Barabbas
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In the Christian narrative of the Passion of Jesus, Barabbas, according to some texts Jesus bar-Abbas, ( Aramaic Bar-abbâ, "son of the father"), was the insurrectionary whom Pontius Pilate freed at the Passover feast in Jerusalem. The penalty for Barabbas' crime was death by crucifixion, but according to all four Gospels there was a prevailing Passover custom in Jerusalem that allowed Pilate, the praefectus or governor of Judaea, to commute one prisoner's death sentence by popular acclaim, and the "crowd" (ochlos) — which becomes "the Jews" and "the multitude" 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, the crowd chose Jesus Barabbas to be released and Jesus of Nazareth to be crucified. A passage found only in the Gospel of Matthew has the crowd saying, "Let his blood be upon us and upon our children."
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 state, 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 Barabban] or Jesus which is called Christ (Iesous ton legomenon Christon)?
Some early Syriac 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. Origen consciously rejected the reading in the manuscript he was working with, and left out "Iesous" deliberately, for reverential considerations, certainly a strongly motivated omission. Origen did not want the name Jesus associated with anyone who was a sinner. While later declared a heretic, much of Origen's theology and philosophy remained influential, and has, to some extent, been traced to the later St. Augustine, who remains one of the most influential church fathers. It is a point of contention how much influence Origen's edits of the text may have had.
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). It must be noted, however, that all surviving texts that include Barabbas' name as "Jesus" are Syriac translations of the original Greek.
Most modern translations of the New Testament do not contain "Iesous" as the name of Barabbas. Additionally, none of the New Testament compilations in the original Greek contain "Iesous" as the name of Barabbas, nor is there any evidence within the Greek grammatical forms that Barabbas was anything more than a proper name and not an epigraph.
Barabbas' crime
Image:Munkacsy - christ before pilate.jpgJohn 18:40 refers to Barabbas as a lēstēs, "bandit;" Mark and Luke further refer to Barabbas as one involved in a stasis, a riot. Mark 15:7; Luke 23:19. Matthew refers to Barabbas only as a "notorious prisoner." Matthew 27:16. Some scholars posit that Barabbas was a member of the sicarii, a militant Jewish movement that sought to overthrow the Roman occupiers of their land by force, noting that Mark (15:7) mentions that he had committed murder in an insurrection. The sicarii and the ongoing revolt of Jews against foreign presence in Judea have been discussed by Robert Eisenman (James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead sea Scrolls); however, many historians maintain that the sicarii only arose in the 40's or 50's of the 1st century — after Jesus' execution. <ref name=Brown>Brown, Raymond E. (1994).The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels v.1 pp. 688-92. New York: Doubleday/The Anchor Bible Reference Library. ISBN 0-385-49448-3</ref> <ref>Meier, John P. (2001). A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus v. 3 p. 210. New York: Doubleday/The Anchor Bible Reference Library. ISBN 0-385-46993-4 (v.3).</ref>
Historicity
The Gospels all state that there was a custom at Passover during which the Roman governor would release a prisoner of the crowd's choice. Mark 15:6; Matt. 27:15; John 18:39; Luke 23:17 (though this verse in Luke is not present in the earliest manuscripts and may be a later gloss to bring Luke into conformity)<ref>Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels v.1. pp 793-95. New York: Doubleday/The Anchor Bible Reference Library. ISBN0-385-49448-3.</ref>
However, no other such release is recorded in any historical document, not even as a passing mention. Some point to the perception of Pontius Pilate's disregard for Jewish sensibilities; the idea of him honouring Jewish Passover in any way may not fit with historical accounts of his character. However, other historians take the exact opposite approach, arguing that Pilate showed careful regard to Jewish customs in order to avoid revolts in an unruly province, and this may be an example of Pilate creating an "ad hoc" tradition in order to avoid a possibly explosive situation.
If Pilate did not offer a choice between Jesus and another person, several possible explanations for the origin of such a story have been offered by a number of scholars.
Were Barabbas and Jesus the same person?
The name Barabbas is composed of two elements: bar, meaning son of, and Abba.
Abba has been found as a personal name in a First Century burial at Giv'at ja-Mivtar and Abba also appears as a personal name frequently in the Gemara section of the Talmud, dating from AD 200-400.<ref>Ibid. The Death of the Messiah: pp. 799-800</ref> This would mean that Barabbas was the son of one named Abba.
Abba also means "father" in Aramaic. Jesus sometimes referred to God as "father;" Jesus' use of the Aramaic word Abba survives untranslated (in most English translations) in Mark 14:36. In the Gospels, Jesus rarely refers to himself as the "son of God" and never refers to himself as the "son of the father." <ref>Ibid. The Death of the Messiah p.812</ref> However, some speculate that "bar-Abbâ" could actually be a reference to Jesus himself as "son of the father".
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.
Maccoby does not explain why such a shifting of blame would be necessary prior to Constantine's Edict of Tolerance which legalized Christianity. Additionally, critics point to the book of Revelation and several of the Apostle Paul's letters which contain criticisms of Roman culture and Roman government; moments that seem counter-productive if there was an attempt by the early Christian community to placate Roman authority by casting the blame for the crucifixion on the Jews.
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." This version seems to be free of the postulated Christian interpolations, but still makes it clear that Pilate ordered the crucifixion of Jesus.)
A different 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 referred to the Jewish 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(Luke 22:36) — and at least one sword turns up in the hands of Peter (named only in John) in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Arthur Drews, 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. Of course, in the Hebrew Bible and in Judaism in general, human sacrifice is strongly condemned. Because of this and many other aspects of Drews research, including the discrediting of Christianity in favor of a national Germanic religion (around the same time as the rise of the Nazi party), most of Drews research and views are held as suspect by the academic community, though he remains a significant source among some of those who argue that Jesus was a mythical creation as opposed to an historical figure.
However, these theories have been rejected by several mainstream scholars as fanciful, noting the consistent appearance of Barabbas in all of the Gospels. See, e.g.<ref>Ibid. The Death of the Messiah pp. 811-14</ref>
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.
If this interpretation is true, it means that the fictitious division of Yeshua Bar Abba (Jesus Barabbas) into two different people was already made in the Aramaic stage, before the Greek Gospels were written.
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<ref>http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/Jesus_and_Barabbas.html</ref>.
However, this theory too is rejected by mainstream scholars. <ref>Ibid. The Death of the Messiah pp.811-14</ref>
References
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Other uses
- Barabbas (novel) (1950): A novel by Swedish author Pär Lagerkvist for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1951.
- Barabbas (movie): A 1962 epic starring Anthony Quinn, based on Lagerkvist's book.
- Monty Python's Life of Brian features a comic scene with a Roman officer asking the crowd if they want to save Brian or somebody else.
- Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits features the family dog, named Barabbas.
External links
- John Dominic Crossan, "Crowd control": 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
- The Absurd Life: Jesus & Barabbasde:Barabbas
fr:Barabbas it:Barabba nl:Barabbas ja:バラバ pl:Barabasz sv:Barabbas zh:巴拉巴