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Saint Barnabas the Apostle

Western calendar
11 June
Orthodox calendar
11 June (24 June on the old calendar)
Honoured as
Apostle, one of the Seventy

Barnabas was a Levite of Cyprus named Joseph, and soon after Pentecost he sold his land and laid the money at the apostles' feet, and they called him Barnabas, “son of consolation”. When the church in Jerusalem was afraid of Saul the former persecutor, Barnabas stood by him and brought him to the apostles, and later he fetched him from Tarsus to Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians. Luke calls him “a good man, full of the Holy Ghost and of Faith”, and Orthodox tradition holds that he was stoned in Cyprus and that Mark buried him with the Gospel of Matthew on his breast.

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Feast days, two calendars and patron saints

A saint’s feast day is the day each year when the Church remembers that saint in its worship, and for most saints it is the day they died. These are among the oldest days in the Christian year: after Easter and Pentecost, and Christmas and Epiphany in the fourth century, the next feasts the Church kept were those of the apostles and the martyrs.

Many saints have two dates in the finder because the Western and Orthodox Churches built their calendars separately over many centuries. Sometimes they remember the same saint on different days: the West keeps Saint Jude with Saint Simon on 28 October, while the Orthodox keep him on 19 June. Some Orthodox churches, such as the Russian Church, also still follow the old Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind the one on our walls, so their 6 December falls on our 19 December. Where that happens the finder gives both dates.

A patron saint is a saint the Church has come to ask for help in a particular place, work or need, “a special intercessor with God and the proper advocate”, as the old Catholic Encyclopedia puts it. Some patronages were declared by a pope, as when Pius IX named Saint Joseph patron of the whole Church in 1870; most grew from long tradition, as with Saint Anthony and the things we lose.

We chose these two hundred saints by what people search for most, by name, by need and by date, and added the saints Orthodox Christians look for and the apostles. Every fact in an entry comes from a source we checked and name under it: the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Orthodox Church in America’s lives of the saints, Vatican News and the Holy See’s own documents. Where a saint’s story comes to us mostly from legend, the entry says so.