Redating Barnabas

Abstract

Abstract The undisturbed consensus that three verses in Barnabas (Bn) 16 refer to the Temple’s destruction by Titus, and to a rumoured rebuilding sometime in the subsequent 65 years, neglects to ask whether those verses would make good sense to readers in the generation before Titus. They would, and as references to the destruction by Nebuchadnezzar, and reconstruction by Zerubbabel, vassal of Cyrus, would cohere much better with the preceding 14 chapters. And since the intertextual ‘echoes’ between Bn and Pauline letters (and 1 Peter and Hebrews) are all more plausible when reversed, and the 11th ‘king’ in Bn 4 may be Agrippa I rather than Vespasian, Nerva, or Hadrian, we can look to a date c.40. Then Bn’s linguistic and thematic links with Acts’ accounts of Stephen’s Speech and of Barnabas in Syrian Antioch are best explained if Bn was written by Barnabas to his Antioch congregation, when fetching Paul to Antioch. The classic but long-doubted objections to Barnaban authorship weigh even less if Bn was thus a generation earlier than they assumed. Finally, the sequence of the earliest witnesses to the Christian Two Ways is clarified.