The Philology of Fraudulence and the Gospel of Barnabas in Renaissance Italy

Domenico Pietropaolo, Professor Emeritus, Department of Italian Studies and Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, and Senior Fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto

The purpose of this paper is to consider the constraints within which philologists must operate when they examine potentially fraudulent documents and to argue that philology, when it is focused on the detection of textual authenticity and forgery, is ultimately grounded in an epistemology of belief. I will develop this argument as a reflection on examples from various fields—including theatre history, law, and religion—in which oral performance, real or imagined, is thought to precede the scripted text. My primary text is a gospel of Islamic inspiration, written in Renaissance Italian, known as the Gospel of Barnabas, which claims to be the translation of a narrative that Barnabas received orally from the lips of Jesus and from his disciples Peter and John. The cultural interest of this work lies mainly in the fact that it overturns the theology of the four canonical gospels, all regarded as false narratives of the identity and ministry of Jesus, and indicts with deliberate deception the traditional account of the Crucifixion. Whether this gospel is derived from an original work by Barnabas, and if so, where in the Mediterranean, when and in what language it was composed, and what function the Italian version was meant to have in the Catholic Reformation are all parts of the philological puzzle.

Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/84568003293