m^^^i^^'
Holtzmann's eared to His ,vr_r««0f. 1. o,.,. Resurrection and said nothing disciples aftei the ^<;=''";.'=j the Resurrection is inconceivable. _ Bettei uenv j yg „ ,ost
altogether than think of a '^^^'J'Xs But the floating before the eyes of t^«„^fjjesus is cer- Trinitarian formula "? t;l»« i^'^""^" ^^ ^aid in its tainly unexpected J^ 45^51) may
avour Lanibert (ifte ^ essential feature of
be consulted f J^^^i^Tthe union of the sou to Baptism ^^/^,'*/,i?fl t |"ffi<^«l to call it ' Baptism Christ and therefore jt ^1^^^/ , y„rti,er discus- into the name of the Lora je.u^^ ^
sion of the genuineness of the ascuption
feAJlABlBAS
BARACHIAH
171
words to our Lord belongs rather to the Trinitarian than to the Baptismal problems.
LiTEEiTCRE.— MacCulloch, Comparative Theology, 235 ; An- rich, Das antike Mysterienwesm ; Lightfoot, Horae Hebraicm ; Schiirer, BJP § 31 ; Suicer, Lexicon, s.v. ; Calvin, Institutw, iv. 15, ' de Baptismo ' ; Reynolds, John the Baptist ; Teathcr, John the Baptist ; Lambert, The Sacraments in the New Testa- ■mmt ; Holtzmann's NT Theol. and the literature mentioned there, as above ; Edersheim's ii/e and Ti^ncs of Jestis the Messiah ; C. F. Rogers, Studia Bill, et Eeeles. vol. v. pt. iv. ' Baptism and Christian Archffiology ' ; Didaskaliw fraymenta
' ■ ' --^ --- • " McGiffert, The Apastt-'
; Early Hist. ofChr
Marcus Dods.
BARABBAS (Aramaic Bar-Abba, 'son of Abba' or 'son of father.' There is very slight documen- tary authority for tlie reading Bar-Rabban, ' son of a Rabbi,' which is adopted by Ewald and Renan. On the other hand, if Bar-Abba=' son of father,' it would hardly differ in meaning from Bar-Rabban ; for in the time of Jesus ' Abba ' wa,s a common appellation of honour given to a Rabbi. But after all 'Abba' may have been a proper name ; for though it is sometimes affirmed [e.g. by Schmiedel in his article ' Barabbas ' in Encyc. Bibl.] that it was not till after the time of our Lord that the word began to be used in this way, the authors of the corresponding article in the Jewish Encyclo- pedia assure us that ' Abba is found as a prce- nomen as early as Tannaitic times ').
Only one Barabbas meets us in the Gospels, the criminal whom Pilate released instead of Jesus at the demand of the people. All the four Evan- gelists relate the incident (Mt 2V^-'^, Mk 15«-i^ Lk 23"-^, Jn IS'"-*), which is again referred to in Acts in the account of St. Peter's sermon in the Temple portico (Ac 3"). From these narratives we gather that Barabbas was ' a notable prisoner,' ' a robber,' one who had taken part in ' a certain insurrection made in the city,' and who in this disturbance had 'committed murder.' It had probably been an old Jewish custom to release a prisoner at the Passover feast (Jn 18'^). Accord- ing to the Roman habit in such matters, the pro- curators of Judiea had accommodated themselves to the Jewish practice. In his desire tp saveJesu.s, Pilate bethought himself of this custom as otter- ing a loophole of escape from the dilemma in which he found himself between his own sense of justice and his unwillingness to give oHence to "the multitude. So he offered them the choice be- tween the life of Jesus and the life of Barabbas, probably never doubting that to Jesus the prefer- ence would be given. The fact that he seems to have expected this precludes the view which some have held that Barabbas was a pseudo-Messiah, and even the notion that he was no vulgar bandit, but the leader of a party of Zealots, since popular sympathy might have been anticipated on behalf of a bold Zealot or insun-ectionary Messiah. The probability accordingly is that Barabbas was simply a criminal of tlie lowest type, a hater of the Romans it may be, but at the same time a pest to society at large. And unless we are to suppose, on the ground of the possible etymolo<;y, 'son of father ' = ' son of teacher,' and the 'flius magistri eorum' which Jerome quotes from the account of the incident in the Gospel of the Hebrews, that he was popular among the peopL because lie was the son of a Rabbi, we have no reason to think that either the Jewish leaders or the multitude had any ground for preferring him to Jesus except their passionate hatred of the latter. According to an old reading of Mt 27'^- ", th( name ' Jesus ' in both verses is prefixed to Barabbas, so that Pilate's question runs, ' Whom will ye that I release unto you? Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?' If this reading were accepted, Barabbas would not have the force of
Bnrtimcvus), but would be only I'l for tlie sake of distinction /("'). In his exposition of the ■lers to this reading, which is MSS and by the Armenian
proper iinii a patniiiM
(Cf. 'Silllul
passa;.:!', 1 1 favoured li;
and Jerusalem Syriac Versions, antl has been de- fended by Ewald, Lange, Meyer, and others, who have supposed that the accidental similarity of the name may have helped to suggest to Pilate the alternative which he presented to the Jews. Olshausen not only adopts this view, but finds a mournful significance in both of the (supposed) names of the condemned criminal— ' Jesus ' and ' son of the father,' and in the fact that the nation preferred this caricature of Jesus to the heavenly reality. Both dramatically and homiletically, no doubt, these ideas are tempting— the meeting of the two Jesuses, the irony of the popular choice, the sense of a Divine 'lu.sus' in human affairs. But the truth remains that the grounds on which this construction rests are very inadequate. There is ingenuity certainly in the suggestion, first made by Origen (who, however, prefers the ordinary reading), that ' Jesus ' may have been dropped out of the early MSS of Matthew after the name had become a sacred one, because it appeared unseemly that it should be borne by a murderer ; but it is of too hypothetical a kind to counterbalance the im- mense weight of the documentary evidence against the presence of the name 'Jesus' at all. The fact that, even in the scanty MSS and VSS in which 'Jesus Barabbas' is found in vv.'" and ", 'Bar- abbas ' and ' Jesus ' are set in direct antithesis in v.-" tells strongly against the reading, as well as the circumstance that no trace of it is found in any MS of the other three Gospels. There is much to be said for the suggestion of Tiegelles, byway of explaining the appearance of the ' Jesus ' in some copies of Matthew, that at a very early date a careless transcriber repeated the last two letters of iiiuv (v."), and that the IX was afterwards taken to be the familiar abbreviation of 'Irjaovv.