Barnabas

Barnabas is the name the apostles gave to a Cypriot Levite — the text of Acts calls him Joses, or Joseph, and explains the name as "Son of Encouragement" (Acts 4:36) — who became one of the earliest and most trusted figures in the spread of the gospel from Jerusalem to Antioch and on into the wider Gentile world.

The first thing Acts says of him, historically, is that he sold a field he owned and laid the proceeds at the apostles' feet (Acts 4:36-37). From there the narrative casts him as a bridge-builder: he is the one who vouched for the newly converted Saul when the Jerusalem believers were afraid of him (Acts 9:27), and he was the man the Jerusalem church sent to inspect the unexpected Gentile response in Antioch, who then fetched Saul from Tarsus so they could teach together there for a year (Acts 11:22-26). He and Saul carried famine relief to Judea (Acts 11:29-30), and Acts lists him first among the prophets and teachers at Antioch when the Holy Spirit set the pair apart for missionary work (Acts 13:1-2). To Greek-speaking hearers his name was close to the word for "son of consolation," which is how the text glosses it (Acts 4:36) — a linguistic point often connected to the encouragement and standing he gives others in the story.

On the first journey he is consistently named before Paul — "Barnabas and Saul" — including at Lystra, where the crowd wanted to worship him as Zeus and Paul as Hermes (Acts 14:12), and at the Jerusalem gathering, where the assembly fell silent to hear them report what God had done among the nations (Acts 15:12). He was among those who received the right hand of fellowship from James, Cephas, and John, agreeing that he and Paul should go to the Gentiles (Galatians 2:9).

Scripture does not present him as flawless. Paul records that at Antioch Barnabas was carried away by the hypocrisy of those who withdrew from Gentile table fellowship (Galatians 2:13), and Acts describes a sharp disagreement with Paul over whether to take John Mark on a second journey; Barnabas took Mark and sailed to Cyprus while Paul took Silas (Acts 15:36-40). That he supported himself rather than claiming support is implied when Paul names him as an example (1 Corinthians 9:6), and Mark is later called his cousin (Colossians 4:10).

Christian traditions read him differently at the edges. In Orthodox and Catholic commemoration he has a fixed feast and, in Orthodox reckoning, is numbered among the Seventy sent out in Luke 10:1 — a claim that rests on tradition rather than on the New Testament text. An ancient tradition recorded by Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian held that he wrote the letter to the Hebrews, and an early non-canonical work circulates under his name; most traditions today treat both as unattributed or non-inspired. Acts 14:14 gives him the title "apostle" alongside Paul, which some traditions read as evidence of a wider apostolic order and others as a looser sense of "sent one."

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.