“That a man by the name of Barnabas wrote this epistle I doubt not; that the chosen associate of Paul wrote it, I with many others must doubt.”[471] Dr. Killen, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church of Ireland, uses the following language:— “The tract known as the Epistle of Barnabas was probably composed in A. D. 135. It is the production apparently of a convert from Judaism who took special pleasure in allegorical interpretation of Scripture.”[472] Prof. Hackett bears the following testimony:— “The letter still extant, which was known as that of Barnabas even in the second century, cannot be defended as genuine.”[473] Mr. Milner speaks of the reputed epistle of Barnabas as follows:— “It is a great injury to him to apprehend the epistle, which goes by his name, to be his.”[474] Kitto speaks of this production as, “The so-called epistle of Barnabas, probably a forgery of the second century.”[475] Says the Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, speaking of the Barnabas of the New Testament:— “He could not be the author of a work so full of forced allegories, extravagant and unwarrantable explications of Scripture, together with stories concerning beasts, and such like conceits, as make up the first part of this epistle.”[476] Eusebius, the earliest of church historians, places this epistle in the catalogue of spurious books. Thus he says:— “Among the spurious must be numbered both the books called, ‘The Acts of Paul,’ and that called, ‘Pastor,’ and ‘The Revelation of Peter.’ Besides these the books called ‘The Epistle of Barnabas,’ and what are called, ‘The Institutions of the Apostles.’”[477] Sir Wm. Domville speaks as follows:— “But the epistle was not written by Barnabas; it was not merely unworthy of him,—it would be a disgrace to him, and what is of much more consequence, it would be a disgrace to the Christian religion, as being the production of one of the authorized teachers of that religion in the times of the apostles, which circumstance would seriously damage the evidence of its divine origin. Not being the epistle of Barnabas, the document is, as regards the Sabbath question, nothing more than the testimony of some unknown writer to the practice of Sunday observance by some Christians of some unknown community, at some uncertain period of the Christian era, with no sufficient ground for believing that period to have been the first century.”[478] Coleman bears the following testimony:— “The epistle of Barnabas, bearing the honored name of the companion of Paul in his missionary labors, is evidently spurious. It abounds in fabulous narratives, mystic, allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament, and fanciful conceits, and is generally agreed by the learned to be of no authority.”[479]