a non-Greek: someone from outside the Greek-speaking world, whose speech a Greek could not follow
The word began as an imitation of sound. To Greek ears, people who did not speak Greek seemed to be repeating the same meaningless noise, "bar bar," much as English says "blah blah." So from the start the word drew a line by language: there were those who spoke Greek, and there was everyone else.
After the wars with Persia, Greek writers loaded that line with contempt, and the outsider became a stock figure: cruel, servile, uncivilized. Both the plain sense and the sneer were available in the first century, but the plain one was still the ordinary meaning, and the New Testament writers use only that. Not one of the six New Testament uses puts the word next to any charge of savagery or violence. Translations reach for "foreigner," "native," or "islander" precisely to keep the modern insult out.
One word covers a surprising spread because of what kind of line it draws. A line of language is quickly read as a line between peoples, so the word can name an individual you cannot understand or a whole population outside the Greek world. And once both sides of a line have names, naming both is a way of saying "everyone": "Greeks and non-Greeks" was a standard way of meaning the whole human race, which is how Paul uses it when he says he owes the good news to all.
The New Testament writers also push back on the sneer. Luke calls the people of Malta by this word and then reports that they showed Paul's shipwrecked company extraordinary kindness. Colossians goes further: in Christ the line between the Greek (Ἕλλην) and the outsider no longer holds, not even at its furthest edge, where the Scythian (Σκύθης) stood in ancient imagination for the wildest outsider of all.
Nuances
Whether "barbarian, Scythian" in Colossians 3:11 is a climactic intensification or a genuine antithesis, and what that implies for the force of βάρβαρος in the verse.
- majorityThe phrase is a climax rather than an antithesis: the Scythian was proverbially the most extreme barbarian, so the pair escalates instead of contrasting, and βάρβαρος retains its ordinary sense of a non-Greek.; T. K. Abbott, The Epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians (ICC; T&T Clark, 1897), on Col 3:11; J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul's Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon, on Col 3:11; James D. G. Dunn, The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (NIGTC; Eerdmans, 1996), on Col 3:11; Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon (Pillar; Eerdmans, 2008), on Col 3:11; Eduard Lohse, Colossians and Philemon (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1971), on Col 3:11
- minorityRead from a Cynic "Scythian perspective" shaped by the idealized figure of Anacharsis, the pairing is a real antithesis: the non-Scythian is the true barbarian, and the Greeks are the genuinely uncivilized party.; Troy W. Martin, "The Scythian Perspective in Col 3:11," Novum Testamentum 37.3 (1995): 249-261
- minorityNeither a climax nor a simple antithesis: the clause is arranged chiastically, so βάρβαρος answers an earlier term in the list rather than the adjacent Σκύθης.; Douglas A. Campbell, "Unravelling Colossians 3.11b," New Testament Studies 42.1 (1996): 120-132; Douglas A. Campbell, "The Scythian Perspective in Col 3:11: A Response to Troy Martin," Novum Testamentum 39 (1997)
Whether βαρβάροις in Romans 1:14 belongs to the conventional totality formula Ἕλληνές τε καὶ βάρβαροι or refers concretely to peoples beyond the Greco-Roman heartland.
- majorityThe phrase is the standard pairing, paralleled in Plato, Isocrates and Josephus, and functions as a way of saying "the whole human race"; Paul is asserting the universal scope of his obligation, with βάρβαρος meaning simply non-Greeks.; BDAG, s.v. βάρβαρος; Ben Witherington III, Paul's Letter to the Romans: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2004), on Rom 1:14; N. T. Wright, "The Letter to the Romans," New Interpreter's Bible 10 (Abingdon, 2002), on Rom 1:14
- minorityThe term carries a concrete reference to the world beyond the Greco-Roman center, read against Paul's projected Spanish mission (Rom 15:24, 28), so that Paul places himself under obligation to the very peoples the Greco-Roman honor hierarchy despised.; Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary (Hermeneia; Fortress, 2007), on Rom 1:14