this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2024
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Based on my understanding of non-religiously biased history, the character of Jesus Christ is an amalgamation of many Jewish prophets who preached a generally similar message.
One of the interesting things that sticks out to me personally that lends credence to the idea that the Bible is just kind of a bunch of half-remembered stories all mashed together is Barabbas- the guy that Pontius Pilate supposedly pardoned instead of Jesus.
In some versions, Barabbas is given the first name "Jesus"
And "Barabbas" could potentially come from "bar abba" in ~~Hebrew~~ Aramaic (although Hebrew "ben av" or "ben aba" is not far off) meaning "son of the father"
He was imprisoned and sentenced to execution due to taking part in an insurrection against the Roman empire.
The two characters- "Jesus, son of the father, and sentenced to death for sedition" and "Jesus, son of God, sentenced to die for claiming to be king of the Jews" sound a hell of a lot like they're referring to the same dude to me.
That's either one of the biggest coincidences in all of history, or someone heard two different versions of the same story and mashed them together.
Or maybe it's just sort of a 1st century version of the saying that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter."
This is what happens over time with people remembering history that they start to attribute a lot to a single person. More recent example of this is George Washington which is given more credit that he deserves for creating the US.
I mean, Hitler had an underling named Himmler. Sometimes coincidences happen.
Then if Barabbas really was pardoned, to some of his acquaintances who didn't know the pardon, he was sent off to die, but then showed up later in the weekend.
This is pretty cool, but I’m struggling to find anything else that makes this claim using my Google fu. Can you help point me at something I can read about this?
Where did you get it?
I'm not too sure where I first picked up the idea, for some reason I think it may have been one of the videos on the Useful Charts YouTube channel, but in general it all kind of fits together to me, and I of course kind of put my own little bit of spin into it myself. Unfortunately I don't have exact sources to cite directly to where I first heard this theory put together.
For starters you can go to the Bible itself with Mathew 27:16-17
I misspoke in my earlier comment, and I edited it accordingly, the language would have been Aramaic, which is what most scholars agree is the language Jesus mostly spoke, although it is a pretty closely related language to Hebrew. I speak neither Hebrew nor Aramaic so I kind of just have to take it on faith that some of the people I've seen discussing this online have some idea what they're talking about. You can kind of piece it together from some common bits of Hebrew "bar mitzvah" literally translates to something like "son of the commandments" and I believe in modern Hebrew, the word for father in "av" with "aba" being commonly used in some places/cultures.
There's also some that would say it comes from "bar rabban" (may be misspelling that) meaning "son of the teacher" instead of father, which you can compare to "Rabbi"
This comes from an era when people didn't really have official last names, depending on who you asked, Jesus could have been known by quite a few different names, Jesus the carpenter, Jesus son of Joseph/mary, the son of God, the teacher, the guy from Nazareth, the religious weirdo, the insurrectionist, of the house of David, etc.
I believe in modern Hebrew "ben" is more often used as the "son of" prefix. And those sort of patronymic names are pretty common in semitic languages, in Arabic you've probably heard a few people with "bin" in their name. It's basically the same idea as Irish/Scottish names that begin with mc/Mac/O', or names that end in "son"
As for Barabbas having been involved in an insurrection, going back to the bible we have Mark 15:7
Israel experienced more than a few different Jewish uprisings/revolts/riots/insurrections/whatever name you wanted to call it. They weren't exactly happy to be under Roman rule, and there were always a bunch of different political or religious movements trying to do something about it and usually not having much success. It's not unlikely that Jesus is sort of a composite of several different folks making trouble for the Romans.
I'm no scholar, my knowledge on this doesn't really go a whole lot deeper than what I've said here, and I can't say how widespread this particular little conspiracy theory is in academic circles, I won't say that I'm totally sold on it myself, I'm very open to someone else saying differently, but it's something to consider, and it looks like a hell of a coincidence to just be a coincidence to me
Very interesting! As a Hebrew speaker, I can confirm "bar" is being used to indicate "son of" but not in spoken language, just in some exoressions which originate from Aramic, and some surnames (son of...) Btw, there is an Israeli actor with the surname "Barabba", who mentioned in an interview it's a name going back many generations.
I was hoping a hebrew-speaker would chime in to confirm that I at least wasn't too far off-base with that part. Talking about languages I don't know is always a little uneasy for me because every language has its own weird quirks and something is always lost in translation.
You weren't kidding...
I looked everywhere and scoured the Dark Web and managed to only find this after great struggle:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabbas#Name