Epistle of Barnabas (70-135 AD): Is the Two Ways doctrine still considered in Orthodoxy? (SOLVED)

rakovsky

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Orthodoxy of course is dedicated to following the teaching of the Church Fathers. In the Didache and in the Epistle of Barnabas, one of the important teachings is the doctrine of "Two Ways". Here is an excerpt about it from the Epistle of Barnabas:
Chp. 18 THE TWO WAYS.
There are two ways of doctrine and authority, the one of light, and the other of darkness. But there is a great difference between these two ways. For over one are stationed the light-bringing angels of God, but over the other the angels' of Satan. And He indeed (i.e., God) is Lord for ever and ever, but he (i.e., Satan) is prince of the time of iniquity.
Does this concept still come up as a significant concept in Orthodoxy, like in the writings of Church fathers, theologians, and sermons? Have you heard it used elsewhere before, or is it basically something that one just finds in a few 1st-early second century Christian writings like these? I ask because I don't remember the concept coming up elsewhere in those terms, but when I read the scholarly literature, the scholars present it as if the "Two Ways" idea was an important theme at one time.

Another theme that comes up is the modern claim that in the New Testament that the Christians referred to their movement as "The Way" and used it for a title for their religious group. But I am not sure if those modern scholars are misreading the Bible verses and misinterpreting the phrase "the way", when in fact the phrase is just meant conversationally as the life path that Christians follow, like the good "Way" in the Two Ways doctrine.

For example, in Acts 24:14 (KJV), Paul tells Felix:
But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets:
In other words, the pharisees called the Christians' ways heretical, not that they called the Christian community called "The Way" heretical.

The ESV however translates the passage in Acts 24 to mean the latter:
But this I confess to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the Law and written in the Prophets,

But in Acts 18:24-25 (ESV), the "way" is used conversationally in the sense of the "way of the Lord": "Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord."

So when "the way" as a phrase shows up elsewhere in Acts, I think that it might be used as a conversational reference to Christians' teachings, and not used as a formal title:
Acts 9:2 (KJV): And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.
Acts 19:9 (KJV): But when divers were hardened, and believed not, but spake evil of that way before the multitude, he departed from them, and separated the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one Tyrannus.
Acts 19:23(KJV): And the same time there arose no small stir about that way.
 
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rakovsky

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Fr. Matt and Lukaris,
I found your replies helpful about the Epistle of Barnabas, so I want to bring to your attention to 4 other questions that I had about it that I posted on the Monachos forum:
The Epistle of Barnabas (1st. cent.) Questions. - Specific texts
Namely:
  1. Was it written by the apostle Barnabas? (It refers to gentile subjects rebuilding the Temple, and there were plans for this decades after Barnabas' time, in 130 AD, but I think that the passage could really refer to the building of the Church as the new Temple.)
  2. Why does Chapter 12 say to Behold Christ, the son of God, not the son of man, who manifested in a figure in the flesh? (A) Is the author just drawing the reader's attention to how Christ is the Son of God in particular, as opposed to His human nature, or (B) does the author mean that Christ is not the direct biological offspring of a male, or (C) is the author teaching Docetism, whereby Christ only had the figure of a human and wasn't actually a human child? I think that (C) is not the case, because in Chapters 2 and 6 Barnabas seems to teach that Christ was human.
  3. Is the Epistle's statement by "Knowledge" (i.e. "Gnosis" in Greek?) a quote from an oracle outside the Bible?
  4. What do you think about the author's idea that Abraham's circumcision of his 318 people refers to Christ and the Cross via the Greek letters I H T? I notice that the "3" in this Hebrew passage in Genesis starts with the letter Ш, which doesn't look like a cross.
 
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Lukaris

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The thing I find interesting about Barnabas concluding with the 2 ways compared to the Didache beginning with the 2 ways seems to fit our ancient liturgical pattern. Barnabas seems to fit the liturgy of the word aspect while the Didache leads to the liturgy of the Eucharist. The Didache concludes beyond the liturgy with daily living in a Christian community but I think worship is the central core between Barnabas & the Didache.

I do not think these documents were written in direct succession but I do think sometimes preachers used both for their compatibility.

I think there are good notes & translations of Barnabas & The Didache in the collection of Staniforth & Louth. https://www.amazon.com/Early-Christian-Writings-Apostolic-Fathers/dp/0140444750
 
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rakovsky

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The thing I find interesting about Barnabas concluding with the 2 ways compared to the Didache beginning with the 2 ways seems to fit our ancient liturgical pattern. Barnabas seems to fit the liturgy of the word aspect while the Didache leads to the liturgy of the Eucharist.
Sure, that's an interesting observation. There is a theory that they were authored in the same community because of the sharing of the Two Ways concept.
 
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rakovsky

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Here is how I would answer my own questions:
1. It seems hard to say whether Barnabas actually wrote this epistle. The first evidence we have that he did was Clement of Alexandria's citation of it, which was about 100 years after Barnabas would have written it. It's a long time for authentification, but not unusual for this kind of writing. There is not really any harder evidence for or against besides this that I've heard of.
2. He appears to be paraphrasing Tim 3:16, wherein "God manifested Himself in the flesh". The idea in the Epistle of Barnabas seems to be that the Logos was not human, and then chose to manifest in the form of the flesh, so Barnabas writes: "Behold again, Jesus: Not the son of Man, but the Son of God, having manifested in a figure/form, but in the flesh." It would sound weird to say that humans "manifest" in the flesh, because flesh is part of humans. It's their only form. But on the other hand, humans do manifest in the flesh because they are fleshly. So the language used by Barnabas sounds ambiguous, but I think that he is not denying Christ's humanity, but rather just trying to say that the Logos was non-human, non-fleshly and took a fleshly form in becoming man.
3. I suppose that he isn't quoting an oracle because a quote like that is unknown. I take it that he means: The Old Testament verse promised something (land/soil), but the knowledge that we received from God tells us something else (We should rely on Christ). And then he resolves this dialectical conflict between the verse and "knowledge" by interpreting the verse to point to Christ (as the real promised "land/soil").
4. The I H T interpretation is rational and logical, but it reminds me of Gematria and it feels like a weak connection because the text in question in Genesis about Abraham was composed in Hebrew, whereas Barnabas is finding Christian prophetic meanings in the letters of the Greek translation. There are probably lots of places where 3 and 10 show up in holy passages in the Bible about holy things, but it seems too loose to just interpret them as Christian references when they pop up, since after all, they are fully normal, common numbers.
 
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rakovsky

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I would just add that Christ Himself says that the OT testifies of Him, so even the most obscure stretches, if they do point to Christ, they are true.
You could be right, but why do you think this?

I took Christ's saying about the Old Testament's "testifying to Christ" to mean more particularly that concepts and passages in the OT testify of him, or that the Old Testament in general testifies of Him, not that it testifies about Him in every literary way conceivable. For example, just because Abraham's name starts with an A doesn't mean to me that his name points to Yeshua because Yeshua ends with an A and they book-end the Abrahamic line of circumcision, an idea which just came to me right now. (Although it's plausible: A-braham, Isaac, Jacob... etc. Joseph & Mary, Yeshu-A.)

Nonetheless, Fr. Matt, one obscure reference that appeals to me is the spelling of YHWH in Hebrew and the names of the letters. In ancient civilizations like the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Chinese, the letters referred to pictures and concepts, and this was particularly true in the case of God's name. Hebrew was not a pictographic alphabet (and Egyptians and Sumerians moved away from pictography as well), but the Hebrew letters still retained their pictographic names. Y-H-W-H transliterates as Arm/Hand-Behold-Nail-Behold.
pRsv0.png

In Psalm 22, Zechariah 11-12, Isaiah52-53, and John 20, these elements come together in describing the Messiah's suffering with piercing of the arms/hands. In Zechariah and John, the pierced one is identified as God. I think that it would be an obscure stretch for many people, but it works for me, because I came across it while trying to learn about ancient civilizations' basic understandings of God. I made a thread about it here: Judaism Issue: Has anyone in the past read YHWH's letters acronymically per their pictoral meaning?
 
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ArmyMatt

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You could be right, but do you think this?

I took Christ's saying about the Old Testament's "testifying to Christ" to mean more particularly that concepts and passages in the OT testify of him, or that the Old Testament in general testifies of Him, not that it testifies about Him in every literary way conceivable. For example, just because Abraham's name starts with an A doesn't mean to me that his name points to Yeshua because Yeshua ends with an A and they book-end the Abrahamic line of circumcision, an idea which just came to me right now. (Although it's plausible: A-braham, Isaac, Jacob... etc. Joseph & Mary, Yeshu-A.)

Nonetheless, Fr. Matt, one obscure reference that appeals to me is the spelling of YHWH in Hebrew and the names of the letters. In ancient civilizations like the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Chinese, the letters referred to pictures and concepts, and this was particularly true in the case of God's name. Hebrew was not a pictographic alphabet (and Egyptians and Sumerians moved away from pictography as well), but the Hebrew letters still retained their pictographic names. Y-H-W-H transliterates as Arm/Hand-Behold-Nail-Behold.
pRsv0.png

In Psalm 22, Zechariah 11-12, Isaiah52-53, and John 20, these elements come together in describing the Messiah's suffering with piercing of the arms/hands. In Zechariah and John, the pierced one is identified as God. I think that it would be an obscure stretch for many people, but it works for me, because I came across it while trying to learn about ancient civilizations' basic understandings of God. I made a thread about it here: Judaism Issue: Has anyone in the past read YHWH's letters acronymically per their pictoral meaning?

I believe it insofar as what the Church says about the OT that points to Christ. and some of them do feel like a stretch, but the Church knows more than I do.
 
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rakovsky

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The early Christians and the ancient Jews both used Gematria, seeing meaning hidden in the numerical values of letters and vice verse - in the alphabetical value of numbers (since Hebrew and Greek letters served as their numbers). My main difficulties with using 318 in the way that Barnabas does are that (A) the passage was written in Hebrew, whereas Barnabas is relying on Greek to find this meaning, and (B) that the decipherment uses the first two letters of Jesus' name, instead of, say, the first letter and the last letter, the 4 Hebrew letters, or all 6 Greek letters. Both issues A and B combined make me skeptical.

To give an analogy regarding issue A, the Israelites had 430 years of slavery in Egypt, so one could suppose that the 430 has a gematrical meaning. After their slavery ended they went to the desert where they got the Torah/Law, which in Greek is Nomos (value=430). But Genesis was written long before Greek got close to becoming a lingua franca of the Near East, and the passage was in Hebrew, so while the Gematria for me is logical, I am still a bit skeptical even of that.

One interesting Hebrew gematrial issue with the 318 servants born in Abraham's household whom Abraham circumcised and brought to rescue Lot is that later on, Abraham complains to God that his only heir is the only servant born in his household, Eliezer. It's curious because the question arises of what happened to the 318 servants born in his household, and also because the Gematria of "Eliezer" is 318 in Hebrew. I think that the coincidence between 318 servants and Eliezer is deliberate in the eyes of the writer of Genesis.

Regarding Issue B, The Language Studies page on Abraham's 318 men notes:
Now, IH, in Greek is Iota-Eta, the first two letters of Jesus' name... iêsous, just as God's name, YHVH, could be represented by its shorter version YH (Yah).
SOURCE: Abraham's 318 Men - Difficult Sayings- Language Studies - StudyLight.org
God in fact sometimes is called Yah in the Old Testament, like in Jeremiah, and I think in "Hallel-U-Yah". So if the language of Genesis was Greek, and the Old Testament certainly used Jesus/Yeshua as the Messiah's name, then the interpretation would sound plausible to me.

I did find on a Messianic website the idea that the Old Testament it does refer to the Messiah as Yeshua (Salvation) when it says in Isaiah 62:11, "Behold, the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world, Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation ('Yishek') cometh; behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him."
Yishek is "thy salvation", ישעך, made of YShA and K.
But then the issue comes up of whether Yeshua/Jesus comes
(A) from Yehoshua (Yeho + Shua = Yahweh + Cry for help) or
(B) from Yesha (Salvation, ישע).
It looks to me based on what I've read that it is more likely (A) a contraction of Yehoshua (hence the U in both Yehoshua and Yeshua), although I guess it could be a mix of both. In agreement with (A), in the Old Testament, Joshua is spelled in Hebrew Yeshua (the same as Jesus) and elsewhere in the Old Testament, Joshua is called Yehoshua. In agreement with (B), Luke 1 says that Jesus got the name because He would save His people, which points to Yesha as a word origin for the name.
 
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Yeshua HaDerekh

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Regarding Issue B, The Language Studies page on Abraham's 318 men notes:
SOURCE: Abraham's 318 Men - Difficult Sayings- Language Studies - StudyLight.org
God in fact sometimes is called Yah in the Old Testament, like in Jeremiah, and I think in "Hallel-U-Yah". So if the language of Genesis was Greek, and the Old Testament certainly used Jesus/Yeshua as the Messiah's name, then the interpretation would sound plausible to me.

I did find on a Messianic website the idea that the Old Testament it does refer to the Messiah as Yeshua (Salvation) when it says in Isaiah 62:11, "Behold, the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world, Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation ('Yishek') cometh; behold, his reward is with him, and his work before him."
Yishek is "thy salvation", ישעך, made of YShA and K.
But then the issue comes up of whether Yeshua/Jesus comes
(A) from Yehoshua (Yeho + Shua = Yahweh + Cry for help) or
(B) from Yesha (Salvation, ישע).
It looks to me based on what I've read that it is more likely (A) a contraction of Yehoshua (hence the U in both Yehoshua and Yeshua), although I guess it could be a mix of both. In agreement with (A), in the Old Testament, Joshua is spelled in Hebrew Yeshua (the same as Jesus) and elsewhere in the Old Testament, Joshua is called Yehoshua. In agreement with (B), Luke 1 says that Jesus got the name because He would save His people, which points to Yesha as a word origin for the name.

Yeho- is always the theophoric prefix while -Yah is the theophoric suffix...YeHoshua....EliYahu. "...shall call His Name Yeshua because Yoshia (He will save) His people from their sins" (in Hebrew this makes sense). YeHoshua is YeHoVaH saves. Y'Shua is the contraction...
 
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rakovsky

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Yeho- is always the theophoric prefix while -Yah is the theophoric suffix...YeHoshua....EliYahu. "...shall call His Name Yeshua because Yoshia (He will save) His people from their sins" (in Hebrew this makes sense). YeHoshua is YeHoVaH saves. Y'Shua is the contraction...
Thanks for replying.
Unfortunately, although I understand that Yeho- is the prefix coming from "Yahweh", but the root word "Shua" means "Cry for Help". SEE:
שׁוּעַ shua‘ is a noun meaning "a cry for help", "a saving cry",[11][12][13] that is to say, a shout given when in need of rescue.
SOURCE: Wikipedia, [citing three language dictionaries] Yeshua - Wikipedia
This would not make YeHoshua, or its contraction Y'Shua, "YEHOVAH saves".
 
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Thanks for replying.
Unfortunately, although I understand that Yah- is the prefix coming from "Yahweh", but the root word "Shua" means "Cry for Help". SEE:

This would not make YeHoshua, or its contraction Y'Shua, "YEHOVAH saves".

Yah is a suffix. YeHo is a prefix. Yeshua is salvation, savior, deliverance (yeshuot), rescue...the word Yeshua is used in many different Hebrew songs and prayers... Yoshia is he will save.
 
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rakovsky

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Yah is a suffix. YeHo is a prefix. Yeshua is salvation, savior, deliverance (yeshuot), rescue...the word Yeshua is used in many different Hebrew songs and prayers... Yoshia is he will save.
You are right that YeHo- is the prefix and -YaH is the suffix.
Ye-Sh-U-A-H (יְשׁוּעָה) with an "H" at the end does mean deliverance.
But Joshua's and Jesus' name "YeShUA" with no H is apparently a contraction of "Yeho-shua" (Yahweh + Cry for help) and does not mean "deliverance."
However, maybe you can find some Etymological Dictionaries that would give a theory deriving "Yeshua" from YeShUAH with an H at the end. Hebrew has etymological and morphological rules and principles that are sometimes very foreign to Indo-European languages. In this case, I notice that YeShA (Strong's Hebrew: 3468. יֵ֫שַׁע (yesha) -- deliverance, rescue, salvation, safety, welfare) and YeShUAH both mean deliverance or salvation.
 
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You are right that YeHo- is the prefix and -YaH is the suffix.
Ye-Sh-U-A-H (יְשׁוּעָה) with an "H" at the end does mean deliverance.
But Joshua's and Jesus' name "YeShUA" with no H is apparently a contraction of "Yeho-shua" (Yahweh + Cry for help) and does not mean "deliverance."
However, maybe you can find some Etymological Dictionaries that would give a theory deriving "Yeshua" from YeShUAH with an H at the end. Hebrew has etymological and morphological rules and principles that are sometimes very foreign to Indo-European languages. In this case, I notice that YeShA (Strong's Hebrew: 3468. יֵ֫שַׁע (yesha) -- deliverance, rescue, salvation, safety, welfare) and YeShUAH both mean deliverance or salvation.

There is no "Yahweh", it would be YeHoVaH saves...YeHoshua...not Yahshua
 
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