The Epistle of Barnabas

Barnabae epistula

Barnabas. The Apostolic Fathers with an English Translation In Two Volumes. Vol. I. Lake, Kirsopp, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd. 1912.

Then thou shalt cry and God shall hear thee; while thou art still speaking He shall say, ‘Lo I am here’; if thou puttest away from thee bondage, and

violence, and the word of murmuring, and dost give to the poor thy bread with a cheerful heart, and dost pity the soul that is abased.

So then, brethren, the long-suffering one foresaw that the people whom He prepared in his Beloved should believe in guilelessness, and made all things plain to us beforehand that we should not be shipwrecked by conversion to their law.

We ought, then, to enquire earnestly into the[*](Warning that the final trial is at hand) things which now are, and to seek out those which are able to save us. Let us then utterly flee from all the works of lawlessness, lest the works of lawlessness overcome us, and let us hate the error of this present time, that we may be loved in that which is to come.

Let us give no freedom to our souls to have power to walk with sinners and wicked men, lest we be made like to them.

The final stumbling block is at hand of which it was written, as Enoch says, For to this end the Lord has cut short the times and the days, that his beloved should make haste and come to his inheritance.

And the Prophet also says thus: Ten kingdoms shall reign upon the earth and there shall rise up after them a little king, who shall subdue three of the kings under one.

Daniel says likewise concerning the same: And I beheld

the fourth Beasts wicked and powerful and fiercer than all the beasts of the sea, and that ten horns sprang from it, and out of them a little excrescent horn, and that it subdued under one three of the great horns.

You ought then to understand. And this also I ask you, as being one of yourselves, and especially as loving you all above my own life; take heed to yourselves now, and be not made like[*](The covenant. Christian or Jewish?) unto some, heaping up your sins and saying that the covenant is both theirs and ours.

It is ours: but in this way did they finally lose k when Moses had just received it, for the Scripture says: And Moses was in the mount fasting forty days and forty nights, and he received the covenant from the Lord, tables of stone written with the finger of the hand of the Lord.