Relation of Paul to Barnabas

It has often been said that Paul is very niggardly here in recognition of Barnabas’s work as a champion of Gentile rights. But Paul was not writing a history for the ignorant; he assumes throughout that the Galatians knew the services of Barnabas. The single phrase “even Barnabas” is a sufficient answer to that charge. The one word “even” recalls the whole past to the interested readers; it places Barnabas above Peter in this respect. Peter had recognised the apostolate to the Gentiles: Peter had eaten with the Gentiles: but his dissembling, after all that, was not so extraordinary a thing as that “even Barnabas was carried away with the dissimulation” of the other Jews. That one sentence places Barnabas on a pedestal as a leading champion of the Gentiles; and yet it does not explicitly state that; it merely assumes the knowledge of his championship among the Galatians.

Further, where Paul speaks of his first journey, i.e., his Gospel to the Galatians, (It is important to observe that when Paul speaks of the Gospel to the Galatians, he means the message which converted them, i.e., on his first visit.) he uses the plural pronoun: “any Gospel other than that which we preached unto you” (Gal 1:8); “as we have said before, so say I now again” (Gal 1:9).

The Galatians caught the meaning of “we” in these cases as “Barnabas and I”. On the other hand, where the reference is to the division which had now come into existence between the Galatians and their evangelist, Barnabas is not included, and the singular pronoun is used (Gal 4:12 ff). There was no alienation between the Galatians and Barnabas, for Barnabas had not returned to them; and, as we shall see, it was through perversion and through real misunderstanding of Paul’s conduct on his second journey that the division arose.