How We Got the Bible
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He emphasizes that the material world is indeed the Creation of the one God, who spoke through the prophets and has now sent Jesus into the world in the flesh “so that he might set free all flesh through his flesh, and might raise us from the dead as fleshly beings.” This is a proto-orthodox, antignostic production. Not well known to most Christians in the West, it had a remarkable reception in other parts of the world. In Armenia and parts of Syria it was accepted as canonical Scripture, even though, as well known to scholars, it was written at least a century after Paul’s death. The Letter of Barnabas
According to both Paul and the book of Acts, one of his close apostolic companions was a man named Barnabas, about whom we are otherwise poorly informed. About seventy years after both Paul and Barnabas died, some anonymous author wrote a “letter”—actually more of a theological treatise—that eventually came to be attributed to Barnabas, no doubt in order to promote its reputation among Christian readers. Some proto-orthodox Christians were quite insistent that the book belonged in the canon of Scripture, and it is found among the New Testament writings in our earliest complete manuscript of the New Testament, known as the Codex Sinaiticus, dating from the middle of the fourth century. Christians of modern times might express some relief that Barnabas was not eventually included among the books of sacred writ. Even more than the books that did get into the New Testament, this letter is virulently and unashamedly anti-Jewish in its views. In fact, it is largely a discussion of the Jewish religion and the Jewish Scripture. Its overarching theme is that Jews are not the people of God because they rejected the covenant that God made with Moses on Mount Sinai, for down below they were making and worshipping the golden calf. As a result, God rejected them. The laws he gave Moses were