That Bar-Abbas is the sarcastic parody of the gnostic Son of Father is surely the great discovery I recognize to Couchoud. But while the explanation of the his being in prison was, per Couchoud, the Judaizing reversal of the marcionite accusation against the OT prophets (survived miracolously in John 10:8), I have now a better solution:
Who was literally "imprisoned" in the flesh of the mere man Jesus was the Gnostic "Son of Father", the spiritual Christ (who wasn't the Jewish Christ).
Isn't this the separationism in nuce of proto-Mark, after all?
When the hearsay about the spiritual possession of the man Jesus by the spiritual Christ was described as a prisony of the spirit in the matter, and the sense of this prisony was definitely (or deliberately?) lost, the Judaizers invented the story of a Barabbas "imprisoned" in a mere Roman prison.
Pace all the separationists of the entire world, in primis proto-Mark.
Separationism in the same idea of a Barabbas who is “prisoner”
Separationism in the same idea of a Barabbas who is “prisoner”
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Re: Separationism in the same idea of a Barabbas who is “prisoner”
The false idea that the prisony of the spiritual Christ was merely a Roman prisony is survived in the Celsus'Jew's accusation against Jesus as the bastard son of a Roman soldier: also in that case we have the degradation of a theological idea related to prisony (= the presence of a divine being in a human recipient = separationism) to a mere case of sarcastic defamation involving a Roman feature.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.