The so-called Gospel of Barnabas is attested by two textual witnesses, an Italian manuscript probably dating from the end of the sixteenth century and presently kept in Vienna, and a lacunar Spanish manuscript from the eighteenth century recently rediscovered in Sydney.The Italian manuscript was edited with an English translation by Lonsdale and Laura Ragg, The Gospel of Barnabas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907). A facsimile of the manuscript, with a French translation, is given in Luigi Cirillo and Michel Frémaux, Évangile de Barnabé (Paris: Beauchesne, 1977). The Spanish manuscript is available in the edition of Luis F. Bernabé Pons, El texto morisco del Evangelio de San Bernabé (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1998). For a description of this manuscript and its history, see John Fletcher, “The Spanish Gospel of Barnabas,” NovT 18 (1976) 314–20. Very little is known, however, about the origins of the writing; dates assigned to it range from antiquity to the early seventeenth century.See the review of recent publications in Jan Slomp, “The ‘Gospel of Barnabas’ in recent research,” Islamochristiana 23 (1997) 81–109. Online: http://home.t-online.de/home/chrislages/barnarom.htm.

Christian Orientalists have always been fascinated by the fact that the Greek text of the canonical Gospels is in some way secondary to a Semitic tradition. Indeed, even if we accept that all four Gospels were written in Greek, we must allow, somewhere in the chain of tradition from the teaching of Jesus to the Gospel-writers, for a transition from Aramaic to Greek. Consequently, a fruitful exegetical approach to the Gospel text has been the attempt to go beyond the Greek text-form to the more original Aramaic wording and to understand this wording in its proper setting in Palestinian Judaism of the 1st century AD. Several methods have been applied within this approach. G. Dalman championed the retroversion of significant New Testament terms into Palestinian Jewish Aramaic (and Hebrew), and investigated the use of the retroverted terms in Jewish texts of the first centuries. J. Wellhausen, and others, searched for anomalies in the Greek Gospel-text which might be explained as mistaken translations of Aramaic expressions. The history of research on this question up to 1946 is discussed and evaluated by M. Black in his Aramaic Approach to the Gospels.