Elymas (Bar-Jesus)

His name was Bar-Jesus – “son of Joshua,” a bitter irony Luke surely noticed – a Jewish false prophet and magician who had attached himself to the proconsul of Cyprus as court advisor. When Sergius Paulus summoned Barnabas and Saul to hear the word of God, Elymas understood his situation perfectly: a patron converted is a patronage lost. He “opposed them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith” (Acts 13:6-8).

Paul’s response, “filled with the Holy Spirit,” is the apostle’s first recorded confrontation, and it reads like a prophet’s indictment: “You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?” The sentence fit the crime with poetic precision – the man who worked to keep another in darkness got darkness: “you will be blind and unable to see the sun for a time. Immediately mist and darkness fell upon him, and he went about seeking people to lead him by the hand” (Acts 13:9-11).

Luke leaves two mercies visible in the judgment: it was “for a time,” not forever – the same temporary blindness that had begun Paul’s own conversion – and its effect was the proconsul’s faith. Whether Elymas ever followed his patron into the light, Scripture does not say.

In the New Testament

• Elymas opposes the mission and is blinded (Acts 13:6-12)