Wednesday, June 11, 2025

It is the 11th of June 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

“Barnaby bright, Barnaby bright, the longest day and the shortest night,” while not technically true, the feast of St. Barnabus on this, the 11th of June, has a long history of being associated with the longest day of the year. In England, today would be the day farmers would begin haymaking season, and this has carried over in the tradition of making treats that look like haystacks- let me give you two, and then we’ll get to the life of Barnabus and what we know about this “son of consolation”.

You can make your haystacks with chow-mein noodles and butterscotch chips (link in transcript: https://owlbbaking.com/butterscotch-haystacks/). I’ve also been informed you can make walnut streusel coffee cake- but as a man fairly convinced walnuts are of the devil, I shall not provide a link.

So, Barnabus- unlike some of the shadowy characters who get the fan fiction treatment in the Middle Ages and beyond, there is a good to bit we know about him from Scripture as he is featured in Acts from the 4th chapter up through the 15th. What do we know? He was originally called Joseph and was a Levite. he was a native of Cyprus who owned land and sold it to give to the church. He is the first on the list of those teachers and prophets at the church in Antioch (where they were first called “Christians”), and he was sent to Jerusalem. After the conversion of Paul, it was Barnabas who introduced him to the disciples (tradition has that he and Paul were both disciples of Gamaliel). Paul and Barnabus would return to Antioch and work there for a year (see Acts 11), and they would eventually serve as missionaries to Cyprus (where Barnabus was from) and then other cities in Asia Minor.

They would then be sent back to Jerusalem for the all-important council mentioned in Acts 15 and Galatians 2- as mentioned before, this is the first example of a council that saw a place for both agreement and disagreement.

And this model of agreement and disagreement would spill into the relationship between Paul and Barnabus, as when they were going to go on a second missionary trip, Barnabus wanted to bring along John Mark, but Paul was upset about John Mark’s desertion of them earlier. Paul and Barnabus went their separate ways, with Paul taking Silas through Syria and Barnabus going back to Cyprus with John Mark. Thus ends the end of his canonical story- but we know that this doesn’t stop the church from telling its stories.

He is reasonably considered the founder of the Cypriot Orthodox Church, being from there. A less reasonable story is him appearing in a dream to the Archbishop of Cyprus in 478, revealing his relics under a carob tree. [We know that no real saint would be buried under that sneaky health food chocolate replacement….]. We have both a Pseudepigraphical epistle and a gospel of Barnabus- one certainly more aberrant and controversial than the other.

The Epistle is early and doesn’t have Barnabus' name on it- Clement of Alexandria supposed it was Barnabus (he also supposed, along with a few, that Barnabus was the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews). It’s a fine early Christian text with pretty standard theology, and parallel to Hebrews in its connecting the Old Testament sacrificial system as a picture of the coming sacrifice of Jesus.

As for the Gospel of Barnabus… well…. The version we have is from the Italian in the 14th or 15th century and is a retelling of the life of Jesus from a Muslim perspective- Jesus denies his divinity, claims he’s a forerunner of Muhammad, and is not crucified; it is Judas Iscariot in his place. Obviously popular in the Muslim world, it is an outlier even in the sometimes strange world of extra-canonical gospels. In the 5th century, the Pope condemned a certain “Gospel of Barnabus” as apocryphal, but this is a long-lost text, not a medieval forgery.

With enough canonical literature written about Barnabus in the book of Acts, we can remember him and his very significant work in the early church, from Antioch and Jerusalem, and then into Paul’s early missions. And with his feast day on this, the 11th of June, he’s another saint we can link to the coming of summer in the Western hemisphere. “Barnaby Bright” indeed on this, the 11th of June- the Feast of St. Barnabus

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary, and in keeping with texts we may not have associated with Pentecost comes Luke 1:26-38.

26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, 27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. 28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. 31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, 33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”

34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. 36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. 37 For no word from God will ever fail.”

38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 11th of June 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man who knows that a cab substitute is about as good as a pizza with a cauliflower crust… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who just learned that Tigers milk bars- the bad substitute and bane of my childhood went out of business, it’s probably for the best- I’m  Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.