The Letter and Its Allegory

The Epistle of Barnabas is famous, and notorious, for its method: it reads the whole of the Mosaic Law allegorically, arguing that its precepts were never meant to be kept literally, that Israel forfeited the covenant, and that its true meaning is Christ — even finding the cross and the name of Jesus in the number 318 of Genesis 14:14. This file describes the Epistle’s structure, its allegorical reading of the dietary laws, circumcision, the sabbath, and the Temple, its supersessionist claim, and how an Orthodox reader assesses it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

Two Halves

The Epistle divides cleanly into a doctrinal part (chapters 1–17) and a moral part (chapters 18–21). The doctrinal part is a sustained argument about the Old Testament: that the Scriptures of Israel, rightly understood, were always about Christ and the Church, and that the Jews, by taking the Law literally, fundamentally misread their own books (Epistle of Barnabas 2–16; trans. Holmes 2007). The moral part presents the “Two Ways” — the way of light and the way of darkness, governed respectively by the angels of God and of Satan — a piece of early Christian ethical catechesis closely parallel to the Two Ways of the Didache, both probably drawing on a common Jewish-Christian source (Epistle of Barnabas 18–20; Holmes 2007; Paget 1994). It is the doctrinal part, with its allegorical hermeneutic, that gives the Epistle its distinctive and controversial character.

The Allegorical Reading of the Law

The governing thesis of the Epistle is stated bluntly: the commandments of the Law were never intended by God to be observed in their literal, material sense, and Israel erred from the beginning in so observing them. The author works this out commandment by commandment.

On the food laws, the Epistle argues that Moses, in forbidding the eating of unclean animals, “spoke in the spirit” and meant moral, not dietary, instruction: the prohibition of the pig means “do not associate with men who are like swine”; the ban on birds of prey means “do not associate with the rapacious”; the hare, the hyena, and the weasel are made figures of various vices — so that the dietary laws were always a coded ethics, and “Moses received three decrees concerning food and thus spoke of them in the spirit; but they, because of the desires of their flesh, accepted them as actually referring to food” (Epistle of Barnabas 10; trans. Holmes 2007). Literal kashrut, on this reading, was a misunderstanding from the start.

On circumcision, the Epistle goes further still, into territory the Church would not follow. The author argues that physical circumcision was never God’s true intent — that “an evil angel was misleading them” when Israel took it literally — and that the circumcision that saves is of the ears and the heart (Epistle of Barnabas 9; Holmes 2007). On the sabbath, he allegorizes the seventh day into the eschatological “eighth day,” the day of the Lord’s resurrection and the new world, denying that God desires the literal sabbath rest of the Jews (Epistle of Barnabas 15; Holmes 2007). On the Temple, he denies that God ever wished to dwell in a building made with hands, locating the true temple in the heart of the believer (Epistle of Barnabas 16; Holmes 2007).

The Cross in Genesis 14:14

The most celebrated single instance of the Epistle‘s method is its reading of the number of Abraham’s servants. When Abraham circumcised the men of his household, the Epistle says, he did so “looking forward in the spirit to Jesus” — and it finds this in the number 318. In Genesis 14:14, Abraham arms three hundred and eighteen of his servants. The author, using the Greek numeral letters (gematria), reads 318 as the letters iota (10), eta (8), and tau (300): iota-eta spell the first two letters of the name Iēsous (Jesus), and tau, shaped like a cross, signifies the cross — so that the number 318 secretly proclaims “Jesus” and “the cross” (Epistle of Barnabas 9.7–9; trans. Holmes 2007). “No one has heard a more excellent lesson from me,” the author adds, “but I know that you are worthy” (Epistle of Barnabas 9.9). This is the Epistle’s allegorical method at its boldest — and, to most modern readers, at its most arbitrary — finding the central Christian mysteries hidden in the digits of an Old Testament number.

The Supersessionist Claim

Underlying the allegory is a strong and explicit supersessionism. The Epistle does not merely say that the Church fulfills what Israel foreshadowed; it argues that Israel never possessed the covenant at all. The author claims that when Moses, descending from Sinai and seeing the people worshiping the golden calf, threw down and shattered the tablets, “their covenant was broken in pieces, in order that the covenant of the beloved Jesus might be sealed in our hearts” — so that the covenant was forfeited by Israel at the very moment of its giving and belongs to the Church alone (Epistle of Barnabas 4.6–8; 14; trans. Holmes 2007). “Take heed to yourselves now,” he warns his readers, “and do not become like certain people by piling up your sins, saying that the covenant is both theirs and ours. It is ours” (Epistle of Barnabas 4.6–7; Holmes 2007). This is among the sharpest statements of the disinheritance of Israel in early Christian literature, and it is what makes the Epistle both historically important and theologically troubling.

An Orthodox Assessment

Two things must be held together in assessing the Epistle. On the one hand, the typological and spiritual reading of the Old Testament is itself thoroughly at home in the Orthodox tradition: the Fathers read the Scriptures of Israel as a forest of types fulfilled in Christ — the Passover lamb, the brazen serpent, the Red Sea as baptism — and the New Testament itself does so (1 Corinthians 10:1–4; the whole Epistle to the Hebrews). The Epistle of Barnabas stands at the headwaters of this Christian reading of the Old Testament, and as such it is a valuable early witness (Paget 1994; on patristic exegesis, The Church Fathers).

On the other hand, the Epistle presses allegory past the point the catholic tradition would follow. Where the Fathers affirm the literal and historical sense of the Old Testament as the ground on which the spiritual sense is built — the events really happened, the Law was really given and really observed by the saints — the Epistle tends to dissolve the literal sense entirely, denying that God ever willed the literal observance of the Law and that Israel ever truly held the covenant (Epistle of Barnabas 4, 9, 10; Prostmeier 1999). This is precisely where it parts from the mainstream: the Church’s typology fulfills the Law; the Epistle’s allegory tends to erase it. Modern scholars note both the Epistle’s debt to the allegorical milieu of Alexandria and the way its supersessionism exceeds that of Paul, who insists that “the law is holy” (Romans 7:12) and that the gifts and call of God to Israel are irrevocable (Romans 11:29). For the Orthodox reader, the Epistle is therefore received as a genuine and early monument of Christian exegesis, honored in its antiquity, but read critically — and certainly not as the teaching of the apostle whose name it bears, a Levite and companion of the Paul whose own theology of Israel is far more careful (see The Epistle of Barnabas on the authorship).

References

The Epistle of Barnabas, chapters 2–21 (esp. 4, 9, 10, 15, 16, 18–20). In Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (“It is ours” at 4.6–7; the food laws at 10; circumcision and the 318 gematria at 9; the sabbath at 15; the Temple at 16.)
Paget, James Carleton. The Epistle of Barnabas: Outlook and Background. WUNT 2/64. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994. (The allegorical method, the Two Ways, and the relation to Alexandrian exegesis.)
Prostmeier, Ferdinand R. Der Barnabasbrief. KAV 8. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999. (Commentary on the supersessionist passages.)
Romans 7:12; 11:29; 1 Corinthians 10:1–4. (The Pauline theology of the Law and Israel, for contrast.)
Lightfoot, J. B., and J. R. Harmer. The Apostolic Fathers. London: Macmillan, 1891.