Barbarian

Barbarian is a Greek word used in the New Testament to denote anyone who did not speak Greek — the term originated in the Greek perception of foreign speech as sounding like bar-bar, an onomatopoeia for unintelligible noise. In Romans 1:14, Paul declares himself a debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, to the wise and to the unwise — using the Greek-barbarian distinction as a comprehensive way of describing all of humanity as his field of evangelistic responsibility. Colossians 3:11 lists Barbarian alongside Scythian, slave and free, as distinctions dissolved in Christ.

In Acts 28:1–4, the inhabitants of Malta are called barbaroi — translated as barbarous people — with no negative connotation, simply indicating they were non-Greek speakers. The Maltese showed Paul and his companions unusual kindness, and Paul's survival of a viper's bite led them to regard him as a god. By New Testament times, barbarian was a neutral ethnic-linguistic descriptor rather than the pejorative it later became in Western usage.