A clue for the anwer
may be found in
Mcn aka proto-Luke:
But the whole crowd shouted, “Away with this man! Release Barabbas to us!”
(Luke 23:18)
The crowd would have rejected the
man, i.e. the Catholic incarnation, and they would have preferred the Marcion's deity, Jesus Son of Father.
Apparently the death is a reason to be prideful about the victim.
If we remove from the Fourth Gospel the mentions of the two verses: 18:39-40 about Barabbas, the narration hardly suffers by it, despite the fact that there seems to be an interpolation with repetition of the words "again" (18:38 and 40, and 19:4) and undoubtedly a reworking of the text, because what the Jews cry again cannot be:
"Not him, but Barabbas", since they have not yet cried it
These two verses were added on proto-John, corrupting it. In this case,
the author of Mark would probably be the first to have introduced in the Gospels the episode of Barabbas and this episode would be related with the death of Jesus called Christ.
But then, if in the previous story the hero of the story was John and not Jesus, the man called "king of Jews" was John and not Jesus, accordingly.
Hence the crowd had to choose between the Son of Father and the mere messianist John called "king of Jews".
The crowd would have cried:
“Away with this man (John)! Release the Son of Father to us!”
Precisely the words given to the crowd by the Revelation of Peter:
"Is the living savior, the one they took and released ... What they released was my immaterial body ..."
Hence, the "living savior", the true hero, was the Son of Father ("Bar-Abbas").
But the true victim was not the true hero of the Judaizers & Catholics (adorers of YHWH).
The true victim was not even John son of Judas, or better, he could even be John son of Judas. But his role was totally in function of the spiritual Marcion's Christ. He worked as the "immaterial body" of the spiritual "Son of Father", a mere involucre, an ologram used for the occasion. He is not even the "king of Jews"
stricto sensu. He is only the
so-called "king of Jews",
to remark his ontological inconsistance. In a certain sense,
it is still Bar-Abbas who is killed in him, since he is only the involucre who hides the true Christ (Barabbas).