The Acts of Barnabas

The Acts of Barnabas (Greek Periodoi kai Martyrion tou hagiou Barnaba, “the Travels and Martyrdom of the holy Barnabas”) is a fifth-century Cypriot apocryphon, written in the first person as if by John Mark, narrating Barnabas’s Cypriot mission and his martyrdom at Salamis. This file describes the document — its date, provenance, attribution, and contents — and assesses it: a late, legendary, but historically revealing text, not the work of John Mark, bound up with the island’s claim to apostolic foundation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

What the Document Is

The Acts of Barnabas is a short Greek narrative belonging to the genre of the apocryphal acts of the apostles — the later, popular, often legendary literature that grew up around the apostolic figures to supply what the canonical Acts left untold. It is cast as a first-person memoir by John Mark, the cousin and companion of Barnabas (Colossians 4:10; Acts 13:5), who narrates the apostles’ travels through Cyprus, their preaching from city to city, the opposition they met, and finally the seizure, stoning, and secret burial of Barnabas at Salamis — the burial in which Mark, by the narrative, laid the Gospel of Matthew on the apostle’s breast (Acts of Barnabas; trans. Walker, ANF 8). The text was first printed and translated into English in the nineteenth century and is most accessible in the Ante-Nicene Fathers collection (Vol. 8, trans. Alexander Walker), among the apocryphal acts.

Date and Provenance

Scholars place the Acts of Barnabas in the fifth century, and locate its composition in Cyprus itself. Its detailed knowledge of Cypriot geography — the route across the island, the named towns — and its evident interest in the apostle’s tomb and relics point to a Cypriot author writing for a Cypriot audience. Most tellingly, the document is closely bound up with the relic-finding and the autocephaly cause: it supplies precisely the back-story that the inventio under Anthemios and Zeno required — the martyrdom, the secret burial, the location near Salamis, the Gospel of Matthew laid on the breast — and was very plausibly composed in the same milieu and for the same purpose, to ground and dignify the island’s claim to apostolic foundation against Antioch (Hackett, History of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, 1901; on the inventio, see The Finding of the Relics). The text is thus a window onto fifth-century Cypriot Christianity and its self-understanding as much as a source for the first-century apostle.

The Attribution to John Mark

The narrative’s first-person claim to be the work of John Mark is, in the judgment of scholarship, a literary device, not a fact of authorship. [Disputed: the *Acts of Barnabas* presents itself as written by John Mark, the companion of Barnabas, and the Cypriot tradition received it as such; but the scholarly consensus holds that it is a fifth-century pseudonymous composition, not the work of the first-century John Mark — on grounds of its date (some four centuries after the events), its legendary character, its dependence on the canonical Acts, and its evident service to the fifth-century Cypriot autocephaly cause (Hackett 1901; the standard treatments of the apocryphal acts)]. The attribution to Mark follows the common pattern of the apocryphal acts, which routinely claim apostolic-age eyewitness authorship to lend authority to later narratives. The Orthodox tradition has nonetheless long associated the document with John Mark, and the association is part of the text’s reception; but the historical author was an anonymous fifth-century Cypriot Christian writing in Mark’s name.

What the Document Narrates

The Acts of Barnabas fills the silence of the canonical Acts after the parting from Paul (Acts 15:39) with a connected story. It recounts how Barnabas and John Mark, after some travels, came to Cyprus and went through the island preaching — naming Salamis, Lapithos, the region of Kyrene, Paphos, and the towns between — establishing the faith and meeting opposition, especially from hostile Jews from Syria. The climax is the martyrdom at Salamis: Barnabas, preaching in the synagogue, is seized by his opponents, abused and tortured, led out, and stoned to death; his enemies mean to burn the body, but Mark and companions recover it by night and bury it secretly in a cave outside the city, the Gospel of Matthew on the apostle’s breast; and Mark, with others, then flees the island (Acts of Barnabas; trans. Walker, ANF 8). The narrative thereby supplies the whole later tradition of Barnabas’s death and burial — the very details that the relic-finding would later “confirm.”

Assessment

The Acts of Barnabas is assessed, per the repository methodology, as a genuine and historically interesting document of the fifth-century Cypriot Church, valuable for what it reveals about that Church’s veneration of its founder and its case for autocephaly — but not as a reliable first-century source for the apostle’s death, and not the work of John Mark (METHODOLOGY §3.5). Several judgments follow. As history of the first century, its evidential weight is slight: it is late, legendary, dependent on the canonical Acts, and shaped by a fifth-century jurisdictional purpose. As a witness to Cypriot tradition, it is precious: it is the earliest connected account of Barnabas’s Cypriot mission and martyrdom, and it preserves the tradition the whole island would build upon. As a literary and ecclesial document, it shows how a fifth-century Church told the story of its apostolic founder and grounded its independence in his tomb. The honest reader holds these together: the Acts of Barnabas is reported as the earliest source for the martyrdom tradition, named as a fifth-century Cypriot apocryphon, and not asserted to be either eyewitness history or the composition of John Mark. It stands in this collection as the chief textual root of the Cypriot tradition treated in Sections 06 and 07, received with the same care the collection gives the Epistle that bears the apostle’s name.

See Also

References

  • The Acts of Barnabas (Periodoi kai Martyrion tou hagiou Barnaba). Trans. Alexander Walker, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The first-person narrative attributed to John Mark; the Cypriot mission and the martyrdom at Salamis.)
  • Hackett, John. A History of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus. London: Methuen, 1901. (Date, provenance, and the relation of the Acts of Barnabas to the autocephaly cause.)
  • Colossians 4:10; The Acts of the Apostles 13:5; 15:39. (John Mark the cousin and companion of Barnabas.)