Cyprus

Cyprus is one of the largest islands in the Mediterranean, approximately 148 miles long and 40 miles wide, situated south of Cilicia in the northeastern Mediterranean. In antiquity it was famous for its copper mines — the very word copper derives from the island's name. Numbers 24:24 may allude to Cyprus under the name Chittim, and the island had a significant Jewish diaspora community. Acts 4:36 identifies Barnabas as a Levite of the country of Cyprus, establishing the island's importance in the early church.

Paul and Barnabas visited Cyprus on the first missionary journey, preaching in the synagogues at Salamis and traveling across the island to Paphos, where the confrontation with the sorcerer Elymas (Bar-jesus) and the conversion of the proconsul Sergius Paulus occurred (Acts 13:4–12). Paul's ship passed Cyprus on his final journey to Jerusalem (Acts 21:3) and during the voyage to Rome (Acts 27:4). After the separation from Paul, Barnabas returned to Cyprus with Mark (Acts 15:39), suggesting a continued church presence on the island meaningful to Barnabas personally.

Cyprus held a special place in the gospel’s outward march. It was men of Cyprus and Cyrene, scattered by the persecution after Stephen, who first preached the Lord Jesus to Greeks at Antioch, where the great Gentile church was born (Acts 11:19–21). From that church Barnabas the Cypriot and Saul were sent out, and Cyprus became the first field of the first missionary journey — so that the island of Barnabas’s birth was the threshold of the mission to the nations. In the conversion of the proconsul Sergius Paulus the gospel claimed its first named Roman official, a sign of the kingdom’s advance from Jerusalem toward “the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Thus Cyprus stands as an early token of the worldwide harvest, where the word once carried by scattered refugees took root and bore fruit among the Gentiles, to the praise of Christ.