Barabbas
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In the Christian story of the passion of Jesus , Barabbas, actually Jesus bar-Abbas, (Aramaic Bar-abbâ, "son of the father"), was the insurrectionary murderer whom Pontius Pilate freed at the Passover feast in Jerusalem. The "crowd" (ochlos)— which becomes "the Jews" in translation— were offered a choice of whether to have Barabbas or Christ released from Roman custody, according to the closely parallel canonic gospels of Matthew (27:16), Mark (15:7), Luke (23:18 - 19), and the more divergent accounts in John (18:40) and the formerly lost gospel of Peter
Barabbas himself was most likely a member of the sicarii, a militant Jewish movement that sought to overthrow the Roman occupiers of their land by force, for Mark (15:7) mentions that he had committed murder in an insurrection. The penalty for his crime was death by crucifixion, but according to the Gospels there was a prevailing custom in Jerusalem that allowed Pilate, the praefectus or governor of Judaea, to commute one prisoner's death sentence by popular acclaim. The crowd ("the multitude") chose Jesus Barabbas to be released and Jesus of Nazareth to be crucified.
The story of Barabbas has special social significances, partly because it has frequently been used to lay the blame for the Crucifixion on the Jews and justify anti-Semitism. Equally, the social significance of the story to early hearers was that it shifted blame away from the Roman imperium, removing an impediment to Christianity's eventual official acceptance.
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"Jesus Barabbas"
According to the United Bible Societies' text, Matthew 27:17 reads: "...whom will ye that I release unto you? Jesus Barabbas [Greek: Iesous ton Barabbas] or Jesus which is called Christ [Greek: Iesous ton legomenon Christon]?"
Some early Greek manuscripts of Matthew present Barabbas' name twice as Jesus bar Abbas: manuscripts in the Caesarean group of texts, the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the Palestinian Syriac lectionaries and some of the manuscripts used by Origen in the 3rd century, all support the fact that Barabbas' name was originally Jesus Barabbas, though not all modern New Testament translations reflect this. Origen deliberately rejected the reading in the manuscript he was working with, and left out "Iesous" deliberately, for reverential considerations, certainly a strongly motivated omission. Early editors did not want the name Jesus associated with anyone who was a sinner. Mark's parallels between the two men, each a "Jesus, son of the Father," constructing a parable, may also have been considered overplayed (see below).
The alternative possibility, that "Jesus" was unintentionally inserted twice before Barabbas' name, in verses 16 and 17, is unlikely, especially since Barabbas is mentioned first in each verse (thus, dittography is ruled out). Further, the addition of "called the Christ" to Jesus' name (Iesous ton legomenon Christon) in verse 17 makes better sense if Barabbas is also called "Jesus" (Iesous ton Barabbas). Otherwise, a mere "Jesus" would have been sufficient to distinguish the two.
Historicity
There is no evidence independent of Mark that it was ever the custom at feasts for the Romans to release a prisoner requested by the Jews, or any other subject people. No other such release is recorded, even as a passing mention, nor does such a Passover custom appear in the Old Testament. Conversely, Pontius Pilate's historic disregard for Jewish sensibilities and Jewish custom is well documented. From an imperial perspective, such a practice would make no sense, and releasing a prisoner accused of murdering soldiers would certainly undercut morale.
Were Barabbas and Jesus the same person?
Jesus was somewhat unusual among rabbis in referring to God as "father". In the gospels, Jesus refers to himself as "son of God" several times, and thus "bar-Abbâ" could actually be a reference to Jesus himself as "son of the father". "Bar-Abbâ" could also be a polite way to refer to a boy whose father's name was not known, though no contemporary usage of this kind has been identified.
Hyam Maccoby and some other scholars have averred that Jesus was known as "bar-Abba", because of his custom of addressing God as 'Abba' in prayer, and referring to God as Abba in his preaching. It follows that when the Jewish crowd clamored before Pontius Pilate to "free Bar Abba" they could have meant Jesus. Anti-Semitic elements in the Christian church, the argument goes, altered the narrative to make it appear that the demand was for the freedom of somebody else (a brigand or insurrectionist) named "Barabbas". This was, the theory goes, part of the tendency to shift the blame for the Crucifixion towards the Jews and away from the Romans.
Benjamin Urrutia, co-author with Guy Davenport of The Logia of Yeshua (the Sayings of Jesus) agrees completely with Maccoby and others who aver that Yeshua Bar Abba or Jesus Barabbas must be none other than Jesus of Nazareth, and that the choice between two prisoners is a fiction. However, Urrutia opposes the notion that Jesus may have either led or planned a violent insurrection. Jesus was a strong advocate of "turning the other cheek" - which means not submission but strong and courageous, though nonviolent, defiance and resistance. Jesus, in this view, must have been the planner and leader of the Jewish nonviolent resistance to Pilate's plan to set up Roman Eagle standards on Jerusalem's Temple Mount. The story of this successful resistance is told by Josephus — who, curiously, does not say who was the leader, but does tell of Pilate's crucifixion of Jesus just two paragraphs later in a passage whose authenticity is heavily disputed. (See article Josephus on Jesus, in particular the section "Arabic Version.")
A less purposely anti-Semitic interpretation is that the story derives from the Jewish crowd (many of whom may have been among those who had hailed Jesus as a king perhaps less than a week earlier) calling out for the freedom of the man who (somewhat unusually for that era) referred to God as "father" and referred to himself as "son-of the father" (bar-Abba in Aramaic) — namely, Jesus himself. Pilate refused their pleas (and likely would have been disciplined by his superiors in Rome, if he did not punish both insurrectionists and those who claimed to be king of the Jews). Later, when people who did not understand Aramaic retold the story, they still included the petition for freedom, but bar-Abbas became a separate person - incidentally thus making the Romans less culpable, and the Jews more so.
Further interpretations along these same lines raise questions about how much difference there was between Jesus and an insurrectionist. In the gospels, shortly after being hailed as a king by the Jews, Jesus caused a commotion in the Jewish temple by overturning tables and swinging a lash (mentioned only in John) at people. Soon afterwards and just shortly before his arrest, the gospels have Jesus telling his apostles to sell their cloaks and buy swords — and at least one sword turns up in the hands of Peter (named only in John) in the Garden of Gethsemane. Pilate would be reprimanded for releasing even a peaceful man who had others calling anyone but Caesar the "king of the Jews", no less one whose methods appeared to include violence.
Arthur Drew, a German Hegelian philosopher, in his books Christ Myth (1924) and Legend of Peter (1924), argued that first century Christianity was a social ethical movement which needed no founder to explain its rise. A long standing feature of the Semitic world was an annual sacrifice of a "Son of the Father" — Barabbas, originally called Jesus Barabbas. This may account for the myth that a historical person, Jesus, actually lived. Of course, in the Hebrew Bible and in Judaism in general, human sacrifice is strongly condemned, so Drew's theory would seem to require at least some further explanation.
A possible parable?
This "practice" of releasing a prisoner is said by some analysts to be an element in a literary creation of Mark, who needed to have a contrast to the true "son of the father" in order to set up an edifying contest, in a form of parable. An interpretation, using modern Reader Response theory, suggests no petition for the release of Barabbas need ever have happened at all, and that the contrast between Barabbas and Jesus is a parable meant to draw the reader (or hearer) of the gospel into the narrative so that they must choose whose revolution, the violent insurgency of Barabbas or the challenging gospel of Jesus, is truly from the Father.
A critical analysis of possibly fictive elements in Mark's series of ironic parallels, and a comparison with Homer's contest between the beggars for the approval of the suitors in the Odyssey, is laid out in detail in Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark[1] (http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/Jesus_and_Barabbas.html).
See also
- Barabbas (movie): the 1962 epic starring Anthony Quinn
External links
- John Dominic Crossan, "Crowd control": (http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2974) identity, purpose and size of "the crowd" in Mark and its adapted purposes in Luke and John, on the occasion of the Mel Gibson film of 2004.
- More on the interpretation that Jesus and Barabbas were the same person (http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/0480Barabbas.html)
- The Absurd Life: Jesus & Barabbas (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_still/absurd.html)