An old hoax has re-emerged online this week. Here’s one example, but an image search reveals that it’s hanging around Muslim forums online.
A groundbreaking discovery in Türkiye has unearthed a supposedly 1500 year-old Gospel that has sparked intense debate and challenged deeply ingrained beliefs in religious history… It is written in Syriac, an ancient dialect of Aramaic, using gold lettering on loosely tied leather.
This ancient text, known as the Gospel of Barnabas, offers a radically new perspective on a key issue in Christian theology: the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In a shocking revelation,….
This story emerged in 2012, and was comprehensively dealt with at that time. It’s not “1500 years old” – the writing in the colophon above actually says it was written in 1500 *AD* – 500 years old. It’s a copy of Matthew’s Gospel in the Syriac Peshitta version. But it’s not even that old; it’s a modern fake, using neo-Syriac book hand, and written by someone with limited knowledge of Syriac. There is a gang of Turkish forgers out there who keep producing “ancient” manuscripts, often in purple and gold.
Google search is so bad these days that the results mainly link to the nonsense, not to the careful refutations published back in 2012. The place to look is Jim Davila’s Paleojudaica blog, and in particular this article ‘More on that Turkish Aramaic “Bible”‘ which links to all the various resources. This seems to be the first in the chain. From this I learn that a couple of scholars at the AINA website analysed it:
This “Bible” is written on leather in gold letters. The picture of the front cover show inscriptions in Aramaic and a picture of a cross.
[photo]
For any native speaker of Modern Assyrian (also known as neo-Aramaic), and that would be your average Assyrian today, the inscription is easily read. The bottom inscription, which is the most clearly visible from the published photos, says the following:
Transliteration: b-shimmit maran paish kteewa aha ktawa al idateh d-rabbaneh d-dera illaya b-ninweh b’sheeta d-alpa w-khamshamma d-maran
Translation: In the name of our Lord, this book is written on the hands of the monks of the high monastery in Nineveh, in the 1,500th year of our Lord.
Nineveh is the ancient Assyrian capital and is located in present-day north Iraq, near Mosul.
There are spelling errors that are immediately noticeable.
The first word, b’shimmit maran (“in the name of our Lord”), is erroneously spelled with a ‘t’ instead of a ‘d’. The ‘d’ in Assyrian is the genitive, and it prefixes the word that follows. It should read b-shimma d-maran, not b-shimmit maran (note, the last word of the sentence is correctly spelled d-maran (“of our Lord”)).
The first word also contains another spelling error. The correct spelling for “name” in Assyrian is ashma, with the initial ‘a’ being silent. Therefore, when correctly spelled, ‘in the name of our Lord” should be written as b-ashma d-maran.
The word idateh is misspelled, it should end with an ‘a’, idata. Also the phrase al idateh (“on the hands”) is incorrect, it should read b-idata (“by the hands”).
The bottom sentence uses the word ktawa (“book”) to refer to the book, but in Assyrian the Bible is never referred to as a “book.” One says awreta (Old Testament), khdatta (New Testament), or ktawa qaddeesha (holy book). Given this, since no one has seen the inside of this “Bible,” we cannot be sure if it is in fact a Bible.
Most significantly, this writing is in Modern Assyrian, which was standardized in the 1840s. The first bible in Modern Assyrian was produced in 1848. If this book were written in 1500 A.D. it should have been written in Classical Assyrian.
It is highly unlikely for monks to make such elementary mistakes. It remains to be seen whether this book is a forgery, or even what kind of book it is.
The bottom inscription also says the book was written in 1500 A.D..
Peter Williams at ETC also looked at this:
The photo starts by homing in on the word ‘Amen’ halfway down the left hand page. As it scrolls over the wording above it is clear that it is Matthew, we get the sequence:
[dn]trwn klm’ dpqdt[kwn]…
‘n’ ‘mkwn ‘n’ kl[hwn]
[yw]mt’ ‘dm’ lšwlm[h]that they should keep all that I have commanded [you]
I am with you all
[da]ys until the end [of]It’s just plain Peshitta.
Now are my eyes deceiving me or does the last line of the colophon they show say something about ‘in the year 1,500 of our Lord’?
bšnt’ ‘lp’ whmšm’ dmrn
If so, the media dating is only out by a millennium, but I’m not sure of my reading at this stage.
The pointed Nestorian script is the giveaway that we’re not dealing with something 1,500 years old.
It is puzzling that if the end of Matthew is on the left hand page, the right hand page should be blank. Also with only two verses appearing on this page of Matthew (28:19-20) there is certainly no way this manuscript has enough pages to contain the four gospels and no way that the whole of Matthew could occur to the right. Moreover, it’s odd that all the writing is grouped on the right hand side of the page. These are features which would make me think of it as a modern forgery. Why go to the effort of using gold and yet have the appearance on the page so irregular and the margins so uneven?
After this everything went very quiet.
And what does AI have to say? I uploaded the image earlier to Google Image Search and I got this:
I have sent feedback that it is a hoax, but I have no idea if there is anyone listening. Oh well. I hope this modern blog post will catch at least some of the Google traffic.