Barbarian, Barbarous
Barbarian, Barbarous
bar-bari-an, barba-rus (, barbaros): A word probably formed by imitation of the unintelligible sounds of foreign speech, and hence, in the mouth of a Greek it meant anything that was not Greek, language, people or customs. With the spread of Greek language and culture, it came to be used generally for all that was non-Greek. Philo and Josephus sometimes called their own nation barbarians, and so did Roman writers up to the Augustan age, when they adopted Greek culture, and reckoned themselves with the Greeks as the only cultured people in the world. Therefore Greek and barbarian meant the whole human race (Rom 1:14).
In Col 3:11, barbarian, Scythian is not a classification or antithesis but a climax (Abbott) = barbarians, even Scythians, the lowest type of barbarians. In Christ, all racial distinctions, even the most pronounced, disappear.
In 1Co 14:11 Paul uses the term in its more primitive sense of one speaking a foreign, and therefore, an unintelligible language: If then I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be to him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh will be a barbarian unto me. The speaking with tongues would not be a means of communication. The excited inarticulate ejaculations of the Corinthian revivalists were worse than useless unless someone had the gift of articulating in intelligible language the force of feeling that produced them (dunamis tes phones, literally, the power of the sound).
In Act 28:2, Act 28:4 (in the King James Version of Act 28:2 barbarous people = barbarians) the writer, perhaps from the Greek-Roman standpoint, calls the inhabitants of Melita barbarians, as being descendants of the old Phoenician settlers, or possibly in the more general sense of strangers. For the later sense of brutal, cruel, savage, see 2 Macc 2:21; 4:25; 15:2.
Fuente: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
Barbarian, Barbarous
properly meant “one whose speech is rude, or harsh;” the word is onomatopoeic, indicating in the sound the uncouth character represented by the repeated syllable “bar-bar.” Hence it signified one who speaks a strange or foreign language. See 1Co 14:11. It then came to denote any foreigner ignorant of the Greek language and culture. After the Persian war it acquired the sense of rudeness and brutality. In Act 28:2, Act 28:4, it is used unreproachfully of the inhabitants of Malta, who were of Phoenician origin. So in Rom 1:14, where it stands in distinction from Greeks, and in implied contrast to both Greeks and Jews. Cp. the contrasts in Col 3:11, where all such distinctions are shown to be null and void in Christ. “Berber” stood similarly in the language of the Egyptians for all non-Egyptian peoples.