It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not—so long as it makes you feel good—as it is not to care how you got your money—as long as you have got it.

Edmund way Teale, Cycle of the Seasons (1950)

The Mystery of Barabbas 1

Barabbas
The Rebel
The Suspicions of the Authorities
Galilaeans

Abstract

For Christians, the peculiar incident of the release of Barabbas, a robber, is another callous event in the narrative of the death of the Son of God for the sins of mankind. It proves that the Jews, by their rejection of Jesus, were no longer the Chosen People of God. Instead the followers of Jesus were. The thesis presented here is that Jesus, the Son of God, was Jesus, the king of the Jews, a man who believed that by capturing Jerusalem from the Romans and cleansing the temple, God would send a miracle to free his chosen people, the Jews. In Roman law, a man who is acclaimed king is a seditionist, so Barabbas and bar Abbas are both revolutionaries. Can we really accept that Pilate offers the crowd the choice of Jesus Barabbas, a seditionist, or Jesus bar Abbas, the son of his father, God, a different seditionist? Is this really historical?

Barabbas

In the earliest gospel, Mark records the incident of Barabbas. This extraordinary incident gives us a glimpse through the distorting veils of time to the foundation of Christianity and the truth about its beginnings. All four gospels tell the story (Mk 15:6-15, Mt 27:15-26, Lk 23:17-25, Jn 18:39-40).

Jesus of Nazareth, a simple travelling preacher and healer, has been betrayed by the scheming Jews and stands before the Roman governor of Judaea on capital charges. The governor, Pontius Pilate, a just and kindly man, can find no wrong in Jesus, but is scared of offending the Jews. He tries to release him by invoking an old custom whereby, at festival time (in this instance, the Jewish Passover) a prisoner of the people’s choosing is released. He offers the crowd, who had only days before been hailing Jesus as a king, a choice—they could release Jesus, or a thief called Barabbas. The fickle crowd pick the criminal. Not wanting to be associated with sending an innocent man to a cruel death Pilate theatrically washes his hands before the crowd to declare to them he is not responsible for the death of a good man.

For Christians this is simply another callous event in the narrative of the unjust and cruel death of the Son of God in atonement for the sins of mankind. The tale proves that the Jews, by their rejection of Jesus, were no longer the Chosen People of God. Instead the followers of Jesus were.

So, Pilate releases a condemned prisoner, rejecting Jesus in favour of a rebel and murderer called Barabbas. Mark implies that both Barabbas and Jesus were condemned prisoners. Jesus had already been found guilty, though the gospel at this point does not say so. The mystery, though rarely remarked upon by Christian scholars, is this:

Jesus, as a king, was a Son of God, and so he had been named at his baptism and the transfiguration. Consequently Jesus always called God, my Father, using an affectionate Aramaic word for father, Abba. If God is my Father then the Son of God is the Son of my Father. Now Mark tells us the name of the rebel Pilate offered to the crowd for release instead of Jesus was Barabbas. By coincidence Barabbas, in Aramaic, means the Son of my Father. So the bandit’s name is a name which is singularly appropriate for Jesus. Some old manuscripts of Matthew, confirmed by the writings of the church father, Origen, reveal the full name of the criminal—it is Jesus Barabbas, and so it is written in modern versions of Matthew’s gospel.

The mystery is that this is too strange to be coincidental!

If we follow the gospel according to Matthew 27:17, Pilate asks the multitude—”Which Jesus will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas or bar Abbas?” The crowd replied, “bar Abbas”—or, as Christians would have it, “Barabbas”? The gospels ask us to believe that Pilate offers the crowd the choice of Jesus Barabbas, the crook, or Jesus ”bar Abbas”, the son of his father, God.

It is as if the governor said—”Who do you want me to release, your king, Jesus, God’s Son, or a criminal we just happen to have in the nick, Jesus Godson.” ”God’s Son,” they shout, so Pilate released Godson! Can we accept that God has such a sick sense of humour?

Now the thesis presented here is that Jesus the Son of God was Jesus, the king of the Jews, a man who believed that by capturing Jerusalem from the Romans and cleansing the temple, God would be induced to send a miracle to free his chosen people, the Jews. So both Barabbas and bar Abbas are revolutionaries! In Roman law, a man who is acclaimed king is a seditionist, so Barabbas and bar Abbas are both revolutionists even in Christian terms! Can we really accept that Pilate offers the crowd the choice of Jesus Barabbas, a seditionist, or Jesus bar Abbas, the son of his father, God, a different seditionist? Is this really historical as clergymen would have us believe?

That is not the only unbelievable aspect of the Barabbas incident.

First, Pontius Pilate appears in it as a most sensitive and understanding man. Yet the judgement of history is vastly different. He is known to have been an exceptionally cruel, greedy and callous man when, under the totalitarian regime of Imperial Rome, such men were common. He was so bad that the Romans eventually withdrew him in disgrace to Rome because of his excesses.

Second, even young children find it hard to accept that the Jewish throng, which had hailed and hosannahed Jesus as a king only a few days before, should have so completely turned against him that they now wanted him crucified. A man, who is a king leading his ecstatic people one day, does not suddenly become hated when the next day he is captured. His disciples and supporters, we are invited to believe, thought he was the Son of God. Would they have summoned God’s wrath by turning against his son in his hour of need? Surely they would have expected God to intervene with a miracle as long as Jesus were alive, and they would have clamoured for their leader.

Third, the habit of the Governor at festival time of releasing the prisoner begged for by the crowd is not recorded outside the New Testament and was unknown anywhere in the Roman Empire, let alone in Judaea which was at the time a hotbed of unrest. Even granted that there had been until then such a custom, it again stretches credibility that Pilate would release one such as Barabbas—he would have committed treason against the Emperor if he had! Pilate knew his duty, if only—according to John 19:12—because the priests had reminded him. Roman law could tolerate no rivals to Caesar.

For though John, the last gospel to be composed, describes Barabbas simply as “a robber”, he was no ordinary criminal. In Matthew Barabbas is “a notable prisoner”. We would say he was notorious. But both writers are being disingenuous. Mark, in the earliest gospel, frankly identifies him as:

a rioter who had committed murder during an insurrection,

and Luke adds that the

insurrection had occurred in Jerusalem itself!

The gospels are here skating over something remarkable. At the very time that gentle Jesus of Nazareth was entering Jerusalem hailed as a king, by coincidence a fellow called Barabbas was leading a revolution!

By fomenting an insurrection Barabbas had committed a political crime against the Emperor and against the Roman state. Pilate would have had to report such a serious crime, and his response to it, to the Emperor himself. He could have found no excuse for letting such a man off—he had no say in the matter. Rebellion was a capital crime requiring the lowest form of death—crucifixion. Yet the holy book of Christianity tells us it was gentle Jesus of Nazareth who was unjustly crucified while Pilate himself committed treason against the Emperor by releasing the leader of a revolution.

What does it all mean?

This confusion can only be intelligently untangled if Jesus Barabbas and Jesus the Nazarene were the same person! The gospels are hiding the fact that the man worshipped as a deity by Christian believers for 2000 years was a Jewish rebel punished horribly but quite properly under Roman law for attempting to overthrow the civic authorities in Jerusalem.

The gospels confirm that an insurrection with popular support had occurred in Jerusalem at the Passover festival. Its instigator, Jesus the Nazarene, nicknamed Barabbas by the crowd from his habit of referring to God in heaven as his father, had been caught by the authorities and promptly taken to Pilate with the Jewish crowds still milling around in a religious and nationalist fervour, expecting a miracle. They called out, Barabbas, Barabbas, asking for the release of the Nazarene, their leader, using their nickname for him. Pilate, who despised the Jews, realized the only way to curb the unrest was to dispatch the Jewish leader with no further ado… and that is what he did.

If, as the gospels say, Pilate did agree to release Jesus Barabbas, later known as Jesus Christ, then he deliberately duped the crowd. But that sounds more like the real Pilate, the rapacious, two-faced Pilate of history, and less like the kindly Pilate of the gospels. Faced with the excited and rebellious crowd, Pilate cunningly decides to give them their miracle—he agrees to release Jesus if the crowd would only disperse. Pilate has such a vile reputation that this really does seem like a miracle to the crowd—they disperse in wonder. Then Pilate crucifies Jesus as he always intended.

Mark would have got the idea for the nonexistent custom from the genuine Jewish custom that only one man could be condemned on one day. The disciples captured with Jesus owed their own lives to this rule and the fact that it was administered by the Jews not the Romans—it was a Jewish not a Roman rule. Pilate would have had no compunction at all about condemning and crucifying half of Jerusalem in one day, if he could justify it to the Emperor. In the battle to retake the city the Romans had captured Nazarenes and other Jews who had joined in its defence and they were crucified alongside Jesus as the gospels tell us.

Later, when Christians passed on the story by word of mouth, it included the scene of the crowd assembled outside the official building calling “Barabbas, Barabbas”. When the oral tradition of the first Christians was being recorded by the gospel writers this was one of the many difficulties that they had to hide or explain.

The Rebel

Uprisings had been occurring with alarming regularity. The gospels tell us there had just been one in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’s crucifixion. The freedom fighter specifically mentioned was Jesus Barabbas. Yet it was the Christian god, gentle Jesus, who was charged with treason! The conclusion is forced. There was one Jesus only—Jesus was a freedom fighter leading a revolution against the Roman occupiers of Judaea, just as Reimarus pointed out two hundred years ago. This was why Jesus was arrested by the authorities. No other interpretation even of the evidence in the gospels makes sense.

The evidence of the gospels, in summary, is this:

Jesus invited suspicion by gathering large crowds which the authorities considered potentially subversive,
he was described as a Galilaean, like Judas the Galilaean—a rebel,
many of Jesus’s followers sound, from their nicknames, more like men of violence than men of peace,
Jesus deliberately depicted himself as a king as he entered Jerusalem and his supporters greeted him thus openly,
Jesus had committed the crime in Roman law of Laesae Majestatis by assuming the power of civic authorities to permit passage through the temple,
an insurrection had occurred in which men had died and Jesus’s supporters had been armed and resisted arrest with violence, cutting off a man’s ear,
when Jesus was charged as a rival to Caesar’s rule in Palestine, claiming to be the king of the Jews, he chose not to deny it unequivocally at his trial.

Jesus was Barabbas, the Nasi, one of the holy ones of God but a failed rebel. Christians wanted their incarnated god to be remembered only as a saintly man. Jesus was condemned and crucified by Romans yet, for Christianity to prosper, it had to seek respectability within the Roman Empire. But tradition showed Jesus, himself a Jew, being hailed by Jews, a race which was widely scorned within the Roman world when they rebelled in 66 AD. They were trouble makers or even terrorists just as some in the world today might regard Libyans, Basques or Irish. And so gentle Jesus was invented and his true nature hidden.

So the gospel writers pretended Barabbas was not Jesus and invented the story of the Passover custom to explain why the crowd called for the release of Barabbas. The just Roman prefect, Pilate, offered to let the mob have their choice of prisoner but the treacherous Jews picked the murderer Barabbas. The gospel writers could use the Aramaic word Barabbas knowing that few of their Latin or Greek speaking gentile converts would know its meaning and question the coincidence. The Romans were depicted as fair and just, the Jewish supporters of the Jew, Jesus, were shown as treacherous villains. A Jewish incident was de-Judaized and the Jewish religion simultaneously discredited within the Roman Empire as a rival religion to Christianity.

The Suspicions of the Authorities

Caesarea was a Roman Town, thoroughly Hellenized as the Theatre Shows

Control of Judaea was vested by the Emperor of Rome in Prefects and later Procurators whom he appointed to govern the province on his behalf. They had to report to him all significant events that occurred. Imperial policy centred on raising revenue through taxation and, to do so effectively, maintaining peace, the Pax Romani. So a governor’s duties included keeping law and order and raising taxes. Since they were unpaid free lance agents, governors had to obtain their own income out of local revenue. By milking the province to get rich they created their own source of unrest. They had a small garrison of about 3000 soldiers based at Caesarea on the coast but some were deployed in Jerusalem especially when it was crowded with pilgrims at the Passover.

The governors left non-political matters to a council of senior Jews called the Sanhedrin. The principal force in it was the High Priest and his party of Sadducees and they controlled the Temple Guard which had limited powers. The death sentence for purely civil matters could only be declared by the Roman Governor. The Sanhedrin could possibly declare a sentence of stoning for a religious misdemeanor, but, if so, it rarely did. The Romans would have disapproved of, and most probably never allowed, a concession which could have been used by the national authorities against collaborators.

Some of the Sanhedrin shared with the Romans a distaste for rebel movements—they posed a threat to the whole Jewish nation from Roman reprisals. Centuries before the Romans had razed under the plough the great city of Cathage, an enemy of Rome. Later they were to raze Jerusalem. There was reason for Jews to worry if Rome became incensed. Josephus says that Herod Antipas killed John the Baptist, not because of the plottings of his wife, but because he saw a threat of an uprising in the large crowds that John was attracting. Herod’s fear of the multitude is declared in Matthew 14:5 but as a reason for not killing John, though this fear did not deter him from killing John when Salome requested it. Repeatedly in Mark, Luke and Acts the fear of the authorities for the people is expressed. In John 18:14, the High Priest, Caiaphas, directly expresses the fears of the rulers of the Jews when he says it is expedient that one man should die for the people. A general outbreak of rebellion would bring retribution on the Jews by the Romans. If it could be nipped in the bud by disposing of the leader of the insurgents, the state would be preserved.

Galilaeans

At the time of Christ, Galilee was ruled by a Tetrarch, a Roman title for a minor king. Antipas (4 BC—39 AD) was a son of Herod the Great. But from 6 AD, when Antipas’s brother, Archelaus, ruler of Judaea, was banished to Gaul, Judaea was ruled directly from Rome under a Prefect, a Roman governor. Galilee was a land of fertile soil and industrious people—it exported olive oil and had a thriving fishery on the Sea of Galilee. It was wealthy and well populated, though many people had been impoverished by being turned off their land to become day labourers and resentment was high.

The sayings of Jesus in the gospels reflect a rural background in agriculture and fishing—Galilaean city life hardly figures in them. Sepphoris, the main city in Galilee, is never mentioned in the gospels even though it was only four miles from Nazareth. Tiberias is hardly mentioned even though it was a magnificent new town built in honour of the reigning Emperor. The local town that is mentioned is Capernaum, a custom post which was little more than a village. Indeed Josephus described it merely as “a highly fertilising spring”.

The regional accent of Galilaeans was strong and their gutturals almost disappeared making it difficult to distinguish certain words. Lazarus (Lazar), for example, is the Galilaean dialect pronunciation of Eleazar. In the New Testament, Peter is recognised by his accent as being a follower of Jesus (Mt 26:73). Many in the more southerly state of Judaea saw native Galilaeans as ignoramuses or clowns.

Galilaeans’ ignorance or neglect of the Jewish laws of purity and decorum also offended devout Jews in Judaea. Even eminent Galilaean rabbis were not free of criticism. Galilee in gospel times was almost surrounded by pagan countries. Indeed it had been pagan itself not long before. The victory of the Hasmonaean king, Aristobulus I, over Iturea, and his threat to the Galilaeans that they should become circumcised and live according to Jewish Law or be dispersed, made Galilee a Jewish province about 100 BC. Anyone who had been forcibly converted could hardly have been the most devout Jews and a certain tradition of laxity must have emerged from them, and persevered even when their descendants had become otherwise Judaised.

By the time of Jesus, Galilaeans regarded themselves as thoroughly Jewish, if somewhat unorthodox, but their southern co-religionists were snooty about them. Judaeans would call the Northerners “peasants” not primarily because that is what they were but because they were thought to be ignorant. In the New Testament (Jn 7:14) the Jerusalem crowd whisper among themselves, “Surely the Messiah is not to come from Galilee?” and when Nicodemus, a Pharisee, defends Jesus to the Chief Priests and Pharisees, they say, “Are you a Galilaean too?…Prophets do not come from Galilee”. Jesus was just what the Jews of Judea expected of a Galilaean—he kept company with publicans and whores, he seemed to deride Levitical purity, he did not avoid defilement through contact with a corpse. Being a Galilaean, in practice, he seemed to flout the Mosaic purity laws.

The Pharisee Party had little support in the North. The only first century rabbi known to be a northerner was actually called “the Galilaean” suggesting that it was unusual. In Mark, Pharisees in conflict with Jesus are twice described as visitors to Galilee. Josephus specified that the Pharisees were influential in the cities, leading one to infer that they had little influence in the countryside. Thus, beside the political suspicion of Jesus, there were also some religious doubts and the snobbery of urban sophisticates toward rural simpletons.

Though, under Antipas, Galilee was generally peaceful, it was the source of much of the Jewish rebelliousness against Rome. To be a Galilaean was synonymous with being an agitator and the Herodian and Roman authorities often mistrusted them as potential rebels. Galilaeans were even quarrelsome among themselves according to Rabbinical sources. Galilaeans were linked with Jewish nationalism from the time that the brigand, Ezekias, was executed in 47 BC. Judas, considered the founder of the Zealots, was referred to as Judas of Galilee. He and his disciples broke into the king’s arsenal in 4 BC and instituted a reign of terror in the region. When Roman rule was declared in Judaea after the banishment of Archelaus, a census was announced to assess the population for taxes. It was carried out by Quirinius, the Legate of the Roman Province of Syria, which included Judaea, in 6 to 7 AD. The followers of Judas believed the only master of the Jews was God. It was improper to pay taxes to a foreign god—the Emperors were beginning to claim divinity. Furthermore the Law of Moses forbade not only foreign rulers, it forbade numbering the people. For some this was the final straw. Judas and his followers urged the Jews not to pay taxes to Rome, and eventually rebelled. Thus it was that Judas of Galilee teamed up with Sadduc to form a religious and political movement of fanatical nationalists.

Josephus in Book 18 of Antiquities of the Jews describes the philosophy founded by Judas of Galilee as the “fourth sect of Jewish philosophy” but leaves it to us to deduce he means the Zealots. As followers of Judas of Galilee it would have been quite logical to call them Galilaeans and that is the approach of Rev Matthew Black writing in Peake’s Commentary on the Bible. Josephus tells us Galilaeans endured pain with resolution, were “ready to suffer any manner of death”, and they put honour before wealth. They believed:

God would not otherwise be assisting to them, than upon their joining with one another in such counsels as might be successful, and for their own advantage, and this especially if they would set about great exploits, and not grow weary in executing the same.

In other words God helps those who help themselves through daring deeds and persistence.

To what extent the sect of the Galilaeans was Pharisaic as Josephus maintains is a moot point. Hyppolytus believed the Zealots were Essenes, In the Jewish War Josephus tells us that Judas of Galilee was a teacher of a peculiar sect of his own then proceeds to describe at length the Essenes, a hint perhaps that the one was a branch of the other. The word from which we get “Pharisee” means “separated”, a description which would apply perfectly to the Essenes. So it is conceivable that Josephus wrote in Aramaic “the notions of the Separated Ones” meaning the Essenes but his amanuensis mistook him to mean the Pharisees. His description of Judas’s ally, Sadduc, as a Pharisee in the same chapter seems to repeat the error. But whether Pharisees or Essenes were nearest to the Galilaeans’ general outlook, they added their own particular beliefs:

having an inviolable attachment to liberty
holding God to be their only ruler and Lord
not calling any man Lord even though threatened with death or torture.

Judas’s Galilaeans became very large and active especially among the young who “were zealous for it”. Josephus blamed them for the troubles of the Jews leading up to the Jewish War, saying

The nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree and it had a great many followers, filled our civil governments with tumults and laid the foundations of our future miseries.

Many people, some of whom must have had allegiance to one or other of the other Jewish sects became attracted to the Galilaean sect as the troubles progressed. It had then factionalized internally. Ultimately, as far as Josephus was concerned, the Zealots became gangsters, killing for personal gain, killing Jews rather than gentiles and fighting amongst each other. And so it transposed, like the Mafia, from a liberation movement into gangs of criminals. Zealots indeed became robbers.

Judas of Galilee and his family nevertheless commanded wide respect for later we find his sons also leading rebellions against Roman rule. Tiberius Julius Alexander, a Romanised Jew, Procurator of Judaea from 46-48 AD and the nephew of Philo of Alexandria, crucified two of them, Jacob and Simon. A third son, Menehem, captured the stronghold of Masada from the Romans but subsequently died in faction fighting among the rebels. Eleazar, a nephew of Menehem, with only a few hundred zealots, held Masada against the Romans for three years after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. John of Gischala, also a Galilaean, was another leader of the Jewish revolt of 66 AD.

Page Tags: Mystery of Barabbas, Robber, Thief, Rebel, Galilaean, Barabbas, Jesus, Suspicions of the Authorities, Insurrection, Revolution, Sedition, Pilate, Mystery, Jerusalem, Crowd, Disciples, Roman, Christianity, Christians, Gospel, Gospels, King, Jewish, Jews, Testament, Murder, Arrest, Crowd, Galilee, God, Jewish, Jews, Judas, King, Man, Mark, Pilate, Roman, Son

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.