 14-16 became the subject of a lackluster controversy between Islamic scholars and Christian apologists since the former focused on Jesus’ promise of a Comforter and astonishingly concluded that the promised Comforter was Mohammad:

Even though the description of the Advocate (Comforter/Counselor) in the above verse as an eternal spirit rather than a human being brings the Islamic assertions to naught, Muslim scholars argue that the Greek word for “advocate” is Parakletos, which is very similar to Periklytos, the Greek equivalent of the name “Ahmad”. The supposition that the writers of the Qur’an insisted on identifying Mohammad as Ahmad because they were aware of the similarities between the Greek word for advocate and for “the praised one” and thus aimed to raise doubts concerning the promise in John’s Gospel cannot be dismissed altogether. However, the context of the verse in the 61^st chapter of the Islamic scripture denies any such affiliation and reduces the issue to coincidence. In John’s Gospel Jesus promises the Comforter only to His followers in return for their faith in and love for Him whereas in the Qur’an Jesus promises Ahmad to all the Israelites during His prophetic ministry, disregarding the condition of belief in Him for Ahmad’s advent. This difference turns the Islamic assertions into a legend having no basis in the New Testament.

The writer of the medieval Gospel of Barnabas, on the other hand, is not pleased with the cryptic and vague prediction of Mohammad’s name in the Qur’an verse. Therefore, he repeats his basic strategy with regard to Mohammad’s prediction by overtly distorting the Gospels and implicitly correcting and ameliorating the Islamic scripture. The outcome of this habitual perversion is the new teaching that Jesus is not the Messiah, but His forerunner. Pseudo Barnabas attributes all the statements originally uttered by John the Baptist in John’s Gospel to Jesus in his forgery, replacing John the Forerunner with Jesus in the canonical writings. For instance, the account below is the altered version of John’s Gospel 1:19-27:

Fake Barnabas’ manipulation of the original narrative necessitates the deletion of John the Baptist from his own history and gospel. The Gospel of Barnabas seemingly corrects the Qur’an too and saves it from the problems caused by the occurrence of John’s name in it as Jesus the Messiah’s forerunner:

The fact that the Qur’an says nothing about John’s prophetic ministry and does not relate the fulfillment of the divine promise that he will confirm Jesus is a big problem for Muslim scholars.¹⁰. More to the point, Jesus’ alleged prediction in the 6^th verse of the 61^st chapter would perfectly solve this problem if Jesus’ name were simply changed to John’s. This was because John the Baptist prepared the way for the Messiah and predicted His coming to Israel. More interestingly, the structure of the Qur’an verse looks like the perversion of the Baptist’s testimony to Jesus in John’s Gospel:

In the canonical account John the Forerunner says that Jesus was before him and came after him. This is similar to Jesus’ defining Himself in the Qur’an verse as a man between the Torah and Ahmad. Last of all, the statement in the Qur’an verse following Jesus’ prediction is more applicable to Jesus than to Mohammad:

In another Qur’an verse Jesus’ miracles are enumerated and the Israelites are accused of considering Jesus’ work mere magic:

In the light of this verse it is more reasonable to think that the person predicted as a prophet in Surah 61:6 was Jesus rather than Ahmad because Jesus went to the Israelites and performed many miracles, all of which were called mere magic by the Israelites. Mohammad neither went to Israel nor performed any miracles. This supports the idea that the writers of the Qur’an started a chain of mistakes when they transformed John the Baptist into Jesus while trying to claim that Mohammad was prophesied by Jesus. The result of this mistake is not only a verse with an awkward structure, but also the sudden disappearance of John’s ministry and testimony from the Qur’an.

Pseudo Barnabas does not repeat the mistakes of the authors of the Qur’an, but goes ahead to correct and improve the Islamic scripture by simply turning Jesus into John the Forerunner and Mohammad into the promised Messiah.

Additionally, Pseudo Barnabas objects to the cryptic presentation of Mohammad’s name as Ahmad in the Qur’an. In order to clear all the doubts and convince Christians that Jesus uttered the name Mohammad, fake Barnabas refers to the Islamic messenger’s personal name. For instance:

Finally, some Muslim scholars love and praise the Gospel of Barnabas because they know that its writer forged it to save Islam from the trouble and burden of looking for a ghost-like book that was supposedly revealed by Allah to Jesus. Being aware of the fact that such a book never existed in history, Pseudo Barnabas decided to write that kind of a book himself and gave hope and joy to the Muslims who had become desperate after seeing that their prayers and implorations to Allah for the discovery of Jesus’ original Gospel had fallen on deaf ears. When fake Barnabas witnessed this Islamic despair, he decided to interfere and help Muslims by forging a Gospel and ascribing it to Jesus. Relevantly, fake Barnabas named his forgery the “true Gospel of Jesus” right in its first sentence:

In order to present his writing as the true Gospel of Jesus, pseudo Barnabas did not forget to consolidate the supposed authenticity of his forgery by putting the following words into Jesus’ mouth just before His ascension:

Clearly, spurious Barnabas preferred adapting the Islamic concept of the Gospel to the purely Christian understanding when he endorsed the idea that Gospel (Injil in Arabic) is not the name of a book given to Jesus from above, but the good news written by Jesus’ disciples who wanted to give testimony to His words and acts. This he did by being sure of the fact that the Islamic definition of the word “Gospel” would add nothing good to Islam and the Qur’an.¹¹

CONCLUSION

Submission to the medieval forgery named the Gospel of Barnabas is still common among Muslims no matter how many books are published to prove that the medieval forgery ascribed to Apostle Barnabas has several discrepancies with the Qur’an and contains gross examples of anachronism. In this paper I have tried to reckon the major reasons for the Islamic submission to the medieval Gospel of Barnabas and compared this forgery with both the Qur’an and the canonical Christian scripture.

The answer to the question WHY Muslims submit themselves to the Gospel of Pseudo Barnabas reveals the mistakes and deficiencies of the Qur’an on the basis of the perversion of the Christian scripture for its adaptation to Mohammad’s teachings. Of the two scriptures that aim to distort the Holy Bible, the Gospel of Barnabas is much better in form and content than the Qur’an as it serves to correct the mistakes of the Islamic scripture with the help of the traditional Islamic teachings and commentaries unknown to Mohammad. In short, the medieval Gospel of Barnabas can be considered a corrected and improved version of the Qur’an.

APPENDIX

Fake Barnabas’ zeal to replace Jesus the Messiah, an Israelite, with Mohammad, an Arab, is manifested in his forgery in the form of a supposed enmity and conflict between the Israelites and Ishmaelites. Since spurious Barnabas believes that Mohammad is a descendant of Ishmael (an Ishmaelite), he modifies some of the canonical accounts as a result of his will to present Ishmael’s descendants as the counterpart of the Samaritans in the original Gospels. For example:

Obviously, spurious Barnabas does not only change the Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel into an Ishmaelite in his, but also binds this modification to his basic argument concerning the identity of Abraham’s son to whom the promises were made. The Qur’an, however, never makes the claim that God’s promises were made in Ishmael or that God tested Abraham through Ishmael. This is mainly because the writers of the Qur’an found another way of making an association between Ishmael and Mohammad. Instead of basing his theories on a racial affinity, Mohammad asserted that Abraham and Ishmael had been to Mecca and constructed the Cube. The insertion of this allegation into the Islamic scripture illustrates Mohammad’s desire to narrate the so-called construction of the Cube by Abraham and Ishmael as hard evidence not only for the sanctity of the cube and the rituals of pilgrimage, but also for the veracity of his prophetic ministry:

Since spurious Barnabas was unaware of these Qur’an verses, he talked of neither Mecca nor the Cube in his forgery.