The Levite of Cyprus

The same verse that names Barnabas also gives his lineage and his homeland: he was “a Levite, a native of Cyprus” (Acts 4:36). This file examines what those two facts meant — his descent from the priestly tribe and his roots in the Jewish diaspora of Cyprus — and how this double identity, Levite and Cypriot, equipped him to be the bridge between the Jerusalem church, the Hellenistic world, and the mission to the Gentiles.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

A Levite

Luke’s introduction of Barnabas packs two biographical facts into its closing words: he was “a Levite, a native of Cyprus” (Acts 4:36, RSV). The first locates him within Israel; the second within the diaspora. To be a Levite was to belong to the tribe of Levi, set apart in the Law for the service of the sanctuary — the tribe of Moses and Aaron, from which the priests (the sons of Aaron) and the wider body of ministers of the Temple were drawn (Numbers 3:5–13; 18:1–7). Not every Levite was a priest, but every Levite stood in a special relation to the worship of Israel, charged with the care, music, and service of the house of God (1 Chronicles 23:24–32). Barnabas’s Levitical descent thus places him among those Jews for whom the Temple, the Law, and the cult were not abstractions but family inheritance.

This makes his later career the more striking. A man of the priestly tribe became a leading apostle of the gospel that would, in the Epistle later attached to his name and in the preaching of his partner Paul, declare the old cult fulfilled and transcended in Christ. The early Church did not miss the resonance: that a Levite should be among the first to carry the gospel to the Gentiles, and should become the patron of a Church beyond the bounds of Israel, was read as a sign of the gospel’s reach. Whether Barnabas had ever served in the Temple, or how observant his Levitical family was in the Cypriot diaspora, the text does not say; what it records is the lineage, and the lineage matters as the background against which his apostolic mission stands (Acts 4:36; Bruce, Acts, 1988).

A Native of Cyprus

The second fact is geographical and decisive for everything that follows: Barnabas was “of Cyprus” — Kyprios tō genei, a Cypriot by birth (Acts 4:36). Cyprus, the large eastern Mediterranean island lying off the coast of Cilicia and Syria, had a substantial and old Jewish community by the first century. Jewish settlement on the island is attested from the Hellenistic period; the historian Josephus records the presence of Jews in Cyprus, and the island’s copper mines (the very word copper derives from Cyprus) drew a mixed population in which diaspora Judaism had a settled place (Josephus, Antiquities 13.10.4 and elsewhere; on the Cypriot Jewish community, see Hackett, History of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, 1901). The chief cities were Salamis on the east coast and Paphos on the west — the two poles of the later missionary journey (Acts 13:5–6).

A Cypriot Jew of the diaspora would in all likelihood have been a Hellenist — at home in Greek, in the Septuagint, and in the wider Greco-Roman world — while remaining a Jew of the synagogue. This is precisely the profile that fits Barnabas’s role in Acts. When the gospel first spread beyond Judea after the persecution that scattered the Hellenist believers, Luke notes that some of those who carried it to Antioch and preached to the Greeks were “men of Cyprus and Cyrene” (Acts 11:20, RSV) — Hellenist Jews of exactly Barnabas’s background. That the Jerusalem church chose Barnabas to investigate and shepherd the new Antiochene church (Acts 11:22) is no accident: a Cypriot Hellenist was the natural envoy to a mixed Greek-speaking congregation. His homeland made him fluent in the world the gospel was entering.

The Family of Barnabas

Acts and the Pauline letters give glimpses of Barnabas’s family that fill out the diaspora picture. John Mark is named as “the cousin of Barnabas” (Colossians 4:10, RSV; Greek anepsios, “cousin”), and Mark’s mother Mary owned a house in Jerusalem large enough to host the praying church and served by a maid named Rhoda (Acts 12:12). The family thus had property and standing in Jerusalem as well as roots in Cyprus — a household straddling the homeland and the diaspora, the kind of family in which a Levite might own a field and a young man like John Mark might be raised within reach of the apostles. This network helps explain why Barnabas would later cling to John Mark even at the cost of his partnership with Paul (Acts 15:37–39): the bond was of blood as well as of mission (Colossians 4:10; Acts 12:12; see Barnabas and Mark).

The Bridge-Figure

The combined identity — Levite and Cypriot, Jew of the homeland and Jew of the diaspora — made Barnabas the bridge-figure of the early chapters of the Church’s expansion. He had the credentials to be trusted by the Jerusalem apostles, among whom he moved freely and whose surname he bore (Acts 4:36; 9:27); and he had the formation to be sent to the Greeks, whose world he knew from birth. He could vouch for the converted Saul to a wary Jerusalem (Acts 9:27) and then go to Tarsus to bring that same Saul into the Antiochene work (Acts 11:25–26), because he stood with one foot in each world. When the Spirit set apart “Barnabas and Saul” for the first mission (Acts 13:2), it sent out a party led by a man returning, in effect, to his own people — for the journey’s first stage was Cyprus itself, where Barnabas led the way through the synagogues of Salamis and across the island to Paphos (Acts 13:4–6).

The Cypriot origin would also frame the end of the story. It is to Cyprus that Barnabas returns with John Mark after the parting from Paul (Acts 15:39); it is on Cyprus, by the later tradition, that he labors and dies; and it is from Cyprus that he is venerated as founder and patron of the island’s Church, whose claim to apostolic foundation and to independence from Antioch rests on him (see The Apostle of Cyprus). The single phrase “a Levite, a native of Cyprus” thus carries forward into the whole arc of his life: it names the tribe whose worship the gospel fulfilled, and the island whose Church he founded. The man the apostles called “son of encouragement” was, by birth, exactly placed to be the encourager who joined the worlds the gospel was binding together.

See Also

References

  • The Acts of the Apostles 4:36; 11:19–26; 12:12; 13:1–6; 15:37–39. (RSV consulted.)
  • Colossians 4:10; Numbers 3:5–13; 18:1–7; 1 Chronicles 23:24–32.
  • Josephus. Jewish Antiquities. Trans. Ralph Marcus, Loeb Classical Library. (On the Jewish community of Cyprus.)
  • Bruce, F. F. The Book of the Acts. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988. (On Acts 4:36 and the Hellenist mission.)
  • Hackett, John. A History of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus. London: Methuen, 1901. (On the Jewish community and the apostolic mission to Cyprus.)