The Apostle of Cyprus

Barnabas is venerated as the apostle, founder, and patron of the Church of Cyprus — the native son who first carried the gospel to the island in Acts 13, returned to it after the parting from Paul (Acts 15:39), and by the later Cypriot tradition labored and died there. This file traces the foundation of the Cypriot Church on Barnabas, from the firm ground of Acts to the later tradition of his return and martyrdom, and his standing as the apostolic root of the island’s Christianity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Scriptural Foundation

The Church of Cyprus grounds its identity on a fact securely recorded in Scripture: the gospel came to Cyprus through an apostle who was himself a Cypriot. Barnabas was “a native of Cyprus” (Acts 4:36, RSV), and when the Holy Spirit set him and Saul apart for the first mission, their first destination was his homeland (Acts 13:4). They landed at Salamis, preached through its synagogues, crossed the whole island to Paphos, and there saw the proconsul Sergius Paulus come to faith after the blinding of the magician Elymas (Acts 13:4–12; see Cyprus and the Mission). This first mission is the bedrock of the Cypriot claim: the island did not merely receive missionaries from elsewhere but was evangelized by its own son, an apostle set apart by the Spirit and named by Luke himself (Acts 14:14). No later legend was needed to make Cyprus apostolic; Acts 13 made it so.

The Return to Cyprus

The second Cypriot foundation-text is the parting from Paul. When Paul refused to take John Mark on the second journey, “Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus” (Acts 15:39, RSV). This is the last the canonical narrative sees of Barnabas: it leaves him sailing for his homeland with his cousin, to revisit and strengthen the churches he and Paul had planted. Acts follows Paul and says no more of Barnabas, but the brief notice gave the Cypriot tradition its starting-point. The island remembers this return as the beginning of Barnabas’s sustained labor among his own people — the apostle who, having helped open the door of faith to the whole Gentile world, came home to build up the Church of Cyprus (Acts 15:39; Hackett, History of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, 1901).

The Later Tradition of His Labors

Everything beyond Acts 15:39 belongs to later tradition, chiefly the fifth-century apocryphal Acts of Barnabas (the Periodoi kai Martyrion tou hagiou Barnaba), written in the first person as if by John Mark, and the Byzantine notices that grew up around the relic-finding (see The Acts of Barnabas). According to this tradition, Barnabas and John Mark traversed Cyprus preaching — through Salamis, Lapithos, Kyrene, Paphos, and the towns between — establishing congregations and ordaining clergy, until Barnabas met his death by martyrdom at Salamis (the Acts of Barnabas; trans. Walker, ANF 8). This material is received by the Church as the tradition of how the apostle founded and watered the island’s Church, not as independently verifiable history; it is pinned to its earliest written attestation in the Acts of Barnabas and the relic-finding sources, per the repository methodology, and the historicity of its particulars is treated as tradition (see The Martyrdom at Salamis and The Historical Questions).

Founder and Patron

On this double foundation — the firm scriptural witness of Acts 13 and the later tradition of his return and death — Barnabas stands as the founder and patron of the Church of Cyprus. The significance is ecclesiological as much as historical. In the early Church, apostolic foundation conferred dignity and, in time, claims to autonomy: a see founded by an apostle could trace its faith and its orders directly to the apostolic generation, and need not regard itself as the daughter of any later mother-church. Cyprus’s possession of an apostolic founder who was the island’s own son gave it a claim of singular strength when, in the fifth century, the Patriarchate of Antioch sought to bring the Cypriot Church under its jurisdiction. The answer the Cypriots gave was, in essence: our Church was founded by the apostle Barnabas, and an apostolic Church owes obedience to no patriarchate (Hackett 1901; see The Autocephaly of Cyprus). Barnabas the encourager thus became, in the island’s memory and in its canon law, the guarantor of its independence.

The Apostle and His Island

The bond between Barnabas and Cyprus is among the most concrete in the calendar of the saints. Where many apostles are venerated across the whole Church without a particular homeland-Church claiming them as its own founder, Barnabas is inseparably the apostle of Cyprus: the island’s cathedral churches, its great monastery near Salamis built over his tomb, and its archbishops’ privileges all derive from him. The Cypriot Church keeps his memory not only on the universal feast of June 11 but with a particular intensity as the feast of its founder, and the discovery of his relics (June 11 is also the day on which the tradition places the inventio) is celebrated as the event that secured the island’s ecclesiastical freedom (see The Finding of the Relics and Veneration and the Feast). For Cyprus, Barnabas is not a distant apostolic name but the father of the local Church — the son of encouragement who, having encouraged the whole Church in its first generation, came home to plant and to die for the Church of his own island.

See Also

References

  • The Acts of the Apostles 4:36; 13:4–12; 14:14; 15:39. (RSV consulted.)
  • The Acts of Barnabas. Trans. Alexander Walker, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The later Cypriot tradition of the mission and martyrdom.)
  • Hackett, John. A History of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus. London: Methuen, 1901. (The apostolic foundation and Barnabas as patron.)
  • The Synaxarion of the Orthodox Church, June 11. (The commemoration of the apostle and patron of Cyprus.)