Philip Carrington says: "Barnabas can be artificial, irritating, and censorious; but it would not be fair to judge him by his less fortunate expositions. His interpretation of the unclean beasts and fishes was in line with the thought of his time, being found in the "Letter of Aristeas", for instance. His numerology was also a fashionable mode of thought, though the modern scholar is often impatient with it." Robert A. Kraft states that some of the materials used by the final editor "certainly antedate the year 70, and are in some sense 'timeless' traditions of Hellenistic Judaism (e.g., the food law allegories of ch. 10, the Two Ways). It is with such materials that much of the importance of the epistle for our understanding of early Christianity and its late-Jewish heritage rests." The author's style was not a personal foible: in his time it was accepted procedure in general use, although no longer in favour today. Andrew Louth says: ""Barnabas" seems strange to modern ears: allegory is out of fashion and there is little else in the epistle. But the fashion that outlaws allegory is quite recent, and fashions change."