Epistle of Barnabas 10.5

Anonymous · Epistle of Barnabas · ca. 70–135 (often ca. 130) · place unknown · Read in context

Traditional ascription rejected: The letter names no author. From Clement of Alexandria (late second century) onward it was ascribed to Barnabas, Paul's companion (Acts 4:36), but its date and its hostility to Jewish practice make that unlikely; modern scholars treat it as anonymous.

Summary: Bottom-dwelling fish stand for the utterly ungodly.

Greek text · Lake, LCL 24:374–376

Καὶ οὐ φάγῃ, φησίν, σμύραιναν οὐδὲ πολύποδα οὐδὲ σηπίαν· οὐ μή, φησίν, ὁμοιωθήσῃ κολλώμενος ἀνθρώποις τοιούτοις, οἵτινες εἰς τέλος εἰσὶν ἀσεβεῖς καὶ κεκριμένοι ἤδη τῷ θανάτῳ, ὡς καὶ ταῦτα τὰ ἰχθύδια μόνα ἐπικατάρατα ἐν τῷ βυθῷ νήχεται, μὴ κολυμβῶντα ὡς τὰ λοιπά, ἀλλʼ ἐν τῇ γῇ κάτω τοῦ βυθοῦ κατοικεῖ.

English · Claude translation

“And you shall not eat,” he says, “the lamprey, nor the octopus, nor the cuttlefish.” You shall not, he means, become like such people by clinging to them, who are utterly ungodly and already condemned to death; just as these fish alone are accursed and swim in the depths, not swimming like the rest, but dwelling on the ground below the deep.

About this passage

Source

Lake, LCL 24:374–376 · Kirsopp Lake, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 1, LCL 24 (London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1912), 340–407 · Greek text: K. Lake, The Apostolic Fathers (LCL, 1912), digitized by the Perseus Digital Library and published by the First Thousand Years of Greek project (Open Greek and Latin), CC BY-SA 4.0

Text

As printed in Lake, LCL 24. Manuscript variants and the editor's apparatus are not reproduced; no textual problem is noted in this passage.

Translation

Claude translation (claude-opus-5-5), 2026-09-26 · Translated by Claude from the Greek text of Lake (LCL 24, 1912); made independently of existing English translations.

Compare

Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885) (an older public-domain English translation, whole volume at CCEL; checked against ours only after ours was made)

Cite this passage

Barn. 10.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/barnabas/10/5/).

Plain text

Barn. 10.5 (trans. Sophia Scriptura, https://sophiascriptura.com/fathers/barnabas/10/5/).