Berea meaning

Meaning

Bringer, Carrier

Etymology

From the verb φερω (phero), to bring or carry.

Related names

• Via φερω (phero): Bernice, Fortunatus, Lucifer, Onesiphorus

The name Berea (a.k.a. Beroea, modern Veria) belongs to a city in Macedonia, where Paul, Silas and Timothy preached the gospel of Jesus Christ after their trouble in Thessalonica (Acts 17:10 and 17:13). When the troublemakers caught up with them in Berea, the brethren sent Paul away to Athens but initially kept Silas and Timothy with them. The three were finally reunited in Corinth (Acts 18:5).

The ethnonym Berean (Βεροιαιος, Beroiaios) occurs once, in Acts 20:4, where it describes Sopater, one of the men who accompanied Paul on his journey from Greece, via Macedonia to Troas.

Berea's other claims to fame are scant. The Macedonian League was seated in Berea, which may have helped the preservation of something of a Macedonian ethnic identity after the Roman conquest of the region (Third Macedonian War, 171-168 BC), even though it was forced under the imperial cult, as were all such local centers.

As we discuss in our article on the name Sopater, Luke did his best to cater to the literary instincts of his Greco-Roman audience (and Paul concurred: 1 Corinthians 9:19-23), and organized Acts so that it also served as an elaborate and respectful nod to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. A much more striking association, one which identifies Sopater as a literary character, Homer-style, comes with the note (deemed a gloss by some) that his father's name was Pyrrhus, which was also the name of the Greek general who managed to ignite the Punic Wars, after which the Roman Republic disintegrated and became the putrid Empire, which, when it too failed, dragged the world's last hope for the resurrection of the Republic with it to the grave. It took mankind 1,500 years to resurrect any semblance of the kingless Republic.

Pyrrhus of Epirus, the man who shook the earth and made kingdoms tremble, was raised from infancy by a Molossian princess named Beroea. Luke made it very clear to his audience that Sopater the Berean, son of Pyrrhus, was a loaded canon, trained on the world's heaving capital.

Today, when we speak of "the Gospel of the Birth of the Savior of the World, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords," we are much too quick to forget that in New Testament times, this term described only Caesar Augustus, and the day on which he was born (as Octavian). The Roman Republic had collapsed and the entire human world was rapidly disintegrating into war, chaos and anarchy, but Caesar Agustus had rescued the world and had stayed its descent by reinstating the monarchy that every Roman had learned to hate.

The Gospel of Caesar Augustus was: DO AS YOU'RE TOLD! OBEY YOUR MASTERS! The Gospel of Jesus Christ was: Do as you have skill. Learn, study and be useful. Live to serve.

In the Roman world, only the Emperor issued law. In the world of The Way, the universe runs on rules that never break, that can be studied, learned and mastered by anybody at all. The Roman law was a law of slavery, whereas God's natural law was a perfect law of freedom (James 1:25). It's from the tension between these two realities that the New Testament derives much of its arena, and from its inherent paradox comes much of the terminology of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Luke deployed Sopater predominantly as an obvious allegorical character who embodied an element of the furtherance of the Gospel: the news that the eternal and incorruptible Word of God — which keeps the entire universe up and running (Colossians 1:16-17) and contains all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3) — had come into human flesh, and could be known and merged with; the magnificent news that a mastery of natural law would result in individual freedom, the principled rejection of any kind of control over any other adult, and the restoration of the Republic: the Final Republic, a.k.a. the Kingdom of Heaven, and the City of God.

The Macedonian dialect of Greek commonly wrote Β for Φ — the name Βερενικη (Berenike), or Bernice, is Macedonian for Φερενικη (Pherenike) — and the name Berea is quite probably drawn from the familiar verb φερο (phero), meaning to bring or carry (a load):

The name Berea means Bringer or Carrier, and since her adopted son's name Pyrrhus relates to πυρ (pur), fire, her story is obviously a play on the name Lucifer (i.e. Light-Bringer; the name of the Morning Star: see 2 Peter 1:19).