While the general atmosphere of Hell in _Barnabas_, with its “neui he giazi intollerabili,”[306] its torturing fiends, its biting serpents, its Sisyphus-labours and Tantalus-pains, its harpies, its burning filth and nameless horrors, has the same “reek” as that of Dante’s Inferno, there are passages which present an almost verbal parallel. In his description of the cries of the lost, Barnabas says: “malladirano ... il loro padre he madre he il loro chreatore.” Who can but recall Dante’s words about the dismal spirits assembled on the bank of Acheron, who—
This brings us to the subject of actual verbal coincidences, of which we must confess we have found but two, though a more systematic investigation might well yield a much larger number.
Barnabas’ recurring characterisation of the idols of the heathen as “dei falsi he bugiardi”[308] is surely too remarkable to be without significance, and is enforced and supported by the occurrence of another cadence of the same canto of the _Inferno_ in the phrase “rabbiosa fame,” which in Barnabas, however, applies not to the symbolic lion of the _Divina Commedia_,[309] but to the torments of the Lost.
There remains one more point to be adduced—an incidental and a somewhat subtle one which makes, not so much for a relation between Dante’s writings and the _Gospel of Barnabas_ as for a relation of contemporaneity between the two writers. The inference which it would suggest is so definite and precise, that it is only fair to remark that there are puzzlingly contradictory arguments to be drawn from the language and style of Barnabas.
Our point, then, is as follows. Barnabas puts into the mouth of our Lord, as we have observed above, numerous predictions of the future advent of Mohammed as “Messiah” and “Messenger of GOD.” In one of these a “Jubilee” is spoken of as recurring every hundred years: “il iubileo ... che hora uiene ogni cento hanni.”[310] The writer or compiler here, as often, fails to throw himself back into the Palestine of the first century, in which, as his very considerable knowledge of the Old Testament[311] should have reminded him, the Hebrew Jubilee of fifty years would have been in force. Whence, then, comes this Jubilee? He cannot have derived it from the _Koran_. We are almost forced to the conclusion that the “hora” of the passage quoted is a literal “now” and refers to a contemporary institution—to the Jubilee as conceived of at the moment when the lines were penned; and that, the Jubilee of Western Christendom. This carries us back beyond the twenty-five years’ Jubilee of modern times—beyond the year when Clement VI, for his own ends, instituted a Jubilee of fifty years after the Hebrew model; and would give us as our _terminus ad quem_ the year 1349. For the upper limit—the _terminus a quo_ of the original Barnabas we must turn to the famous Jubilee of 1300, the ideal date of Dante’s pilgrimage. For though the Bull[312] by which that Jubilee was promulgated alleged antecedent tradition, and the contemporary chroniclers naturally followed suit,[313] there seems to be no sufficient historical evidence for a precedent. Thus, between the years 1300 and 1350—and, apparently, only during that period—it would have been possible to speak of the centennial Jubilee as an established institution. If this be so, the writing of this passage in _Barnabas_ is relegated to the years in which the _Divina Commedia_ took its final shape, or those just after the poet’s death in 1321 when the poem so swiftly took its place among the classics of the world’s literature.