To be accepted in the canon, a work had to have apostolic authorship, be in wide use in the Church, be quoted by many Church Fathers, and proclaim the Good News with right teachings. Some early Church Fathers accepted that the author was the fellow apostle prominently mentioned by St Paul and the Book of Acts, though only the title and little in the text leads you to that conclusion. The Epistle of Barnabas was not widely used in the local liturgies of the church, nor did many patristic Church Fathers quote from the Epistle of Barnabas.

As one translator notes, Barnabas “denies flatly there is any historic link between Judaism and the Gospel. All the rites and ceremonies of the Law, he tells us, had been intended by God simply as mystical pointers to Christ; but the Jewish people had been seduced by an evil angel into a literal instead of a spiritual understanding of them, leading them to regard the observance of the ordinances as a sufficient end in itself.”

Were the early Church Fathers anti-Semitic? Modern readers judge the attitudes of early Christians from the lens of the knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust, but there were no Hitlers advocating mass murder of Jews among the early Church Fathers. The early Christians did not directly persecute Jews because they were a minority religion, instead the early Christians themselves feared persecution. But over the centuries, as Christianity became central to the Western tradition, and the consequences of creeping anti-Semitism sometimes resulted in pogroms where Jews were often exiled, often lost their property, sometimes lost their lives. These pogroms were often condemned by the Pope.

One main source used by Barnabas is the ancient church writing, the Didache, or Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, on the way of light and the way of darkness.

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As Socrates teaches us, the examined life is a life worth living. We would be fools if we did not desire to learn from our multitude of friends whose words live in the works of the classics that have survived from past centuries and millennia. The Stoic and moral philosophers of Greece and Rome saw philosophy as an evangelical enterprise, seeking to spread the joy of living a godly life for its own sake.

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Studying the teachings of the ancient and modern stoic and moral philosophers on how to better lead a godly life.
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Everyone should join and participate in their local church. However, my internet persona is purposefully obscure so that I can be respectful of all genuine Judeo-Christian traditions, I do not wish to be disrespectfully polemical.

This is original content based on research by Bruce Strom and his blogs. Images in the Public Domain, many from Wikipedia, some from the National Archives, are selected to provide illustration. When images of the actual topic or event are not available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. The ancient world was a warrior culture out of necessity, to learn from the distant past we should not only judge them from our modern perspective but also from their own ancient perspective on their own terms.

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