This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Epistle of Barnabas carries the word epistle in its traditional title, but a reader looking for the ordinary features of an ancient letter, a named recipient, a specific community's specific trouble, a closing greeting to particular people, will not find them. What survives instead reads as a sustained argument, unfolding chapter after chapter of allegorical reinterpretation of Hebrew scripture, that the literal observance of Jewish law was never what the covenant actually meant, and that Israel forfeited its claim to it in favor of the Christian community the text is addressing in only the vaguest collective sense.
That argument, uncomfortable to later and modern readers for its sharp displacement of Jewish covenant claims, sat well enough with some early Christian communities that the complete text was copied into Codex Sinaiticus directly after the New Testament, one of the oldest and most important biblical manuscripts to survive. Its presence there, alongside the near-certainty that the real author was not the Barnabas of Acts at all, tells a story about how early Christian communities decided what belonged near scripture: proximity in manuscript, and the theological work a text was doing for its readers, mattered as much as a secure attribution.
The text's final section changes register entirely, laying out an ethical catechism called the Two Ways, one path leading to light and one to darkness, that closely parallels a nearly identical section in the roughly contemporary Didache. Whether one text borrowed from the other or both drew on a shared older catechetical source is a question that has never been fully settled, and it is one more sign of how fluid and interconnected the earliest Christian literature was before later boundaries hardened around it.