The Martyrdom at Salamis

The Acts of the Apostles leaves Barnabas alive, sailing for Cyprus (Acts 15:39); the tradition of his death comes from later sources, above all the fifth-century apocryphal Acts of Barnabas. By that tradition the apostle was seized by hostile opponents at Salamis, tortured, and stoned to death — c. AD 57–61 — and secretly buried by John Mark. This file reports the tradition of the martyrdom, names its earliest attestation, and considers how an Orthodox reader holds a martyrdom known only from later tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Silence of Acts

Scripture says nothing of Barnabas’s death. The last canonical notice of him is the parting from Paul: “Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus” (Acts 15:39, RSV). Luke, following Paul, never returns to him; the Pauline letters show the two apostles’ paths still crossing (1 Corinthians 9:6; Galatians 2:13; Colossians 4:10) but record no death. The whole tradition of Barnabas’s martyrdom therefore stands outside the New Testament, resting on the later Cypriot sources — and the honest acknowledgment of this is the first duty in reporting it. What the Church holds about the apostle’s death is tradition, pinned to its earliest written attestation, not a fact narrated by Scripture (per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Tradition of the Martyrdom

The earliest connected account is the Acts of Barnabas (Periodoi kai Martyrion tou hagiou Barnaba), a fifth-century apocryphon written in the first person as if by John Mark (on the document itself, see The Acts of Barnabas). According to its narrative, Barnabas and John Mark, traversing Cyprus and preaching, came at last to Salamis. There Barnabas preached in the synagogue, and certain Jews from Syria, hostile to the gospel, stirred up the people against him. They seized the apostle, subjected him to abuse and torture, and, leading him out of the city, stoned him to death; his body they intended to burn, but John Mark and others recovered it by night and buried it secretly in a cave outside the city, laying upon his breast the copy of the Gospel of Matthew that Barnabas had carried and used in his preaching (Acts of Barnabas; trans. Walker, ANF 8). The mode of death — stoning — is fitting to the tradition’s setting: it is the death prescribed in the Law for blasphemy (Leviticus 24:16) and the death suffered by Stephen, the first martyr, at whose stoning the young Saul had stood by (Acts 7:58–60). Barnabas, the Levite of Cyprus, dies in his homeland the death of the proto-martyr.

The Date

The sources do not fix the year precisely, and the tradition gives a range. The death is variously placed around AD 57 and around AD 61, with c. 61 the more commonly cited figure in the hagiographical and reference literature; some accounts place it a few years earlier. [Disputed: the martyrdom of Barnabas at Salamis is dated by the hagiographical tradition to c. AD 61, by some accounts c. AD 57; the *Acts of Barnabas* itself gives no precise year, and the date is a tradition reconstructed from the implied chronology of the apostolic age rather than a fixed datum (Hackett 1901; the *Synaxarion*, June 11)]. What the tradition is consistent about is the place (Salamis), the manner (stoning by hostile opponents), and the agent of burial (John Mark) — and on these the later relic-finding tradition would build.

How an Orthodox Reader Holds It

The methodology of this collection requires that hagiographical claims be reported as what the sources attest, with the source named, and never certified as independent historical fact (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The martyrdom of Barnabas is exactly such a claim. It is attested in the Acts of Barnabas, a fifth-century text of legendary character, and in the synaxaria and later Cypriot tradition that depend on it; it is not corroborated by any first- or second-century source. This does not make it false — apostolic martyrdoms were common, and the death of Barnabas in his Cypriot homeland is entirely plausible — but it places the tradition at a particular level of evidence, and the honest reader keeps that level in view. The Church venerates Barnabas as a holy apostle and, in the Cypriot and wider tradition, as a martyr, on the strength of this tradition; it does not claim to know the manner and date of his death with the security of the events Acts records.

What the martyrdom tradition does carry, beyond the bare facts it asserts, is theological meaning the Church has always read in it. The apostle who began his career by selling his field for the community (Acts 4:37) and who spent it standing surety for others — for Saul, for the Antiochenes, for John Mark — ends it by the supreme self-gift of the martyr, laying down his life in the homeland to which he had carried the gospel. The Gospel of Matthew on his breast, in the burial tradition, makes the point visible: the apostle dies clutching the gospel he preached, and is buried with the word for which he died. Whatever the precise history, this is how Cyprus and the whole Church have remembered the end of the son of encouragement — and the tradition of that death would, in time, give the island its tomb, its relics, and its independence (see The Finding of the Relics).

References

The Acts of Barnabas. Trans. Alexander Walker, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The earliest connected narrative of the seizure, stoning, and secret burial at Salamis.)
The Acts of the Apostles 7:58–60; 15:39. (RSV consulted; the stoning of Stephen; the last canonical notice of Barnabas.)
Leviticus 24:16. (Stoning as the penalty for blasphemy.)
Hackett, John. A History of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus. London: Methuen, 1901. (The martyrdom tradition and its date.)
The Synaxarion of the Orthodox Church, June 11. (The commemoration of the apostle and martyr.)