Early Manuscript Copies
Our third clue is the abundance of early New Testament manuscripts which have helped scholars determine the approximate time they were originally composed.
Archaeologists have discovered over 5,600 manuscript copies of the New Testament in the original Greek language, some complete books, and some mere fragments. Counting other languages, there are over 24,000.20 However, only three copies of the Gospel of Barnabas have been discovered.
Furthermore, archaeologists have discovered New Testament fragments that date to within a generation or two after Christ, compared with hundreds of years later for the Gospel of Barnabas.
Scholars’ Consensus
Prior to these findings, German critical scholars from the late 19th and early 20th centuries had argued that the New Testament was written by unknown authors in the 2nd century. But this new evidence reveals that its books were all written in the 1st century. Historian Paul Johnson writes:
The late nineteenth-early twentieth-century notion that the New Testament was a collection of late and highly imaginative records can no longer be seriously held. No one now doubts that St. Paul’s epistles, the earliest Christian records, are authentic or dates them later than the A.D. 50s.21
Archaeologist William Albright states the entire New Testament was written at “very probably sometime between about 50 A.D. and 75 A.D.”22
The following chart illustrates the significant difference between the writing of New Testament and the Gospel of Barnabas.
| RELIABILITY TESTS | NEW TESTAMENT | GOSPEL OF BARNABAS |
| Date of Original | AD 40-95 | AD 400-1500 |
| Earliest Verified Copies | AD 117-138 | AD 400-1500 |
| Gap from Original | 22-98 years | Undetermined |
| Years after Christ | 7-30 | 370-1,470 |
| Number of Manuscripts in Original Language | 5,600+ | None |
| Number of Manuscripts in All Languages | 24,000+ | 3 |
| Citations in other Historical Documents | 36,000+ | 2 |
Conclusion
Whereas the “secret Bible” called the Gospel of Barnabas was written 400-1500 years after Christ, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written in the 1st century, within one generation of his life.
Neither the Gnostic Gospels nor the Gospel of Barnabas meet the stringent standards early church fathers used to determine which books were the authentic eyewitness reports of the apostles. They were excluded for their late dating, fraudulent authorship and inconsistency with the eyewitness accounts of the apostles.
As one reads the New Testament, it becomes apparent that the writers made every attempt to honestly record the life, words and events surrounding Jesus. Luke, the writer of both the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, puts it this way,
Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write a careful account for you, most honorable Theophilus, so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught.23
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