Many a pogroms have been incited by Passion plays and the idea that Jews were to blame for Jesus' death. After all, they let a murderer -- that filthy murderer Barabbas -- go free while Christ was hung on a tree.
I've long thought this ridiculous and still do. But at church Sunday night I began to see this story differently from the Jewish perspective (yes: church and Jewish perspective).
I've read countless times the passage in the Gospel of Mark where Pontius Pilate asks the crowd of Jews which prisoner he should free -- the Messiah or the murderer -- but I hadn't paid attention to the way Barabbas is described in Ch. 15 as "among the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection."
"Barabbas," the Rev. Mark Brewer of Bel Air Presbyterian then said, "was like a freedom fighter for the Jews, who had probably slit some Roman soldiers throat."
Learning that, I wondered under which circumstances the Roman-ruled Jews would have chosen to free a man believed to be a Jewish heretic and who said he was going to destroy the temple over someone they believed was fighting for the physical and political freedom of the Israelites.
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4 comments:
I'm not a scholar... but does this make sense at all?
Would the romans really offer to let that guy go? It's kinda UNroman to do such a thing.
I don't buy it. If the murderer killed a roman soldier, they'd never let him go. They'd crucify him and 50 of his neighbors, to let the message sink in.
It is said to have been an annual show of mercy from the Romans during Passover.
The Roman custom was to set free Jewish prisoners during Jewish Holydays.The majority asked for Barabas freedom since Christ did not preach rebelion. Barabas is described as a rebelios person.If Jesus Christ would preaced rebelion
against the Romans than the majority of the Jews would have accepted Him as the Messiah and would have asked for His freedom.The fact that 130 years after Jesus a person by the name of Bar Kochvah,a reblion leader was going to be accepted as the Jewish Messiah had he survived.
Kind Regards,
Dicko.
"The Roman custom was to set free Jewish prisoners during Jewish Holydays."
According to wikipedia, we don't have any record of the existence of such a custom except in the Bible.
I don't buy that they set free a killer of a Roman soldier. Romans weren't known for their mercy.
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