1500 Year Old Bible Claims Jesus Christ Was Not Crucified

LostBoy101

Interesting piece. However the Vacitan will just deny its existence and hide it somewhere so it can be never be found again.

This discovery turns modern Christianity on its head! This bible, dating as far back as 2,000 years, details the Gospel of Barnabas, a disciple of Jesus Christ, which shows that Jesus wasn’t actually crucified and doesn’t claim him to be the son of God, but instead a prophet. The book charges that Apostle Paul was “The Impostor.” The story is completely different. In the Book of Barnabas, Jesus wasn’t crucified, but ascended to heaven alive, and Judas Iscariot was crucified instead.
The National Turk issued a report saying that the bible was seized from smugglers is a Mediterranean operation. The report states the gang was charged with smuggling a variety of things, such as antiques, illegal excavations and even explosives. The book is valued at around $28 million. That’s quite the find!
Experts and Authorities in Tehran insist that the book is authentic. It’s written in gold lettering on loosely tied leather in Aramaic, the language of Christ.
There are connections that can be drawn between this text and Islam, and it directly contradicts the New Testament’s teaching. In it, Jesus also predicts the birth of Prophet Muhammed, who founded Islam 700 years later.
Experts believe that during the Council of Nicea, the Catholic Church went through and hand picked the gospels that form what we know the bible to be today and omitted the Gospel of Barnabas (among others) in favor of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These original texts surfaced over time, and this new discovery is especially worrying to the Catholic church.
So what does this mean for religions derived of Christianity? It’s a bit of a predicament. The Vatican has asked Turkish authorities to allow them access to the book for examination. The big question is: will they accept it as evidence, deny its validity, or call it a “Muslim lie” as “Truth” Magazine did in 2000?
To many people, this book is seen as a cause for hope. But what does this mean for atheists? Is it a real text or a hoax? And does it even really matter? With any luck, this newly discovered text will force theologians to ask deeper questions about their faiths instead of believing it without thinking. Only time will tell. In the meantime, keep an open mind, be respectful of the beliefs of others, and remember that it’s our responsibility to take care of one another and this place we call home.

Source : http://higherperspective.com/2014/05/1500-year-old-bible.html?utm_source=HP

Benny_Cake

LostBoy101 wrote: »

Interesting piece. However the Vacitan will just deny its existence and hide it somewhere so it can be never be found again.


Source : http://higherperspective.com/2014/05/1500-year-old-bible.html?utm_source=HP

The "Gospel of Barnabas" is generally considered to be a medieval forgery, whereas this site claims that it is both 1500 years old and 2000 years old in the same few paragraphs. Also, the original article at the National Turk site doesn't even mention the Gospel of Barnabus (the article is over 2 years old btw).

homer911

Sounds like a highly reputable web site :rolleyes:

Gotta love their contact address:
United States of America, Planet Earth Milky Way Galaxy, The Universe

LostBoy101

Benny_Cake wrote: »

The "Gospel of Barnabas" is generally considered to be a medieval forgery, whereas this site claims that it is both 1500 years old and 2000 years old in the same few paragraphs. Also, the original article at the National Turk site doesn't even mention the Gospel of Barnabus (the article is over 2 years old btw).

I see so it can be regarded as rubbish?

Nick Park

It's worth pointing out that anyone who claims that the Council of Nicaea handpicked the books of the Bible could not be called an 'expert' by any stretch of the imagination.

We have plenty of historical records on the Council of Nicaea - it dealt with a heresy called Arianism.

Benny_Cake

LostBoy101 wrote: »

I see so it can be regarded as rubbish?

I didn't say it was rubbish, I said it's widely considered to be a forgery. And I don't see any evidence that this book is a copy of the Gospel of Barnabas.

What Nick said about the council of Nicaea is true by the way, any "expert" that claims that the council handpicked the canon of scripture is no expert at all.

mphalo1

isn't it saying he didn't die and go to heaven , he went to heaven alive or one of the lads was crucified and took one for the team ,, what one scripture says vrs what gospel truths from his own disciples says I'd go with the latter , we are warned of **** trying to put doubt in your mind so or false prophets even the anti Christ pretending to be god or Jesus so stand firm I say , Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead 3 days later but as a spirit version suddenly appearing and reappearing whenever wherever, if you look at statements of some people that see ghosts they are as real as us to look at not transparent or anything till they vanish so something similar happened to people
with our lord. I will read the found scriptures but I'll stand firm in the gospels with he died for our sins , via crucifixion

Wibbs

Benny_Cake wrote: »

The "Gospel of Barnabas" is generally considered to be a medieval forgery

Yep, it's a pretty obvious ready up to make an "Islamic" New Testament to legitimise the later doctrine of that faith.

recedite

From Wiki;

In February 2012, it was confirmed by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism that a 52-page biblical manuscript in Syriac had been deposited in the Ethnography Museum of Ankara. Newspaper reports in Turkey claimed that the manuscript had been found in Cyprus in 2000, in an operation conducted by police against smugglers, and had been kept in a police repository since then; and further speculated that the text of the manuscript could be that of the Gospel of Barnabas. No subsequent confirmation has been made, either as to the contents of the Ankara manuscript, or as to any findings of scientific tests for its age and authenticity. In March 2012 Dr Assad Sauma, an expert in medieval Syriac texts, reported that the manuscript deposited in the Ethonography Museum could be identified with one for which he had formerly undertaken a partial analysis. He stated that the portions of text that he had examined had consisted of random gospel verses and quotations; and also that he had been unable to find any correspondence between them and the text of the Gospel of Barnabas.

It should be possible to carbon date the vellum to within a hundred years or so. If it turned out to be an "original" from say, 500 AD, that would mean it was written long after all the original characters being referred to were dead and gone. The opinions of people who were born after the time of Jesus should not necessarily turn anything on its head. Any more than a manuscript or an opinion piece that is written today. Even the gospels of St. Paul fall into that category, when you think about it.

If this gospel was written 2014 years ago by an actual eye-witness to the events, it would be significant alright.

Brian Shanahan

mphalo1 wrote: »

I will read the found scriptures but I'll stand firm in the gospels with he died for our sins , via crucifixion

Even though none of them were written by people who knew the historical Jesus (being written between 65CE and 125CE approximately), contain multiple errors of fact which seriously undermine their claims to historical accuracy, and are massively contradictory, both internally and between each other?

Nick Park

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

Even though none of them were written by people who knew the historical Jesus (being written between 65CE and 125CE approximately), contain multiple errors of fact which seriously undermine their claims to historical accuracy, and are massively contradictory, both internally and between each other?

So, even if your dates here reflected the views of most scholars (which they don't) you're saying that someone writing in 65AD could not have known someone who died approx 30AD?

The majority of scholars date the Gospels within the following ranges:

Mark: 65 - 75 AD
Matthew: 70 - 100 AD
Luke: 80 - 100 AD
John: 90 - 100 AD

Very few reputable scholars would argue for a date as late as 125 AD for any of the Four Gospels. Some date them much earlier (eg JAT Robinson, certainly no champion of biblical orthodoxy, dated all Four Gospels prior to 65 AD).

Any honest person, whether favourably disposed toward Christianity or not, will readily admit that such sources are a very different kettle of fish from a work written many centuries after the events it purports to describe.

Nick Park

recedite wrote: »

From Wiki;
It should be possible to carbon date the vellum to within a hundred years or so. If it turned out to be an "original" from say, 500 AD, that would mean it was written long after all the original characters being referred to were dead and gone. The opinions of people who were born after the time of Jesus should not necessarily turn anything on its head. Any more than a manuscript or an opinion piece that is written today. Even the gospels of St. Paul fall into that category, when you think about it.

If this gospel was written 2014 years ago by an actual eye-witness to the events, it would be significant alright.

Sorry, could you explain what you mean by 'the gospels of St Paul'?

Paul didn't write any 'Gospels'. He did write letters - and historians agree that his earliest letters were written within 25 years of the death of Jesus. How are these 'in the same category' as something written 'after all the original characters being referred to were dead and gone'?

Brian Shanahan

Nick Park wrote: »

Any honest person, whether favourably disposed toward Christianity or not, will readily admit that such sources are a very different kettle of fish from a work written many centuries after the events it purports to describe.

I've cut the top bit, because quibbling over a couple of years is not exactly dignified. But the fact of the matter is that, despite your querying my approximate dates, you still have the problem that at best the four gospel accounts were written accounts of second hand knowlege (i.e. that the writer was taking down the recollections at thirty years remove of someone who witnessed the alleged events), and most likely to be third hand (i.e. neither the writer nor the person they were getting their information from witnessed the alleged events and were relying on other people's testomony). Couple this with the fact that the only sources for the recorded events are the four gospels and you are on very shaky grounds when trying to take them as reliable historical documents.

But you've ignored completely the far larger challenge I posed, the massive inconsistencies, wrong details and errors of fact in the gospels.
For example between the four gospels we have two contradictory accounts for the birth of Jesus in Matthew or Luke, while there is none in Mark (the earliest) or John (the latest). Also associated with the nativity and very problematic for establishing the historicity of the gospel narrative is the town of Nazareth, which is where Luke asserts that Joseph and Mary were from before moving to Bethlehem for the so-called census (another huge problem for the gospels). The fact is that there is no evidence of a town of Nazareth before the 3rd century at best, and you can see the problem there with a town we can't say existed until after 170 years after the death of the purported most prominent person born there.

Then we've other serious problems like the Legion story exposing the fact that the writers of Mark, Luke or Matthew knew nothing about the geography of Israel at the time, because they sited the place of the exorcism (Gadara for Mark and Luke, Gerasa for Matthew even worse) was a good distance from the Sea of Gallilee (where the pigs who Jesus supposedly cast the demons comprising Legion into went to drown) and there was a river in between the town and lake.

There are many, many problems as bad as these two examples, which indicate to any reputable historian that the gospel stories are at best an ahistoric projection of the ideas of the 2nd century church on an earlier period, or at worst a simple fabrication in order to justify christian beliefs.

Edit: But that is getting away from the original question, which was essentially: Why dismiss one document of dubious provenance and reliability when you are embracing another of equal dubiousness? That always gets me about religious people, how they can discriminate between differing mythologies and pick one to be deemed true.

Nick Park

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

I've cut the top bit, because quibbling over a couple of years is not exactly dignified. But the fact of the matter is that, despite your querying my approximate dates, you still have the problem that at best the four gospel accounts were written accounts of second hand knowlege (i.e. that the writer was taking down the recollections at thirty years remove of someone who witnessed the alleged events), and most likely to be third hand (i.e. neither the writer nor the person they were getting their information from witnessed the alleged events and were relying on other people's testomony). .

Do you know who wrote the Gospels? Or are you just making a faith statement when you assert that they were not written by eye-witnesses? Three of them may, or may not have been written by people who were present at many of the events.

One of them was almost certainly written by a non-eye-witness, namely Luke, the physician who accompanied Paul on his travels and who also wrote the Book of Acts. He would have had ample opportunity to interview eye-witnesses.

But you've ignored completely the far larger challenge I posed, the massive inconsistencies, wrong details and errors of fact in the gospels.
For example between the four gospels we have two contradictory accounts for the birth of Jesus in Matthew or Luke, while there is none in Mark (the earliest) or John (the latest).

I ignored it because it's probably in the wrong thread. There is an atheist/ Christian megathread.

The problem is that atheists tend to make grandiose claims about the Bible being full of errors and contradictions - but then come out with vague generalities and unsubstantiated claims when pressed to actually name some of these errors.

You seem to think that it's a problem that Mark and John don't mention the nativity of Jesus. Why? If it didn't suit their purpose to include an event, then that is not, to any reasonable person, an error or a contradiction.

Also associated with the nativity and very problematic for establishing the historicity of the gospel narrative is the town of Nazareth, which is where Luke asserts that Joseph and Mary were from before moving to Bethlehem for the so-called census (another huge problem for the gospels). The fact is that there is no evidence of a town of Nazareth before the 3rd century at best, and you can see the problem there with a town we can't say existed until after 170 years after the death of the purported most prominent person born there.

Argument from silence. Nazareth, as the Gospels make clear, was considered to be an unimportant place. It is hardly surprising if evidence doesn't survive 2000 years later. No problem there. You say 'We can't say it existed' - but neither can you say it didn't exist (unless you're making an unsubstantiated faith statement).

Then we've other serious problems like the Legion story exposing the fact that the writers of Mark, Luke or Matthew knew nothing about the geography of Israel at the time, because they sited the place of the exorcism (Gadara for Mark and Luke, Gerasa for Matthew even worse) was a good distance from the Sea of Gallilee (where the pigs who Jesus supposedly cast the demons comprising Legion into went to drown) and there was a river in between the town and lake.

You are incorrect here. None of the Gospels refer to 'Gadara' or 'Gerasa'. They refer to 'the country of the Gadarenes' and 'the country of the Gerasenes'. This is entirely reasonable since Gadara belonged to the larger territory of Gerasa. Therefore for one writer to talk about the Gadarenes, and another to talk of the Gerasenes, is no contradiction at all - no more than if one person spoke about an event happening in the Fingal area whereas another spoke about it happening in Greater Dublin.

Josephus refers to the territory of Gadara "which lay on the frontiers of Tiberias and formed the eastern boundary of Galilee". A reasonable site for this event would be Umm Qais, which has a large slope going down to the sea of Galilee and would have been seen as part of the land of the Gadarenes & Gerasenes.

There are many, many problems as bad as these two examples,

That bad, eh? Lol.

Edit: But that is getting away from the original question, which was essentially: Why dismiss one document of dubious provenance and reliability when you are embracing another of equal dubiousness? That always gets me about religious people, how they can discriminate between differing mythologies and pick one to be deemed true.

It's not just religious people. Actually many non-religious people appreciate the difference between texts written while eye-witnesses were still alive, and a text written centuries later.

recedite

Nick Park wrote: »

Sorry, could you explain what you mean by 'the gospels of St Paul'?

Paul didn't write any 'Gospels'. He did write letters - and historians agree that his earliest letters were written within 25 years of the death of Jesus. How are these 'in the same category' as something written 'after all the original characters being referred to were dead and gone'?

Acts of the Apostles and Epistles then. They are part of the bible are they not? Recognised as scripture? Paul's version of events that took place before his time is taken as gospel.
Paul is thought to have been only born around the time of Jesus' death. Which makes him a secondary source, not a primary source, for any Jesus related events. He can still be a primary source for letters and reports about his own personal travels and activities. Though not exactly an independent or an objective source.

If something was written 65 years after the event by a 90 year old, you would have a point, because he could well have been involved in the actual events as a young man of 25.

Nick Park

recedite wrote: »

Acts of the Apostles and Epistles then. They are part of the bible are they not? Recognised as scripture? Paul's version of events that took place before his time is taken as gospel.

Er, you do know that Acts of the Apostles was written by Luke, not Paul, don't you?

Paul is thought to have been only born around the time of Jesus' death.

Nobody who knows even the most basic facts about early Christianity would think that. Paul was a grown adult, probably in his late twenties or early thirties, at the time of Jesus' death.

Which makes him a secondary source, not a primary source, for any Jesus related events. He can still be a primary source for letters and reports about his own personal travels and activities. Though not exactly an independent or an objective source.

I don't know of anyone who thinks Paul was a primary source on the life of Jesus. That's why we have the Four Gospels.

If something was written 65 years after the event by a 90 year old, you would have a point, because he could well have been involved in the actual events as a young man of 25.

If you take Mark's Gospel, it starts with the public ministry of Jesus (three years before the crucifixion and resurrection). So Mark could easily have been a young man of 20 at the time of the events he writes about, and then written his Gospel when he was in his early fifties.

Brian Shanahan

Nick Park wrote: »

Do you know who wrote the Gospels? Or are you just making a faith statement when you assert that they were not written by eye-witnesses? Three of them may, or may not have been written by people who were present at many of the events.

Thanks for indirectly answering my question. This paragraph goes to the very heart of what I am querying, the idea that something is essentially unquestionable because it is at the centre of what a person believes. It is well acknowledged even by most christian theologians (I wouldn't call them scholars because theology is frankly not a scholastic subject but apologetic in nature). Everything I've read from you shows an unquestioning acceptance of the bible as literally true and the word of god, and the evasion, questioning and minimising of any evidence or theory which conflicts this belief.

To answer your question about authorship, while not a biblical scholar myself, I do have access to lots of material and an intelligent enough mind to dismiss the dross and apologetics. It is well accepted that the gospel of Mark was not written by an eyewitness, and being the earliest of the four gospels (and especially with Matthew and Luke being based primarily off Mark, and John being written very much as anti-semitic propoganda) the others most definitely are not. But interestingly enough, modern scholarship is of the consensus that John, the last and most apocryphal of the gospels, is the only one to contain fragments of, at much remove, eyewitness accounts. You can read a brief overview of authorship here.

Nick Park

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

Thanks for indirectly answering my question. This paragraph goes to the very heart of what I am querying, the idea that something is essentially unquestionable because it is at the centre of what a person believes. It is well acknowledged even by most christian theologians (I wouldn't call them scholars because theology is frankly not a scholastic subject but apologetic in nature). Everything I've read from you shows an unquestioning acceptance of the bible as literally true and the word of god, and the evasion, questioning and minimising of any evidence or theory which conflicts this belief.

To answer your question about authorship, while not a biblical scholar myself, I do have access to lots of material and an intelligent enough mind to dismiss the dross and apologetics. It is well accepted that the gospel of Mark was not written by an eyewitness, and being the earliest of the four gospels (and especially with Matthew and Luke being based primarily off Mark, and John being written very much as anti-semitic propoganda) the others most definitely are not. But interestingly enough, modern scholarship is of the consensus that John, the last and most apocryphal of the gospels, is the only one to contain fragments of, at much remove, eyewitness accounts. You can read a brief overview of authorship here.

So it's your subjective opinion that the Gospels were not written by eye-witnesses, but you've no idea who did write them.

Anyone who disagrees with you is evasive.

Scholars who address this subject are not real scholars.

You previously claimed that the Gospels were 'massively contradictory' and contained 'multiple errors of fact'. If that were the case it should have been easy for you to point out some undeniable contradictions and errors.

But, when challenged on this point, you posted several extremely unconvincing 'errors' and 'contradictions' in the Gospels. These were demonstrated not to be errors or contradictions at all. Now you appear to be falling back to the safer tactic of avoiding presenting any examples or evidence and simply linking to rationalwiki - hardly an authoritative or unbiased source of information.

None of this, of course, deals with the weak point you made when you entered this thread - that Christians are somehow being inconsistent in treating the Gospels (written in the First Century) as better sources than a book written many centuries later.

For the sake of this argument it doesn't matter whether the authors of the Gospels were eye-witnesses or secondary sources. Nor does it matter whether one believes the Bible to be inerrant or not. Anyone with the even a slight knowledge of history, unless they are a one-eyed propagandist going off on a rant, can readily see that the Gospels are better sources for the life and death of Jesus than something that was written at least 400 years, and probably a lot longer, later.

recedite

Nick Park wrote: »

For the sake of this argument it doesn't matter whether the authors of the Gospels were eye-witnesses or secondary sources. Nor does it matter whether one believes the Bible to be inerrant or not. Anyone with the even a slight knowledge of history, unless they are a one-eyed propagandist going off on a rant, can readily see that the Gospels are better sources for the life and death of Jesus than something that was written at least 400 years, and probably a lot longer, later.

If you are saying the gospels, if written by secondary sources who were members of a particular sect, should be more reliable than a Barnabas gospel written 400 years later by members of a different sect, then probably yes.

If you are saying the gospels, if written by secondary sources, should be more reliable than anything written later by any source, then no.

As an analogy, something written today about L. Ron Hubbard by an elderly scientologist who personally knew the man in the 1950's (or even just someone who knew someone who knew L.Ron) is not necessarily more reliable than any other account of L.Ron.

Going back to St. Paul, would you agree that he converted to the early Christian sect in dramatic manner as an adult, some time after the death of Jesus, and is unlikely to have ever met Jesus? Yet a large part of the Bible is made up of his writings. His contribution is really that of "one of the founding fathers of a religion". Not as an eyewitness to any actual events, except those involving his own conversion. If "having a vision and receiving message from God" was in itself a reason to be included in scripture, why are the scriptures not updated more regularly with modern visionaries? If his role was mainly that of a PR man in developing the early religion, then fair enough, he was obviously very good at his job.

Brian Shanahan

recedite wrote: »

Going back to St. Paul, would you agree that he converted to the early Christian sect in dramatic manner as an adult, some time after the death of Jesus, and is unlikely to have ever met Jesus?

We don't even have to go that far, his writings openly acknowledge that his vision of what Jebus "wanted" are based not on him ever meeting the man (as he acknowledges that he didn't) but on "visions" where he was told that what he subsequently preached was what Jebus wanted, these visions starting after Paul suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. And that his vision of what Jebus "wanted" is in stark contrast to the vision James brother of Jebus said Jebus wanted.

It is common knowledge that the gospels don't reflect the cult of Jebus but of the cult of Paul of Tarsus.

Nick Park

recedite wrote: »

If you are saying the gospels, if written by secondary sources who were members of a particular sect, should be more reliable than a Barnabas gospel written 400 years later by members of a different sect, then probably yes.

That's exactly what I'm saying, because that's what this thread is about.

If you are saying the gospels, if written by secondary sources, should be more reliable than anything written later by any source, then no.

That isn't what I'm saying, although I suspect that some of the interventions in this thread are an attempt to hijack it and drag us down such a rabbit hole.

Going back to St. Paul, would you agree that he converted to the early Christian sect in dramatic manner as an adult, some time after the death of Jesus, and is unlikely to have ever met Jesus? Yet a large part of the Bible is made up of his writings. His contribution is really that of "one of the founding fathers of a religion". Not as an eyewitness to any actual events, except those involving his own conversion. If "having a vision and receiving message from God" was in itself a reason to be included in scripture, why are the scriptures not updated more regularly with modern visionaries? If his role was mainly that of a PR man in developing the early religion, then fair enough, he was obviously very good at his job.

We're talking about two different things here. The Gospel of Barnabas purports to give a contradictory account to the Four Gospels of facts pertaining to the life and death of Jesus Christ.

The apostle Paul had very little to say about the historical details of Christ's life and death. The few references he does make (clearly as a secondary source who communicated with eye-witnesses) supplement rather than contradict (eg the detail that Christ appeared to 500 followers after His Resurrection).

Most of what Paul wrote was exploring how we work out our experience of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in the world around us. That is what Christian thinkers and theologians have continued to do for the last 2000 years.

Most Christians do believe that the Canon of Scripture closed with the writing of the Book of Revelation. While that is an interesting subject (at least I find it interesting) it is of little relevance in this thread.

hinault

Some here won't accept the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

But they are prepared to accept the Gospel of Barnabas.

Go figure.

dvae

how can the book of Barnabas be taken seriously?
from what I can gather, Barnabas says that "Jesus was not the son of God" and, "he never died by crucifixion".
if we were to believe this then we would have to discredit the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, James, Jude,
and Paul. not to mention all the prophesies that go in to great detail about the lineage of Christ, and where and how he would die in the O/T.

madness.......

recedite

dvae wrote: »

madness.......

Islam, actually.