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Who
is Saint Barnabas ?
The prophecy of Jesus Christ about the advent of the Holy Prophet is faithfully and clearly recorded in the Gospel of Barnabas, which is excluded from the Bible, may be, for this very reason, and for the reason of Christ's denial, in it, of his divinity and crucifixion and of his assertion of his
humanity as a Prophet of God sent to the Children of Israel.
St. Barnabas is mentioned in the Bible as an 'Apostle' of Jesus (Acts14:14) and as a
"a good man and full of the Holy ghost and of faith" (Acts 11:24), selected by the Holy ghost to preach
Christ to the Gentiles in the company of St. Paul (Acts 13:2) - facts quite sufficient to give this Gospel the halo of authenticity. Besides, the Gospel of Barnabas has been in use in the churches of Alexandria as a Canonical Gospel until the Council of Nice (325 A .C), at which Christianity is said to have assumed a new shape on a account of the machination of Emperor Constantine.
The most important Bible is the Bible of Barnabas. A Jew born in Cyprus, Barnabas’ real name was Joses. He is one of the leading believers of Jesus and occupies an important post among the apostles. The nick name BARNABAS given to him means “ who gives advice, who encourages to do goods “ The Christian world knows Barnabas as “ great saint who together with Saints Paul set out for promulgating Christianity first “,and celebrates 11 June as a St. Saint’s day.
Like
the other four Apostles, Barnabas also
wrote a Bible. He recorded the
facts he had heard and
learned from Jesus in that
Bible without changing them.
That Bible, together with the other copies of the Bible, was the rage and
was read during the first three hundred years of Christianity. When the first
Nicene Council held in 325 decided that all
the copies of Bible written in Hebrew would be raised, Barnabas’s
Bible was burned, too. The other Bibles were to translated into Latin, but
Barnabas’s Bible was suddenly lost. Only , in the year
383, Pope Damaucus kept in the library of his papacy a surviving
copy of the Bible which came into his possession by chance. Barnabas’s
Bible remained there until 1585 (hijri 993) , when fra Marino (Fra means
brother and monk in Italian), who was a friend of Pope Sixtus’s, found
it in the library and had deep interest in it, For , approximately in 160,
IRANANEUS (130-200) had put forward that “ there is only on God, and
Jesus is not he son of God ”, and had said, “
Influenced by the Romans’ custom of worshipping many gods, Saint Paul
wanted to introduce the idea of trinity, which means to worship three
gods, into the Christian creed “ , and in his criticism of St. Paul he
had called to witness Barnabas’s Bible, which stated that there is only
one God. Fra Marino knew this, so he read Barnabas’s Bible with utmost
attention and translated it into Italian conjecturally between the year
1585- 1590. After changing many hands, the Italian manuscript came into
possession of CRAMER, one of the
councillors of the King of Prussia. And in 1125 (1713) Cramer presented
that valuable manuscript to Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663-1736), who had
made a great European reputation for having defeated the Turks in Zenta
and taken back Hungary and the fortress of Belgrade from them. After
Prince Eugene’s death, Barnabas’s Bible , together with all his
private library, was transferred to the Royal Library (Hofbibliothek) in
Vienna in 1738.
(ICRA)