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Biography

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Barnabas, originally named Joseph (also rendered Joses), was a Levite of Cypriot origin and one of the leading figures of the earliest Christian movement in the first century. The Acts of the Apostles states that the apostles in Jerusalem gave him the name Barnabas, explained there as meaning son of encouragement or son of consolation. He first appears as a man of property who sold a field and laid the money at the apostles' feet for the common support of the Jerusalem community. That act, together with his later work as a mediator between Jewish and Gentile believers, fixed his reputation as a trusted and conciliatory leader. The New Testament gives no year of birth and no native city, only that he was a Cypriot by descent; later legend sometimes places his origin at Salamis, but that detail is not historically verified. Nothing reliable is known of his family life, and there is no contemporary evidence that he married or had children.

After the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, Barnabas was the one who brought the former persecutor to the apostles in Jerusalem when others still feared him, vouching for the reality of his change of heart. When word reached Jerusalem that Gentiles in Syrian Antioch were turning to the Lord, the church sent Barnabas there. Finding a large and growing congregation, he went to Tarsus, sought out Saul, and brought him back to Antioch, where the two taught for a year and where the disciples were first called Christians. Together they carried famine relief from Antioch to the elders in Judea. The church at Antioch later, following prophetic guidance, set Barnabas and Saul apart for missionary work. They went first to Cyprus, Barnabas's native island, preaching in the synagogues from Salamis to Paphos, and then into Asia Minor. John Mark, a kinsman of Barnabas, accompanied them as an assistant but left the mission in Pamphylia, a decision that later caused a serious quarrel.

Barnabas and Paul (as Saul came to be known) reported to the council in Jerusalem on the conversion of the Gentiles and supported the ruling that Gentile believers need not be circumcised. After they returned to Antioch they planned a further journey, but they disagreed sharply over whether to take John Mark again. Barnabas was determined to give his cousin another opportunity; Paul refused. The two apostles separated: Paul chose Silas and went through Syria and Cilicia, while Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus. The canonical Acts of the Apostles does not mention Barnabas after that departure. Paul's later letters still speak of him with respect, describing him as a fellow worker who, like Paul, earned his own living, and noting Mark's relationship to him. These scattered notices are the last contemporary evidence for his life. No New Testament text records his death.

Later Christian tradition, especially the fifth-century apocryphal Acts of Barnabas, holds that he continued to preach in Cyprus and was martyred at Salamis, where hostile members of the local Jewish community are said to have killed him. The same tradition places his burial near Salamis. In the late fifth century, during the episcopate of Anthemios of Constantia, a tomb identified as his was reported found, containing a manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew; the discovery was used to support the autocephaly of the Church of Cyprus. A monastery dedicated to him stands near the ancient site and is the traditional place of his relics. The precise year of death is not attested by any early historical source and is therefore unknown, though later martyrologies often placed the martyrdom in the early 60s of the first century.

Barnabas was recognized as a saint from the earliest Christian centuries and was never the subject of a later papal canonization or beatification process. East and West commemorate him on 11 June. He is venerated as apostle and founder of the Church of Cyprus and as a patron of Antioch, and he is invoked against hailstorms and as a peacemaker. Other later claims—that he wrote the so-called Epistle of Barnabas, that he was the first bishop of Milan, that he authored the Epistle to the Hebrews, or that he composed the medieval Gospel of Barnabas—are either anonymous second-century works, Western medieval legends, or much later forgeries, and are not accepted as historical.

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