John was born in Almodóvar del Campo, in the Spanish province of Ciudad Real, around 1500. As a priest he travelled throughout Andalusia, drawing crowds by his preaching. His enemies, disturbed by his success and challenged by his teaching, denounced him for heresy, and he made no attempt to avoid imprisonment or trial, but preached the Catholic faith even more fervently.

The so-called Epistle of Barnabas is a Greek epistle written between AD 70 and 132. It was respected enough to be included in early codices of the Bible, such as the famous Codex Sinaiticus. Some early Fathers of the Church ascribed it to the Barnabas who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, but it is now generally attributed to an otherwise unknown early Christian teacher, perhaps also called Barnabas. Like the Epistle of James, the later letters of Peter and John, the Apocalypse and the Shepherd of Hermas, it was accepted as canonical by some people but not by others. As time went on, the status of these various books was settled. Although the Epistle of Barnabas has not in the end been found to be part of scripture, it is still a valuable way of reflecting on scripture itself, especially in the way that it applies specifically Jewish modes of exposition to the events of the New Testament and their prefiguring in the Old. It is used several times in the Liturgy of the Hours.

The theological virtue of hope is symbolized by the colour green, just as the burning fire of love is symbolized by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like them, is always new and always fresh. Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time, the orderly sequence of weeks through the year, a season in which we are being neither single-mindedly penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white).