JC wasn't crucified, says 1500-year-old bible

[Confused Ape]

Ok, pigeons, here comes the cat...

You missed out a very important point in your quote -

Jesus also foresees the coming of the Prophet Muhammad, who would found Islam 700 years later.

I looked it up on wikipedia which is a useful place to start for things. It turns out that the content of the Gospel has been known for a very long time. The excitement is due to the possibility of it being a very old copy if it isn't a forgery. The only way it could rock the boat for Christians is if scientific analysis dates this old Bible to a time before Islam started.

Gospel of Barnabus

The Gospel of Barnabas is a book depicting the life of Jesus, and claiming to be by Jesus' disciple Barnabas, who in this work is one of the twelve apostles. Two manuscripts are known to have existed, both dated to the late 16th century and written respectively in Italian and in Spanish—although the Spanish manuscript is now lost, its text surviving only in a partial 18th-century transcript. Barnabas is about the same length as the four Canonical gospels put together, with the bulk being devoted to an account of Jesus' ministry, much of it harmonized from accounts also found in the canonical gospels. In some key respects, it conforms to the Islamic interpretation of Christian origins and contradicts the New Testament teachings of Christianity.

This Gospel is considered by the majority of academics, including Christians and some Muslims (such as Abbas el-Akkad) to be late and pseudepigraphical;[1] however, some academics suggest that it may contain some remnants of an earlier apocryphal work (perhaps Gnostic,[2] Ebionite[3] or Diatessaronic[4]), redacted to bring it more in line with Islamic doctrine. Some Muslims consider the surviving versions as transmitting a suppressed apostolic original. Some Islamic organizations cite it in support of the Islamic view of Jesus.

This work should not be confused with the surviving Epistle of Barnabas, nor with the surviving Acts of Barnabas

Analysis

This work clearly contradicts the New Testament biblical accounts of Jesus and his ministry but has strong parallels with the Islamic faith, not only mentioning Muhammad by name, but including the shahadah (chapter 39). It is strongly anti-Pauline and anti-Trinitarian in tone. In this work, Jesus is described as a prophet and not the son of God,[37] while Paul is called "the deceived." Furthermore, the Gospel of Barnabas states that Jesus escaped crucifixion by being raised alive to heaven, while Judas Iscariot the traitor was crucified in his place. These beliefs—in particular, that Jesus is a prophet of God and raised alive without being crucified—conform to or resemble Islamic teachings which say that Jesus is a major prophet who did not die on the cross but was taken alive by angels to God (Allah).

PS: I discovered another reason for excitement by following an outside link. Nobody knew if the medieval version was a forgery or a copy of a much earlier work.

Was There an Early Gospel of Barnabas?

THE extant Gospel of Barnabas, often classified among the "modern apocrypha," survives in Italian and Spanish versions and is, no doubt, the product of the late Middle Ages.1 There is, however, a Gospel of Barnabas mentioned in earlier Christian history and it is fairly safe to assume that the medieval book of the same name is intended by its author to be the same work. In the Preface to the Spanish text of the medieval Barnabas we are told that an employee of the Inquisition, a "Brother Marino" encountered a reference to an early Gospel of Barnabas in the writings of Irenaeus. Then, some time later, by a happy accident, he found a copy of the same early gospel in the library of Pope Sixtus V. Neither the known text of Irenaeus' Adversus haereses nor any existing fragments from Irenaeus' writings mention a Gospel of Barnabas as the Preface claims, but two other works do: a gospel of that name is mentioned in two lists of books "received and not received" by orthodox Christianity, the so-called Gelasian Decree and the so-called List of Sixty Books. The later of these two references is dated to the seventh century CE 2 after which a "Gospel according to Barnabas" is never heard of again until the medieval work appeared. It is widely assumed that this is the historical opportunity seized upon by the author of the medieval work: knowing, through Irenaeus, the lists, or some other source, that there had once been a Gospel of Barnabas but that it was no longer extant provided the medieval author with a perfect situation in which to place his forgery