Evidence that Irenaeus knows the meaning of Barabbas ("Son of Father")

[Baley]

It is unfortunate because over the years, and even now, this problem is very, very limited in terms of offending posters.

Yes, there are a lot of quality discussions on this forum. You're all great individuals I think, and it'd be a shame for this place to go to waste.

[Joseph D. L.]

Hi, Giuseppe and Joseph. I've been visiting these pages for over a year now but had never registered until today. I actually registered to let you know how disappointing it is for an outsider to read all these personal insults and acrimonious remarks.

I think you both need to step back a little. I love the discussion though.

All the best.

Baley, with all due respect, when you see someone who says something like this:

Who disagrees with me on this is a total idiot. And to put it more clearly I am ready to insult any user of this forum as IDIOT, even the admin himself, if he/she writes that he/she disagrees with me on Barabbas.

How else are you supposed to engage with a person who thinks anyone who disagrees with him on what is essentially a meaningless point is a "total idiot?" Giuseppe himself said that he is ready and willing to call even Kirby, the creator and curator of this forum, an idiot. You don't reason with someone who has, in the past, admitted, that he doesn't come here for honest discussion, who has admitted that he treats his ides as if they were a religion and infallible, and who has shown unapologetic hostility to, not only myself, but almost everyone on this forum.

No, my treatment of Giuseppe is completely in keeping with his own vile behavior on this forum. Anyone else, safe for Hansen, Avery, John T. and semiopen, I treat with respect because they treat others with respect.

[Giuseppe]

I have always made clear that only on this precise point (Barabbas as anti-Gnostic parody) I don't like any objection at all. Because any objection would have provoked by need my irritation and hurted my own sensibility. But evidently someone has profited precisely of this because his goal was in advance to do just that (hurt my own sensibility).

[Joseph D. L.]

I have always made clear that only on this precise point (Barabbas as anti-Gnostic parody) I don't like any objection at all. Because any objection would have provoked by need my irritation and hurted my own sensibility.

Well that's too bad Giuseppe. No one is obligated to placate or accept anything you have to say and have every right to criticize every facet, point, and argument you bring up, your feelings to that criticism notwithstanding.

Who do you think you are?

But evidently someone has profited precisely of this because his goal was in advance to do just that (hurt my own sensibility).

Your theory presupposes too much in order for it to be workable, and you have to explain in clear and unambiguous terms why your interpretation is correct. Instead you have to prop it up with more vague and obscure interpretations about Judiazers and agendas that you cannot prove.

• Why is Barabbas in Marcion if it was a product of Judiazers?

• Why is Pilate written of positively, and the Jews written of negatively, if the agenda was to attack the more Gentilizers/Marcionites?

• Why is Barabbas missing in Peter and the Hebraic Gospels, when that is precisely where he should be as per your theory?

• Why is there no external evidence that can be produced to verify that your theory was at least one interpretation among the early ecclesiastical writers?

• Why is there no textual evidence that shows such an agenda was made? i.e. Marcionites and Gnostics pointing out that Barabbas was a later insertion to attack them

• Why is it that Origen is the earliest witness to any interpretation of Barabbas, and his is exactly what I have said, that it is based on th Yom Kippur rite?

• What did Judiazers have to gain in creating Barabbas, when they argued against vague allegories? i.e. were historicists

• A theory is only as good as its predictive power. What does believing your theory about Barabbas solve or accomplish for us? What and where would further evidence to confirm it be? (As an example, with my theory about Hadrian from Revelation 13, I was able to discover further evidence from another source, because the theory allowed me to determine where to look. How does your theory accomplish the same feat?

• What is so great or special about your theory that you defend it with such zeal and zealotry? What important question does it answer?

These are all questions that your theory presupposes, and you have utterly failed to answer them with any satisfactory answer, instead resorting to further arguments about a "proto-John", which only begs the question.

And that is why I reject your theory.

[Giuseppe]

• Why is Barabbas in Marcion if it was a product of Judiazers?

I answer to you by quoting what I had already named as Stuart's Law:

Once an element is accepted as part of the story, rather than drop it if it conflicts with your theology, you flip it to match your theology. This is a spot on observation!

Hence, once Barabbas was interpolated in the Gospels, the marcionites continue to play with it.

• Why is Pilate written of positively, and the Jews written of negatively, if the agenda was to attack the more Gentilizers/Marcionites?

Because Pilate was Roman and the Gospels - any Gospel - are not seditious propaganda.

• Why is Barabbas missing in Peter and the Hebraic Gospels, when that is precisely where he should be as per your theory?

because the tendence, by the time these late Gospels were written, was to have eclusively the Jews as killers of Jesus.

• Why is there no external evidence that can be produced to verify that your theory was at least one interpretation among the early ecclesiastical writers?

for two reasons:

because the same theory assumes that the parody, to be such , has to be interpreted, not explicitly declared;

because the parody in question is relative to a time when the Catholic compromise between Gnostics and Jewish-Christians was still not a solution. The Jesus Son of Father of proto-John was rejected a priori and not still catholicized/judaised.

• Why is there no textual evidence that shows such an agenda was made? i.e. Marcionites and Gnostics pointing out that Barabbas was a later insertion to attack them

for three reasons:

• For the Stuart's Law (see above)

• Because there is really evidence of a marcionite attack against Moses and OT prophets as "thieves and robbers" (John 10:8), the exact negative description of Barabbas, in a proto-Gospel (proto-John) where probably Barabbas was still absent, but in this case retorted against the Judaizing icons.

• Because there is really evidence, in Irenaeus, of a Gnostic expression "I am the Son of Father" as magical formula to escape the celestial archons, very hardly a coincidence with a Bar-Abbas ("Son of Father") escaping the death by hand of an earthly Archon.

• Why is it that Origen is the earliest witness to any interpretation of Barabbas, and his is exactly what I have said, that it is based on th Yom Kippur rite?

because his interpretation is mere Catholic apology to exorcize the embarrassment of the nomen sacrum given to a bastard criminal.

• What did Judiazers have to gain in creating Barabbas, when they argued against vague allegories? i.e. were historicists

in the polemic against rival sects, any tool of propaganda is useful. The seed thrown on stones (in the Parable of Sower) is for example a mere anti-petrine propaganda, Peter being the idiotic stone where no tree can have birth. The parable of Two Trees is probably a marcionite allegory of the gods in perennial conflict among them: the Alien God versus the god of the Jews.

In particular, Robert M. Price and Solomon Reinach agree in recognition that Simon of Cyrene is a Judaizing parody of Simon Magus: he limited himself to bear the cross, not to be himself the true victim of the crucifixion.

• A theory is only as good as its predictive power. What does believing your theory about Barabbas solve or accomplish for us? What and where would further evidence to confirm it be? (As an example, with my theory about Hadrian from Revelation 13, I was able to discover further evidence from another source, because the theory allowed me to determine where to look. How does your theory accomplish the same feat?

the explicative power of my theory shows itself by resolving definitely:

• the enigma Barabbas,

• the extraordinary coincidence-too-impossible-to-be-such of the magical formulas in Irenaeus (see above),

• the apparently embarrassing nomen sacrum given to a bastard criminal,

• the criminal intrinsic nature of the presumed goat released to wilderness (left surprisingly unexplained by the theory of the Barabbas episode based on midrash from Leviticus 16),

• the fact that Tertullian describes the marcionite Christ as a "robber",

• the fact that even Celsus (!) describes the marcionite Christ as a "robber"

• The fact that when it is pointed out the absence of a name for a father, very probably in ancient societies what is in action is an implicit accusation of bastardy, an apt accusation addressed against an alien father, as the father of the marcionite Christ is.

  
  Bar-Abbas was the Jewish name given to the bastards, i.e. the natural sons of unknown father, just as in the World of Westeros Snow is the name of the bastards.
  
  This view is given without reference by Jean Radermakers, S. J., Au fil de l'Evangile selon saint Matthieu, 2, s° ed. p. 342.
  
  Barabbas was the bastard, the natural son of an unknown father.
  

• What is so great or special about your theory that you defend it with such zeal and zealotry? What important question does it answer?

because my personal agenda is morally innocent (even if I consider the morality a myth, as totally persuaded by this genius) insofar it wants:

• to show that the religious sectarian rivalry gives birth literally to monsters, and Barabbas is a moral monster;

• to show particular contempt for the adorers of the unique god creator.

These are all questions that your theory presupposes, and you have utterly failed to answer them with any satisfactory answer, instead resorting to further arguments about a "proto-John", which only begs the question.

I think that I have explained my reasons to accept my theory with conclusive certainty, with a thin corollary: the moral right to despise in my mind who would disagree with me on this precise point.

[Joseph D. L.]

You're telling me everything and telling me nothing. You might as well have said "my theory is correct because it is correct."

[Giuseppe]

You're telling me everything and telling me nothing. You might as well have said "my theory is correct because it is correct."

Translated: your objections are not so strong to make impossible my theory.

[Joseph D. L.]

You're telling me everything and telling me nothing. You might as well have said "my theory is correct because it is correct."

Translated: your objections are not so strong to make impossible my theory.

No. I've honestly lost all interest in this. Barabbas is not a parody of Marcion or Marcionism. He is not a parody of separationism, which was strictly the Christology of the Jewsish Christians, not the Marcionites or Gnostics. I'm done repeating the same things over and over, asking for the evidence that you are unable to produce, and am tired of reading your insane babblings.

[Giuseppe]

I believe that your objections don't work. And that the quality of these objections is very much low, reducible to the claim that separationism is a Jewish-Christian thing (sic).

What I find strange and contradictory is your proclaimed absence of interest contra factum that you have assillated me for 14 long insult-based pages of a thread started about an Irenaeus's quote.

Facts of the life.

[Joseph D. L.]

I believe that your objections don't work. And that the quality of these objections is very much low, reducible to the claim that separationism is a Jewish-Christian thing (sic).

That’s why you cannot give straight forward answers or evidence to prove your case.

What I find strange and contradictory is your proclaimed absence of interest contra factum that you have assillated me for 14 long insult-based pages of a thread started about an Irenaeus's quote.

Because Irenaeus doesn’t say anything close to what you’re saying.