keepitcatholic:

snakesaredelicious:

the-knights-are-not-dead:

prettyboyshyflizzy:

umiko-hitara:

poisonpawz:

zftw:

voyagebysexualdiscovery:

Uh oh

wouldn’t that be awkward

Can I get some credible sources?

Here’s one

and another

and one more for the road

this wont end well

all it is is proof people have been coming up with conspiracy theories for centuries. it’s fucking bollocks.

gold lettering, black leather-bound book, unsigned? well doesn’t that sound dramatic and mysterious? to me, it sounds more like the Book of Mormon hoax – a secret, controversial text that’s written weirdly (gold letters on black paper = gold plates buried in the woods), only a few have access to and the Church don’t want you to see.

it’s a centuries-old con. it’s fucking clickbait.

let’s break this down. in the first article, the implication that it has been kept secret by the Vatican is false – “many followers of Islam believe the original gospel work was repressed by the Vatican Library” – the Vatican actually want access to it; it’s been repressed by the Turkish authorities (implying that the Church are repressing it is just typical anti-Catholic propaganda).

and who do the Turkish authorities have a grudge against? Sunni Muslims – the people who this ‘gospel’ benefits (heavy air-quotes on the use of the word gospel). the article never actually says how they arrived at this figure of 1500 years, but it fits with the historical fad for rewriting scripture – most notoriously, the Torah/Pentateuch by Mohammed – to fit local beliefs, to create controversy, and to pass off a forgery as real. it dovetails so well with Muslim theology because they’re both influenced by the same event – the gradual formalisation of Christianity by deciding between canonical, apocryphal, and non-canonical texts.

here’s the thing though. this book isn’t 1500 years old. it isn’t even a gospel. it’s 500 years old. and it’s a fake. the inscription reads “In the name of the Lord, this book is written by monks of the high monastery in Nineveh in the 1500th year of our Lord.” when copying apocryphal works, monks would still call it a holy book.

more generally, the gospel of Barnabas itself is of far-more dubious origin than any of the canonical gospels. if it’s really written by Barnabas, why the actual fuck does he call Paul – his mentor, his colleague, his closest companion – an ‘impostor’. if it’s not, then it’s kinda pointless to claim it has any legitimacy. yeah, maybe someone who’s not Barnabas wrote it and used his name to boost the profile of the work, but that still doesn’t answer the question of how something first recorded in c. 500 is considered more authentic than the actual canonical gospels.

the pseudo-epigraphical gospel of Barnabas is 500 years old. the canonical gospel of Mark is 1950 years old. the synoptics’ authenticity doesn’t come from their age though. it comes from the fact they were written whilst the apostles were still alive.

also, why the fuck would something allegedly from c. 500 in Turkey be written in Aramaic? that’s because it’s not: it’s written in Syriac, a dialect, as the third link shows. the original post says “Aramaic” because it’s popular knowledge that was the spoken language for the Jewish civilians in the Gospels (ie. Jesus). again, it’s fucking clickbait! anything of a serious scriptural bent would have be written in Latin, or possibly Greek if you really want to pull the wool over people’s eyes. it’s written in Syriac because it was the closest thing people had to Aramaic, the language a forgery would choose to say “HEY! THIS IS REAL! IT’S WRITTEN IN THE RIGHT LANGUAGE!”

it’s a conspiracy theory. just because it’s vaguely old, that doesn’t make it valid. if i produced a document from 1964 saying that JFK had been kidnapped by aliens and it was LBJ who was shot in Dallas instead, would you believe it just because it’s old?

no. use your noggins.

tl;dr – conspiracy theories aren’t anything new

PS. the second link is just plain dead.

PPS. the first article cites the third article – so there aren’t three separate sources, there’s one – and also cites a highly unbiased Muslim website called Answering Christianity.

So like, did no one bother to even Google that the Gospel of Barnabas is a known fake text that was made specifically to get Christians to convert to Islam by claiming Christ wasn’t Divine? You guys are aware Barnabas the Apostle died in the 1st century AD, so how could he have written something in the 500s?

These are not retoricle mind you

The Catholic Church: *has been dunking on apocryphal forgeries for 2,000 years*

Some Dumbass Reporter: “the Vatican is SHOCKED!!!!1!! Utterly DISMAYED!!!”