William Milligan

“ These men, as appears from the tenor of the whole chapter, must have been Jews, and their statement could have no other meaning than that Judaism, as the Jews understood and lived it, was God's covenant, that it was to be preferred to Christianity, and that the observance of its rites and ceremonies was the true divine life to which men ought to be called. ”

“ In short, those to whom Barnabas writes are in danger of falling away from Christian faith altogether; or, if not in actual danger of this, they have to contend with those who are striving to bring about such a result, who are exalting the ancient oeconomy, boasting of Israel's nearness to God, and praising the legal offerings and fastings of the O.T. as the true way by which the Almighty is to be approached. ”

“ In carrying out his argument upon the first point, the writer everywhere proceeds on the idea that the worship which God requires, which alone corresponds to His nature, and which therefore can alone please Him, is spiritual, not a worship of rites and ceremonies, of places and seasons, but a worship of the heart and life. It is not by sacrifices and oblations that we approach God, Who will have no offerings thus made by man [1] (c. ii.) ; it is not by keeping sabbaths that we honour Him (c. xv.) ; nor is it in any temple made with hands that He is to be found (c. xvi.) ”

“ Finally, we are too prone to forget that the substance of Christian truth may be held by others in connexion with misapprehensions, imperfections, misinterpretations, of Scripture, absurd and foolish views, in connexion with which it would be wholly impossible for us to hold it. ”

“ It was an undoubted fact that the Saviour had associated with publicans and sinners, and Barnabas may mean no more than that out of that class were the apostles chosen. He may even have had the career of Saul previous to his call to the apostleship mainly in view. The fourth argument of Hefele, that the epistle betrays in c. x. so much ignorance of the habits of various animals, is not valid ”

“ The second, that Barnabas had died before the destruction of Jerusalem, while the epistle bears clear marks of not having been written until after that date; for this idea is no just inference from the texts referred to, Col. iv. 10, I Pet. v. 13, 2 Tim. iii. (iv. ?) 11, and the authority of a monk of the 6th or 9th cent. is not to be relied on. The third, that the apostles chosen by our Lord are described in c. v. as ὑπὲρ πᾶσαν ἁμαρτίαν ἀνομώτεροι; for these words are simply introduced to magnify the grace of Christ in calling not the righteous but sinners to repentance. ”

“ His chief trust is in the γνῶσις, that deeper, that typical and allegorical, method of interpreting Scripture which proceeded upon the principle that the letter was a mere shell, and had never been intended to be understood literally. ”

“ The authorship of Barnabas is rejected by, among others, Neander, Ullman, Hug, Baur, Hefele, Winer, Hilgenfeld, Donaldson, Westcott, Mühler, while it is maintained by Gieseler, Credner, Guericke, Bleek, Möhler, and, though with hesitation, De Wette. [The weighty judgment of bp. Lightfoot must now (1911) be added to the list in favour, and will generally be considered as decisive: see Apost. Fathers, pt. i, vol. ii. pp. 503-512.]
II. The Date of the Epistle.—External evidence does not help us here. We are thrown wholly upon the internal. ”

“ A trans. of the epistle is contained in the vol. of the Apost. Fathers in the Ante-Nicene Christian Lib. (T. & T. Clark, 10s. 6d.) . The ed. princeps by archbp. Ussher (Oxf. 1642) has been reprinted by the Clarendon Press with a dissertation by J. H. Backhouse. The best text for English scholars is given in Lightfoot, Apostolic Fathers, ed. by bp. Harmer (Lond. 1991) , pp. ”