Barabbas and The Bible

Faith & Science Conversation
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Merely believing someone is a Messiah does not seem to be an impetus for persecution by fellow Jews. There were plenty of messianic expectations in the first century. Jesus may have been the wrong type of Messiah but Jews debated and argued about all manner of theology and politics. If Christians were persecuted by Jews there had to be something more to it. Clashes with the law? Cleanliness?

We also have to ask, systematically persecuted the whole time and in all locations, or more sporadically and mainly in Jerusalem? Paul was beaten and stoned a few times and yes he persecuted the early Church (per Acts and his own autobiographically statements). The real question is what did that persecution early in Acts fully entail since the Apostles are reported as staying in Jerusalem at the time. Acts 8:1 "On that day a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. " Is this Luke just pointing out that God wouldn’t allow world powers to stop the Apostles appointed by Jesus? More of his Jerusalem centric theme? Or something deeper? Some historians think it was more the hellenists who were persecuted here. Wedderburn cames up with a possible explanation in A History of the First Christians:

“Now, if it is going too far to suggest that Stephen and others were criticizing the law, it is also going too far to suggest that they were already engaging in a mission to the gentiles as Paul was later to do. . . . A situation , is , however, readily intelligible which non-Jews would approach Greek-Speaking members of the early Christian community, even in Jerusalem, and ask them on what terms they might join their fellowship. And because these Christians were Greek-speaking and used that language in their gatherings, it is more likely they would be approached before their Aramaic-speaking fellow-Christians. . . . And in answering it the example of Jesus’ behavior and attitude might well commend itself as showing the way to follow. If, however, Jesus’ conduct in relation to ‘sinners’ from within the people of Israel was offensive to more scrupulous Jews, how much more so would a similar laxity towards contact with non-Jews. For Jesus’ example might threaten to compromise Israel’s holiness from within, but laxity towards unclean non-Jews broke down those external barriers which separated Jew from non-Jew and undermined Jewish identify over and against other nations of the world.” pg. 51

I agree with you that they were theological opponents and also do think that “anti-semitism” is blown out of proportion at times. Jews argued vehemently with other Jews. I still see a tendency (subtly in Mark but in overdrive in Matthew) to exculpate Rome and put his death on the Jews. Pilate had the final decision no matter how it’s sliced. I think John speaks poorly of the Jews (but these are really the Jewish leaders, not all Jews) and he ultimate transcends many of these issues to a degree. Jesus clearly correct Pilate that Jesus and God are in control. Jesus gives himself up. Pilate is being allowed to carry out the sentence. Just like Jesus isn’t really “arrested” in John. His would be armed-captors immediately fall to the ground in terror when they see him, then He allows them to take Him. I personally din’t get a history remembered vibe out of John’s portrait. It blends history with God’s sovereignty.

I agree this was the final alienation of both sides. I also agree with you that this division wasn’t an earthquake that formed a crack in the ground on the spot. It developed over several decades as the original, largely Jewish-Jesus movement gained more and more traction with the Gentile world. What rules to impose on the Gentiles, whether one can sit and eat with them, circumcision and remaining “clean” were all problems and questions for the early church to consider. We have the men from James which caused Paul to oppose Peter to his face. Barnabas and the Jews sided with the men from James in Antioch. Peter receives a vision learning that all foods are clean in Acts, twice IIRC because he was having difficulty accepting it. Yet Mark (7:19) in 70CE, throws in his own interpretive gloss that Jesus had declared all foods clean 40 years prior. Matter and Luke do not reprint this. While not impossible, all the disputes about food in the early church are a hard sell if Jesus definitively settled the issue from the beginning.

It is certainly possible for the Barabbas story to pre-date 70AD. I never interpreted Mark as dating to 7AD because of it. My argument was always because I do already date Mark to just after the temple’s destruction, and given the several very difficult historical problems in this narrative, and the fact that Barabbas literally means son of the father (wasn’t Jesus God’s son?), this interpetation in Mark seems likely. It is beyond dispute this is how Matthew took the story and Matthew’s gospel is more “Jewish” than Mark’s.

Vinnie

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My thoughts are the disciples being unaware in the feeding account of Mark 8 is inexplicable after the other feeding account in chapter 6. I believe there were two versions of the same feeding miracle in early Christianity. Mark includes both in his Gospel and the gospel of John seems to have some elements of both Mark’s accounts in its one feeding miracle. Good arguments can be made that John and Mark are independent here as well. As a Christian I believe it is possible for Jesus to have worked miracles. I believe it is also possible for OT parallels, early Christian beliefs about the last supper and communal, eucharistic meals, along with the possibility of rather a big meal by Jesus and his followers by the sea of Galilee could also have very easily led to the development of feeding miracles a decade or two later. John Meier writes:

To be honest, our sources do not allow us to specify the details of the event, especially since we must allow for the influence of both the Elisha miracle story and the Last Supper tradition on the retelling of the story in subsequent Christian decades. However, despite our glaring inability to be specific, I think the criteria of multiple attestation and of coherence make it more likely than not that behind our Gospel stories of Jesus feeding the multitude lies some especially memorable communal meal of bread and fish, a meal with large eschatological overtones celebrated by Jesus and his disciples with a large crowd by the Sea of Galilee. Whether something actually miraculous took place is not open to verification by the means available to the historian. A decision pro or con will ultimately depend on one’s worldview, not on what purely historical investigation can tell us about this event." pg 966 vol 2 A Marginal Jew

So my answer is one account that bifurcated into two different streams in the early church. Mark includes both. I think Meier was compelling in arguing the second account is not a redactional creation of Mark. I don’t want to full-scale defend this position though. We are discussing lot of different issues now. Time constrains limit how many issues I can handle at once. I’d be happy to come back to it though. My views would probably match most of what Meier writes (v2 pg 950-967) in his Marginal Jew series.

Vinnie

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I hear what you say Vinnie. You sound like a much smarter, much better read version of me. Which isn’t difficult. I can barely hold the oil lamp of faith in the face of rationality. Each man is an island for sure. I could not do what you do. I want to believe in God and Jesus is the only warrant for that.

You appear to have Him as sheer as a space elevator cable with no approach, no concentric circles of association; no foothills, no slope, no talus round the impossible needle to heaven. He is so for you despite not being historically, socially, psychologically, textually, possible. It seems. That’s impressive.
I’ve just finished Baggini’s Godless Gospel. It put oil in the lamp. Not by simply polarizing me against him, but because he made Jesus more authentic, more real all round.

A couple of years ago I lost the Pericope Adulterae, the cornerstone of proof of divine intelligence in Jesus, in discovering the small print; it’s a C4th bodge. It gutted my already guttering faith. All I had left was desire, already made pathetic by the eternal power of nature. What you are RIGHTFULLY saying should make me drop the candle in a bucket of water. The feeding of the ten-twenty thousand counting women and kids is acoustically impossible even in the natural amphitheatre of a lakeside cove. The 40 year late twin track (Marcan based synoptics and Johannine) gospels are riven with earnest, pious, second hand agenda, propaganda. With legend. With myth. In the shower just now the candle nub should have melted and gone down the plug hole. But it didn’t. Paul came up. As he did when the PA went down.

What did Paul know of what was related decades later by others?

He knew from from his Pharisee peers and the Christians he persecuted. But what was it? What can we infer from his first seven consensual ecumenical letters? What, written forty years later, could they have believed?

And I couldn’t agree more, we choose the wrong Jesus, we choose Jesus the ÎșαταΎÎčÎșÎŹÎ¶Ï‰Îœ, who gainsays His own name and excludes all from His title, Elect. Which, interestingly enough, is fuelled by misinterpreting the hard sayings of the gospels.

So, how and who does Jesus save for you?

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I never heard of the Godless Gospel but in researching it I see it is by a life-long Philosopher. Not sure I would enjoy his reconstruction of Jesus since I have a host of volumes on my shelf by historians who spend a living studying early Christian and Jewish writings and ancient history. What was redeeming about the book? What was this philosopher relaying to us about the historical Jesus, a first century, second temple Palestinian Jew and charismatic preacher?

I believe based on personal experience. To steal and adapt an analogy from C.S. Lewis, New Testament Criticism is like a map of the ocean. It is great and helpful, but being at the ocean is better. Or another adapted from Lewis: I believe in Jesus as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." Its about faith to me and no philosophical certainty is to be had. It took me decades to shun my fact-literal desire for certainty.

I had a guttering faith for a while in my life. When my former evangelical --inerrancy touting system came crumbling down in my early 20s, the spiral to a liberal to an agnostic and finally to an atheist ensued. I kept reading, writing, digging. Oddly enough, of all things, it was Betrarnd Russell and “The Problems of Philosophy”, David Hume on the faith required for belief in cause and effect (no logical necessity to be found!) and most importantly, William’s James, pragmatic, “The Will to Believe” which brought me back to my senses. The inability of any other system to put value on life and actually justify morality brought me back to God. The bleakness and shallowness of life outside of God came full circle. The incarnation is the greatest love story ever told. I firmly believe its true. It is the light by which I see the world. As Barth wrote in his commentary on Romans (pg 35)

The Gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question-mark against all truths. The Gospel is not the door but the hinge . . . Anxiety concerning the victory of the Gospel –that is Christian Apologetics—is meaningless, because the Gospel is the victory by which the world is overcome. By the Gospel the whole concrete world is dissolved and established. It does not require representatives with a sense of responsibility, for it is as responsible for those who proclaim it as it is for those to whom it is proclaimed. It is the advocate of both. God does not need us. Indeed, if He were not God, he would be ashamed of us. We, at any rate, cannot be ashamed of Him.

Or as, to use C.S. Lewis wrote in Till We Have Faces, one of my favorite books (all the best comes at the end):

"I ended my first book with the words ‘no answer.’ I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.”

I don’t agree with modern evangelicals who say if it is not in the autograph its not scripture. I have a pretty seminal commentary on Luke-Acts by Fitzmyer where I am pretty sure he argued Luke added his infancy narrative to his own work in a later edition. There are also all sorts of sources and texts evident behind our gospels. We know John received a second ending. Not to mention, Mark was very incomplete compared to Matthew and Luke who essentially reprinted it, adding a lot of new content and spanned some material to suit their theological needs. There is no need to assume because the pericope was not in papyrus 66 (which may date to the 4th century) its not original to Jesus or the early church. Not being in an early version of John does not mean Jesus did not say it. The story fits in with the other “trap” questions posed of Jesus and actually resembles Lucan special material L (its vocabulary does not fit in well with John and it shows up in times in Luke in the manuscript tradition). As Raymond Brown writes in his commentary on John:

“However, a good case can be argued that the story had its origins in the east and is truly ancient (see Schilling, art. cit.). Eusebius (Hist. III39:17; GCS 91:292) says, “Papias relates another story of a woman who was accused of many sins before the Lord, which is contained in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.” If this is the same story as the adulteress, the reference would point to early Palestinian origins; but we cannot be certain that our story is the one meant. The 3rd-century Didascalia Apostolorum (II 24:6; Funk ed., I, 93) gives a clear reference to the story of the adulteress and uses it as a presumably well-known example of our Lord’s gentleness; this work is of Syrian origin, the the reference means that the tory was well known (but not necessarily as scripture) in 2nd-century Syria. From the standpoint of internal criticism, the story is quite plausible and quite like some of the other gospel stories of attempts to trap Jesus (Luke xx 20,27). There is nothing in the story itself or in its language that would forbid us to think of it as an early story concerning Jesus.” Brown, Commentary on John V1 pg 336

Papias, with the necessary caveats, connects himself to people who heard the original followers of Jesus and he had a version of this story, if not the same exact one. Its quite clear a story like this was floating around by the turn of the first century, not long after John was written. Heck, it may even predate Luke-Acts and the Gospel John itself. It is far from a 4th century bodge and one of my favorite parts of the Bible. Though admittedly, it may be a conflation of two similar, earlier stories. You can see a snippet here:

Either way, Augustine and some modern scholars may be correct that Jesus may have been seen as too soft on a woman committing adultery. Augustine claimed people were suppressing the account for that reason–the ease of which Jesus forgives adultery. Not to mention the Roman Catholic Church canonized the Vulgate which has it. Despite modern ideas of sola-scriptura, there is no scripture without the Church. We accept this story as scripture and to be quite honest, historical or not, its as true as anything else in the Bible could ever be! The story is much earlier than you are suggesting and we have some plausible reasons on why the early church might not invent this and would actually suppress it. I would not say we can have historical certainty of something like this going back to Jesus, but its definitely a lot stronger than you seem to imply.

There are snippets in Paul’s letters of facts and sayings of Jesus. A few are certain, a lot could be allusions. How many is anyone’s guess. Beyond what he says we can only speculate though. We c find very high Christology in Paul and this is reflected in some early creedal formals that he probably inherited.

How? Like as in penal substitution? I can’t answer how Jesus’ death on the cross brought salvation, only that it does. I am not smart enough to see clearly in a mirror dimly lit about the inner workings of God’s salvific act. I do believe solidarity is a big part of the incarnation and what exactly the atonement accomplished I really can’t say. It brought God to the world, a better and more accurate understanding of God and our role in his Kingdom. Whatever else the Cross did, it did enough.

I just bought NT Wright’s Justification. Hoping to get into that and see how he articulates the “new perspective on Paul” in this work. Maybe it will help me with my question in the other thread about God setting us to fail.

Jesus saves anyone who calls upon him and anyone who may know him in a different setting or by a different title. Would not a rose by any other name smell just as sweet?

Vinnie

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@Klax

Full article on the PA here. This rejects the suppression angle in favor of a literacy one. Worth the read for anyone interested in the PA though.

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I’ll wrap up and give my final thoughts on this topic


Firstly, the idea of Roman authorities offering clemency to conquered rebels or insurgents is entirely unsurprising. there is precedent in the likes of Julius Caesar, famous Roman political philosophers as Cicero and Seneca extolled the benefits of exercising such clemency, they had a goddess to clemency, and Josephus records an instance of criminals being granted clemency even after they had been crucified for goodness sake
 they were brought down from their crosses alive. While not every Roman ruler may have done so, the idea that one provincial governor made a very minor gesture (a single prisoner once a year) of clemency to help placate a conquered people would entirely unremarkable.

Secondly, the fact that there are no records of Pilate having done so is entirely irrelevant. There are countless things he did we don’t have of records of.

Thirdly, it seems extremely odd to me to suggest that Mark invented this idea from whole cloth in order to add a most subtle, esoteric, and extraneous theological point, and the other evangelists added other subtle details for no apparent reason. a far more obvious and less convoluted explanation is that they recorded this event simply because it happened.

So to make an analogy
 Josephus recorded the aforementioned instance where certain criminals were granted clemency, due to his request, by Titus after they had been crucified and thus taken down from their crosses alive.

Now, should we similarly disbelieve the historicity of this event by Josephus? Clemency was indeed practiced by Roman leaders, so the idea itself is not inconsistent with what we know
 and the alternative
 that Josephus for some reason (maybe to exaggerate his own influence with the authorities?) merely invented this incident? Questions of scripture and inerrancy aside, i firmly think it makes much more sense to believe that this incident of clemency to the crucified prisoners was recorded by josephus simply because it happened, rather than go through all the logical contortions necessary to invent a reason that Josephus invented this incident. If there is no good reason to disbelieve Josephus’s account of the clemency given to these prisoners, i see no good reason to disbelieve the accounts of Barabbas either.

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Not irrelevant unless we can expect Josephus not too have cared about it. That you cannot do. This is a case of silence that the majority of experts do consider significant.

As noted, Caesar was assassinated by men two of the men he freed, this is an exception to the rule and his successors completely disbanded this process. Nothing in Pilate’s history suggest he would free a man of high treason against Rome. A robber or petty thief, maybe.

But can you cite the references in Josephus you are talking about?

Mark is writing to a specific community 70 CE. There is nothing subtle or esoteric in it to his audience. Maybe to you 2000 years later it appears that way. The account need not be woven from whole cloth. It is possible a petty thief was released and this evolved into the tradition we see or something else happened. Whole-cloth creation, while possible, is not the only potential way. You are knocking down a straw man.

Can you quote the references?

But when Albinus heard that Gessius Florus was coming to succeed him, he was desirous to appear to do somewhat that might be grateful to the people of Jerusalem; so he brought out all those prisoners who seemed to him to be most plainly worthy of death, and ordered them to be put to death accordingly. But as to those who had been put into prison on some trifling occasions, he took money of them, and dismissed them; by which means the prisons were indeed emptied, but the country was filled with robbers. (Antiquities 20, 215).`

Set the robbers free. Murder the rest. This is the Roman way. If Barabbas and his insurrection was as FAMOUS as the Gospels portray it, this is all the more reason for Pilate NOT to free him. You are not distinguishing between types of criminals. But I await your references.

Vinnie

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But that is wrong.How can they make such claims?We have basically zero knowledge of Jesus life apart from the gospels and maybe one or 2 manuscripts outside the bible.How can they claim Jesus of the Bible is not the historical one?

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in my own studies, for what it is worth, many scholars rejected the accounts of Jesus in the gospels as being historical - the primary reason being that they contained miracles. being unbelievers and naturalists, they assumed that if an account contained a miracle, it was de facto unhistorical.

Rudolph Butlmann, essentially the granddaddy of the “quest for the historical Jesus”, is famous for acknowledging as much
 " It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles

thus based on that presupposition, anything in a gospel that contains a miracle, or claim to divinity, or the like cannot be historical. therefore, they reason, there must have been a “real” historical Jesus who did not do miracles, claimed divinity, or anything of the sort, and the stories about his miracles and divinity must all have been added to that. thus began the quest to remove the supernatural accretions from the historical kernel.

But this whole endeavor grew not out of any objective reading of the text, but it was essentially a required logical consequence of their antisupernaturalism.

If interesting, C. S. Lewis’s book “Miracles” is perhaps the best treatment of the topic, as is his shorter article “modern theology and biblical criticism.”

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How so?Do they have proof it didnt happened?NO.We dont either from the other hand but they need to give another expllanation then as to why did the writters claimed that miracles happened

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I think this is a valid criticism of the critics. However, I’m currently reading “God’s Word In Human Words,” by Kenton Sparks. In it, he points out that there are many other reasons not based on miracles for dating OT books contrary to what the orthodox teaching has been. These are not biased against biblical texts, but treat them as any other text with impartial reasoning. Sparks’ point is to protect students of ANE literature from loss of faith, while still approaching the literature without bias.

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but i don’t think this is possible. to treat a text “just like any other text” is to judge it as if there was nothing miraculous involved in its composition. Consider the most excellent example in C.S. Lewis’s book Miracles


Here is an example of the sort of thing that happens if we omit the preliminary philosophical task, and rush on to the historical. In a popular commentary on the Bible you will find a discussion of the date at which the Fourth Gospel was written. The author says it must have been written after the execution of St Peter, because, in the Fourth Gospel, Christ is represented as predicting the execution of St Peter. ‘A book’, thinks the author, ‘cannot be written before events which it refers to’. Of course it cannot—unless real predictions ever occur. If they do, then this argument for the date is in ruins. And the author has not discussed at all whether real predictions are possible. He takes it for granted (perhaps unconsciously) that they are not. Perhaps he is right: but if he is, he has not discovered this principle by historical inquiry. He has brought his disbelief in predictions to his historical work, so to speak, ready made. Unless he had done so his historical conclusion about the date of the Fourth Gospel could not have been reached at all. His work is therefore quite useless to a person who wants to know whether predictions occur. The author gets to work only after he has already answered that question in the negative, and on grounds which he never communicates to us.

So in this case, Lewis observes with i think great insight that a scholar who "treated John’s gospel just as any other text with impartial reasoning" is, de facto, importing anti-supernatural bias. He could not have arrived at his date without assuming a lack of supernatural influence. And he is dead on
 for instance, how many scholars date the gospels, especially Mark, to a timeframe after the destruction of the temple on essentially the sole grounds that they include predictions of the destruction of the temple? These scholars would similarly claim they are judging Mark’s gospel and treating it just like any other ancient text. But if Jesus did in fact accurately predict what is recorded therein, then as Lewis observed, their argument just isn’t worth much.

Similarly, if the Old Testament books Sparks notes are, in matter of fact, different than all other books by nature of divine inspiration and influence and miraculous aspects of both their composition and their contents, then if this is the case, then it simply would be a fallacy to treat them “the same as any other text” in order to determine date, authorship, etc.

Just consider how problematic it would be to treat the claims of Christ “just as any other first century Jew with impartial reasoning,” as for instance those scholars of the Jesus seminar have done, and hence their quest for a “historical” Jesus
 If I treated the claims of a Christ no differently than I would any other first century Jew, then i would be guaranteed to arrive at a fallacious conclusion. if he were, in fact, categorically different than any other first century Jew.

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Its simple.Get the oldesst manuscript of thr Nt and do a carbondating test.Why something like that havent happened already?Or it has?What date is the oldest New Testament manuscript

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That does not preclude the possibility that it is not a copy of a yet older one.

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Not so simple as no originals exist, and the earliest copies are know to be from the second century, earliest being a fragment of John from about 125 AD

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That cant be right.Im sure there are older ones.What about the dead sea scrolls?They are earlier than that for sure no?

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True .Im interested to hear scholars opinions on what happened to the originals.Any guess?

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Dead Sea Scrolls are OT. And are the oldest copies of OT outside of a silver amulet fragment around 500-600 bc as memory serves. Remarkably, the oldest OT manuscript goes from Dead Sea scroll fragments to 920 AD, so oldest NT manuscripts are actually older.

I am sure the originals were were passed around and fell apart within years of their writing.

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Doubtfull.I think Christians were aware of the"pious" meaning these texts had so they would have considered them some sort of blessed.Even if thats not the case i dont think they would just throw them away like that.There isnt a reason to do

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Papyrus doesn’t last forever. And given it was hand copied versions that were passed around the “original” may not have had any special meaning. We have evidence old copies of the OT were discarded.