BAR IESU (Βαρησοῦς: "son of Jesus"). - A Jew devoted to magic, a "pseudoprophet" nicknamed Elymas ('Εὐχάς'), a term of Arabic origin ('alim' = wise man, pl. 'ulamā'). He lived at Paphos with Sergius Paulus, proconsul of Cyprus, where
Paul and Barnabas met him. The proconsul was inclined to welcome the Gospel message, but B. dissuaded him, and with intrigues and impostures "resisted" the Apostles. Paul, fixing his gaze on him, struck him down: "Man full of fraud and deceit, son of the devil"; and he inflicted blindness on him as a punishment: "For a time you will be blind," which came about instantly. This miracle converted the proconsul (Acts 13:6-12). Chrysostom (Hom. in Act., 28, 2: PG 60, 211) observes that this punishment was temporary, to lead B. to the faith; Origen states (in Exod.: PG 12, 276) that the magician did in fact believe in Christ.
F. C. Bauer and E. Zeller denied the historicity of this narrative, considering it a duplicate of Peter's altercation with Simon Magus (Acts 8:18-24); but between the two passages the only point in common is the presence of a magician.
B. belonged to that category, which was beginning to develop, of Jewish adventurers who cultivated and propagated a theosophical occultism. Μάγος has lost its original Persian sense and means "sorcerer." The patronymic "son of Jesus" is not surprising, because "Jesus" was then a very common name: more than ten persons of that time bear it in the writings of Flavius Josephus. But St. Ephrem and the Ρεβίτσα have Βαγανόμαι.
From Acts 13:8, it would appear that Ἐλύμας is the equivalent (μεθερηνεύεται) of the magician's name. Th. Zahn therefore identifies the sense of the two names and, with codex D and other "Western" witnesses, reads Ἐντομᾶς (with the sense of ἔτοιμος, "ready") and Βαργοδῶν (which derives from the Heb. Ἐντομᾶ, a form more of Ἐντομᾶ "made ready"), so that the magician would have had a double name, Greek and Aramaic, of equivalent sense (like Thomas-Didymos).
If one accepts the "Western" reading Ἐντομᾶς (or Ἐντομᾶς: Lucifer and late codices of the Old Latin: "Paratus"), the identification of B. with the magician of Cyprus whom Flavius Josephus calls Ἀντομᾶς (Antiq. Jud., XX, 7, 2; in various codices Simon) is plausible; he was an intermediary between the Roman procurator Felix and Drusilla, separating her from her husband Aziz, king of Emesa.
Among the Latins the form Barieu appeared ("maleficus," St. Jerome), which penetrated into 4 codices of the Old Latin and 5 of the Vulgate; St. Bede advocates it, out of respect for the sacred name of Jesus. Strange is the conjecture of F. C. Burkitt, that Ἐλύμας is a corruption of ὁ λομῶς "the plague."