Many people have been circulating this supposed "news," which isn't new at all. Nor is the Vatican "shocked" by an old Syriac Bible purportedly from 1,500 years ago.

 

There is nothing new in the Bible that the Vatican's scholars and other experts have not known about for the past 18 centuries or so.

 

To begin with, Christian apologists rebut that the so-called 'Ankara Bible' evidently is not 1,500 years old but may date from 1500 AD/CE at the earliest, while also contending that the book may be a "forgery."

 

In reality, this particular book may not be as ancient as is claimed, but its doctrines were not fabricated at that time.

 

Indeed, the Ankara Bible's "strange" doctrines of Jesus not being crucified and other peculiarities are simply a rehash of one of the many strains of Christianity that thrived from the second century AD/CE onward.

 

This Syrian-Arab Christian perspective thus has been around for many centuries, since antiquity, based on the apocryphal Gospel of Barnabas and other such non-canonical texts.

 

The contents of the Gospel of Barnabas include the following:

It generally resonates better with existing Muslim views than with Christianity:

• it foretells the coming of Muhammad by name

• rather than describing the crucifixion of Jesus, it describes him being raised up into heaven, similar to the description of Elijah in 2 Kings, Chapter 2

• it calls Jesus a "prophet" whose mission was restricted to the "house of Israel"

 

 

 

The 'name' Muhammad

 

As concerns the claim that Barnabas "names" Muhammad/Mohammed, that 'title' simply means "praised" or "praiseworthy," so any book that includes the Arabic word for "praiseworthy" as an epithet could be said to be "predict Mohammed."

 

In other words, "Mohammed" is simply a title that could be applied to many people and probably was, long before a historical Mohammed supposedly existed.

 

In this regard, it is also claimed that the name "Mohammed" was included in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament/Tanakh, at Song of Songs 5:16, which represents a love song about the singer's "beloved":

His speech is most sweet, and he is altogether desirable. This is my beloved and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.

The Hebrew word here for "desirable" is מחמד machmad, a term Muslim apologists contend is the "prediction" of Mohammed as well.

 

Neither the Bible nor the Barnabas gospel "predicts Mohammed," however.

 

If anything, Mohammed is a fictional compilation of characters, and Song of Songs 5, the Barnabas gospel and other apocryphal texts were used to create him, as was done with Moses and Jesus before him.

 

In reality, the ideas in Barnabas evidently were used to create Islam, which includes the book's heretical doctrines in the Quran. In the end, the gleeful recent touting of this Bible and Gospel basically represents Muslim propaganda.

 

Again, there were MANY different strains of Christianity beginning in the second century.

 

That's one very big clue that we are talking about a MYTH.

 

 

 

 

The Gospel of Barnabas

...Predicts The Coming of Prophet Muhammad

 

 

 

 

 

 

Related

• Gospel of Barnabas

• 1500 year-old Syriac Bible found in Ankara, Turkey - Vatican in shock!

• Is Mohammed a Man or Myth?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not-a-1500 Year Old Bible in Turkey
24 February 2012

from TML Website

 

 

 

Seems this stuff comes up every week, but this picture is apparently that of an alleged 1500 year old Bible that is now being kept in Ankara.

 

The story is that Turkish police seized it in an anti-smuggling operation in 2000. It is only now coming to light because the Vatican is asking for it. It apparently contains the Gospel of Barnabas, which scholars almost unanimously date to the 16^th century as a late pseudo-gospel that was written to give the impression that it was the work of Barnabas.

 

Why is this gospel so potentially valuable to Turkey?

 

 

 

 

It contains within it some material that seems to predict the coming of Mohammed, and generally follows the standard Muslim account of early Christianity.

 

So if Turkey can prove it is from 500 AD it obviously scores a huge point since Mohammed doesn't come until the end of that century, and thus the book would clearly be a prophecy about his coming.

 

Lots at stake then, and no surprise the Turkish authorities are not so readily handing it over to the Vatican and are instead keeping it under military control.

I just spoke with my colleague about this, and after both of us have had the chance to look at it we concur it is impossible this is a 1500 year old Bible. What could be really funny is that at the bottom it appears to read something like 1500 AD.

 

It is admittedly tough to read, but it would quite a mistake to claim it is 1500 years old when it was produced in 1500. This date would also conform to what most scholarship believes anyway, that this gospel was produced around this time.

 

Please do chime in if you have a better read on this, but I think this is another phony.

 

 

 

UPDATE:

 

Another colleague just wrote:

Another modern fake, I'm afraid - hence the gold ink, and the uncured skins. (Forgers are obsessed with using skins instead of vellum or paper.)

 

For once the forger seems to know some Syriac, but not very well. Not sure about the last date -  looks like 1500 of 'our Lord', which is itself very dubious!

Anyway, this is interesting but read it with discernment:

Aydoğan Vatandaş, a Today's Zaman journalist and author who has written two books on the Gospel of Barnabas, said there is no clue that the Bible mentioned in the Turkish press dates back to 1,500 years ago, but he said it is sure that the Gospel of Barnabas had been written in the Aramaic language and Syriac alphabet.

"There is only one Gospel that exactly matches this definition: the 'Gospel of Barnabas' that was found in a cave in Uludere in Hakkari [now of Şırnak] in the early 1980s by villagers, which I told the story of first as a screenplay in 2005 for a film project, then in my novel in 2007, 'The Secret of Gospel of Barnabas' and my investigative journalism book, 'Apokrifal' in 2008."

As a result of his research, Vatandaş said he found that this Gospel was actually preserved by the Special Armed Forces intelligence unit in the 1990s and that some parts of this Gospel were translated by an Aramaic language expert Dr. Hamza Hocagil under the control of the intelligence unit.

 

He said Dr. Hocagil was asked to stop translating it by the Special Armed Forces when it turned out that he had shared sensitive information with journalists at the time.

"Since then we did not know where this Gospel was.

 

After my book about the entire story of this Gospel and the criminal incidents surrounding it, the public's interest and curiosity has increased and the Turkish military has been the target of several questions about the case.

 

Therefore, I believe that the emergence of this Gospel again is very timely," he said.

Vatandaş also claimed that three other copies of this Gospel written by St. Barnabas are hidden in different locations in the region, so the Gospel in Ankara might be one of these as well.