You are missing the point of the overall questions though.Thε question of wether about who witnessed the event is of little signicance compare to if Barabass and the custom existed.
But I think you are trying to decide whether or not this historical event did or didn’t happen, by ruling out (a priori?) the various independent/multiply attested historically accounts that we have… but in what basis? Why would you decide to rule out these particular accounts of this practice and event? Do we similarly rule out the betrayal of Judas because he is “only” found in biblical sources?
Those historians that ruled out the existence Belshazzar because he was “only” referenced in Biblical sources, or that ruled out the particular kind of Egyptian boat, because it was “only” referenced by Herodotus, are the ones that ended up with egg on their faces, after all…
I would be extremely cautious in using that line of reasoning… that discounts something as historical because it is “only” found in one or two historical sources.
What about the custom? Surely there are reports for that.Unless it was something Pilate only did
are you suggesting that creative governance, independent thinking, and unique customs never existed in antiquity?
They did . Wanna know how we know they existed?Ohhh yeah we have sources for them.Comon what was this question
Exactly… like Rome would have had some tradition about releasing a prisonor in every major city though out the empire on the Jewish Passover…??
No.The Jews would however no?
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Jesus, God incarnate, is the horse. None of the trivial details matter, the historiography of 2000 years ago cannot be bettered now. There are no extra-biblical sources. Why would there be? A few years ago correspondence was found on Hadrian’s wall from the Roman garrison commander. It’s wonderful! Basically they said something like the wife’s birthday’s coming up, don’t forget the beer. If you could have all of the extra-biblical sources available at the time, from 31-81 AD, that’s all they’d say. Do you want to believe or not?
Thats blind faith.You are putting a dillema on me trying to play the "superior"believer here?I cant believe whatever.Your argument can be made for evrything and its weak.Thats how people are getting manipulated.
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The Jews had no neither authority nor power to release Roman prisoners. The Roman governor ordered to keep peace among the Jews in Palestine, however, may well have come up with just such a token of peace.
They did at some level.The Temple had ties with the local governorn.A simple bribe maybe and it would be fine.But i was arguing whether or not the Jweish authorities had kept records of such a custom
Are you suggesting that, if they had kept records of such an event, that those records would somehow necessarily be extant today, and would not have been lost to history like the rest… the vast majority of records of all sorts of things from that timeframe and administration?
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Yeah i do suggest that.We have lots of records from other places at different times
The skeptic in me is buzzing in reading some of this. So in order to demonstrate the historicity of some of the details in the passion narratives, we have to assume the historicity of the details of the Resurrection and that Jesus filled in all the empty gaps over those forty days of appearances? Of course, the resurrection is usually defended on the basis of the passion narrative (empty tomb etc.). If you are a Christian who already believes the story based on these grounds, this makes sense, but from a historical or even apologetical perspective, this leads into a sweeping circularity. Also, we have to realize the Gospels do not represent 4 independent witnesses to any events of the passion accounts. Matthew and Luke used Mark when writing and John may have as well (scholarship is 50/50 on the last point). Many think there was a pre-Marcan passion narrative that he adopted as well. We have 1 account mentioning this incident (and maybe 2). From something incomplete I am working on:
The Release of Barabbas
Crossan thinks the release of Barabbas (Mark 15: 9-16) fits well with a post 68 dating of the Gospel of Mark. He claims the technical Greek term for a “rebel bandit” is used in reference to Barabbas and the account makes that description pretty certain.[1] As Crossan writes, “I judge that narrative to be absolutely unhistorical, a creation most likely of Mark himself, and for two reasons. One is that its picture of Pilate, meekly acquiescent to a shouting crowd, is exactly the opposite of what we know about him from Josephus. Brutal crowd control was his specialty. Another is that such a custom of open amnesty, the release of any requested prisoner at the time of the Passover festival, is against any administrative wisdom.”[2] Why would Rome be releasing an insurrectionist, the type of figure crucifixion was meant for? Crossan is correct on the problem of the yearly release of any requested prisoner in Mark 15:6. There is absolutely no evidence outside of the NT that this occurred and it makes absolutely no sense to release anyone requested, including a murderous revolutionary like Barabbas. Though an argument from silence, Josephus who portrays the Romans favorably does not mention this yearly amnesty either. Many scholars tend to feel this silence is significant. There is nothing implausible about the Jews requesting prisoner releases, especially around Passover, given the holiday celebrates their liberation from foreign bondage but it should not be maintained that what Mark writes in 15:6 is not remotely plausible. We do know there were occasional releases of prisoners and Theissen and Merz suggest such a release could have coincided with Jesus’s condemnation, leading to the arising of this detail in the Barabbas story.[3]
Mark seems to imply the insurrection of Barabbas was a well-known event by calling it the insurrection. Gundry argues that Josephus’ lack of mentioning the event adds plausibility to Barabbas being released as his crimes must not have been that serious. This, though going against the thrust of the Gospels, oddly reeks of apologetics as Pilate releasing a murderous insurrectionist against Rome is still problematic, even if the insurrection was small and its certainly not certain that this event was not mentioned.[4] Matthew also says Jesus Barabbas was well known (Mt 27:16). Crossan’s treatment of Pilate is grounded in some historical details but it’s not quite as certain as he makes it out to be. Joel Marcus, referencing Brown’s views in from Death of the Messiah writes,
“Brown . . . argues that we should not think of the historical Pilate as a bloodthirsty monster whom the Gospels have thoroughly whitewashed. The picture of him that emerges from Josephus and other sources, rather, is of a governor was as corrupt as most provincial officials, and ruthless when threatened with upheaval (see, e.g., the violence against a protesting crowd in Josephus, War 2.175-77, and cf. Luke 13:1-2), but who usually antagonized Jewish subjects more out of ignorance than out of malignity and sometimes relented under popular pressure (see e.g., Josephus, War 2.169-74, and Philo, Embassy to Gaius 299-305; cf Reinbold, Bericht, 259-60).” [5]
So one of Crossan’s two reasons does not seem to be as strong as the other, but given this instance, it does still seem like the portrayal of Pilate is too benign in the Gospel of Mark. We would have to imagine and contrive political pressure here that would be strong enough to force Pilate to release a murderous insurrectionist against Rome for fear that the Jews would riot and revolt, the same thing the chief priests feared if they publicly arrested Jesus.[6] This poignantly brings us to the problem of the vacillating crowds. They love Jesus in Mark 11:1-11 and 12:12 to the point where the chief priests are too scared to arrest Him. In 12:37 the crowd listens to him teach in the temple with delight. In Mark 14:2 the chief priests and teachers of the law are secretly plotting to arrest Jesus but just not during the festival for fear the people may riot. The only crowd up until Jesus’ trial not favorable to him is the armed one sent by the Chief priests to capture Him in Gethsemane (Mark 14: 43). Now at the Passover festival, the crowd just haphazardly turns on Jesus at the instigation of the chief priests and requests Barabbas to be released and yells “Crucify him” in reference to Jesus? While fickle crowds do exists and this narrative fits a historical trope, [7] from a historical-probability standpoint, something is clearly amiss in this story. Theissen and Merz think that there might be a kernel of historical truth in that the pilgrims who accompanied Jesus adored him (they shouted Hosianna in Mark 11, not the natives) but Jerusalemites who depended on the Temple for their livelihood could easily be provoked by the chief priests as Jesus prophesied against the Temple.[8] Regardless of this possibility, the account in Mark clearly does not bifurcate between them or report any of this. Trying to find the historical impetus for such narrative details in this incident is a bit of an exercise in subjective guesswork. Crossan is probably right in his interpretation that the Jews are choosing their fate over Jesus. From the Marcan perspective, they are choosing an insurrectionist, maybe even a messianic pretender, that probably wanted to overthrow the Roman occupation of Israel over Jesus, the man and messiah who told them that they had to lose their life in order to find it (Mark 8:35). In the Temptation story Jesus is offered all the kingdoms of the world but he declines and tells Satan to get thee behind me. When Peter rebukes Jesus for saying he would have to die (Mark 8) Jesus says the same exact thing to him (Get thee behind me!). Peter may very well have had a messianic conqueror in mind. He didn’t expect Jesus to die at the time and probably expected him to restore Israel and free it from Roman bondage. In Mark, the Jews are very mistaken about the true nature of the Messiah and the releasing of Barabbas seems to play directly into that. There are too many difficulties with the narrative to regard it as historical as Mark writes it . The idea that it is created from scratch is certainly not demonstrable but Crossan is correct on that point at least and we must remember Mark is writing to a Gentile audience (he must explain Jewish customs to them) so in essence, he is claiming the Jews chose a criminal against Rome over an innocent Messiah. Mark’s gentile audience can be assured Rome actually wanted to free Jesus and found nothing wrong with him. This may be part of an apology for the Cross which, as Paul told us, could a stumbling block or foolishness to the rest of the world.
The account has the appearance of the increasing anti-semitism we see in the New Testament as the Roman leader Pontius Pilate wants to release Jesus but the Jews are insistent on the release of a murderous, rebel insurrectionist. Crossan writes, “But Mark was written soon after the terrible consummation of the First Roman-Jewish War in 70 C.E., when Jerusalem and its Temple were totally destroyed, We already saw how the Zealots, a loose coalition of bandit groups and peasant rebels forced in Jerusalem by the tightening of Roman encirclement, fought within the city for overall control of the rebellion in 68 C.E. There, says Mark, was Jerusalem’s choice: it chose Barabbas over Jesus, an armed rebel over an unarmed savior. His narrative about Barabbas was, in other words, a symbolic dramatization of Jerusalem’s fate, as he saw it .” Pg 142-143 Crossan Jesus Revolutionary Biography Matthew goes so far as to have Pilate wash has hands to be innocent of this blood and the crowd in Matthew actually yells, “His blood is on us and our children” (Mt 27:25). It seems that Matthew very clearly knows of the events of the Temple and how things turned out.
[1] See Joel Marcus, Mark V 2 pg 1029 for comment on Brown’s downplaying of the political meaning of the terms.
[2] Crossa, Jesus a Revolutionary Biography
[3] See Theissen and Merz HJ pg 466
[4] Joel Marcus highlights two potential qualifying events that may have occurred around the same time as Jesus was crucified, one mentioned by Pilate and one by Philo (v2 pg 1029-1030)
[5] Marcus v2 pg 1027 See also Brown for 6 Pilate Incidents, Death v2 pg 698-705
[6] This is not meant to say Pilate could not have acquiesced and decided to crucify Jesus to avoid a riot by the Jews, only that releasing an anti-Roman insurrectionist over Jesus is just a bridge built too far.
[7] Marcus v2 pg 1030n.11
[8] THeissen and Merze pg 179, they also note that there was sometimes tension between the pilgrims and Jerusalemites based on the writings of Josephus. That is, after all, why the prefect was there. To keep the peace and quell any disturbances and riots.
Vinnie
That’s redundant. Faith is blind. Nobody is manipulating me and I’m done with fecklessly manipulating myself thinking that anybody knows anything I don’t, as Jesus said, or that I need apart from insight in to the human condition. Are the writers of the NT, starting with the disciples, manipulating you? Not with malice from 2000 years ago they’re not. They may have been genuinely self-deluded. Was Paul? Maybe. His story is easily that of a Nazi inverting his beliefs and having a near psychotic break, overwhelmed with guilt in an instant. It happens. It’s well psychologically documented. The top, most brilliant, most spectacular, deadly IRA bomber completely flipped on six casual words by his brigade commander and became a British agent.
Reality cannot work as you desperately, understandably desire. There is no proof of ANY of it. There is the testimony of your heart, just like Jesus’ unknowing companions on the road to Emmaus. That’s it. Where’s the manipulation in that? Where’s the deception? I am not deceiving myself. Apart from where I unknowingly am. And nobody but my shrink or other mirror can tell me that.
Again and again you ask for the impossible, for that which does not and never will or can exist. Modern standard proof. They didn’t need it. Would not have understood it. Jesus had to keep speaking to them in terms of their epistemology even after His transcendence. He couldn’t use ours, their minds would not have survived the cultural shock.
I’m playing the inferior believer Nick. For real. I can’t get lower. I have stared all of rationality in the face and I still find myself holding the barely gutteringly glowing, dimming and brightening oil lamp I’ve been gifted.
Lord, blow on Nick’s wick.
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Like what?! Recording ordinary events of a week in a frontier town two thousand years ago? No we don’t.
Why would they?
So its a symbolism then?Or it was something only the pilate did?At least thats what i got from your post. So we have either one or another? Thank you Vinnie for your insightfull answer as always.God bless
You know what.Yeah you are correct.I might be looking for the imposible.But just because you or i maybe dont know it exists doesnt mean it doesnt.And till i find it i will keep looking
?
It is a geographically unique thing, an event that would only happen in Judaea. Are you seriously suggesting that because there are no records of the governors of Gaul, Hispaniola, Macedonia and all other Roman provinces releasing prisoners for the Jewish Passover… that this is a useful premise or adequate basis for arguing that the multiple extant historical accounts of such an event happening In Palestine are all false?
Perhaps if there was one solitary record of, say, the ancient Roman governor of Aegyptus making a speech in front of a pyramid, you would doubt that on the grounds that there is no record of any other Roman governor doing so in any other province throughout the realm?
You mean the different times when Pilate was not governor, and his personal and unique governing practices were not done? Even the language of Matthew and Mark imply that this was a custom that Pilate did specifically… "the governor was accustomed to release…" “Now at the feast he used to release for them one prisoner…” I wouldn’t take this too far, but you will notice it doesn’t say, “now the governors used to…”
(Not to mention, both Matthew and Mark give an explanation for their contemporary audience, and both put this custom in the past tense, as if to explain something that their contemporary audience would have known little about… also strongly implying that this was not a long term practice that was still continuing, but rather was the unique practice of the one administration).
So again, unless I misunderstand, you’re suggesting that if we discovered extant, in any one historical manuscript or inscription from antiquity, a unique governing practice on the part of a particular Roman governor, we should immediately discount it on the grounds that we have no records of this unique governing practice being shared by other Roman governors?
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