John Toland (1670–1722) distrusted the churches’ claim to preserve a faith that lay beyond ordinary human judgment. His Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) maintained that the Gospel taught nothing contrary to reason or above it. The Irish parliament ordered the book burned. A few years later, an unfamiliar gospel seemed to give Toland historical support for the simpler Christianity he believed later authorities had obscured.
In Amsterdam in 1709 he encountered an Italian manuscript of the Gospel of Barnabas. Its account of Jesus differed sharply from the Christian canon, denying his divine sonship and having him escape crucifixion. Toland treated the book as a possible witness to an early religious world that victorious churches had pushed aside. In Nazarenus (1718), he used it to develop his account of Christianity before its supposed corruption. The excluded text gave his challenge to ecclesiastical authority a tangible object around which to argue.
The manuscript was much younger than the history Toland wanted it to explain. Its disagreement with the churches had made it attractive without making its claim to antiquity reliable. Yet readers who rejected church authority still needed some way to determine which accounts of the early faith they should trust. Toland continued to pursue that faith through books that seemed to preserve neglected testimony. His Christian opponents now had to answer the larger challenge as well as the particular manuscript, for his account of reason and revelation did not depend on this gospel alone.