Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

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Giuseppe
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Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by Giuseppe »

According to J M Robertson, there was an old sacrificial rite where a "Son of the Father" worked as expiatory sacrifice: he was emulated during this rite by a mock-king, a "king" for 5 days with complete license as king, to be killed in sacrifice after the 5 days.

When the Christ myth became famous at least in Judaea, the rabbis identified the Christ preached by the Christians with the "Son of the Father" of the sacrificial ritual cited above. Evidently they did so to despise Christ by reducing him to someone already known by them: the mock-king.

The evangelists invented the Jesus Barabbas episode to remove the risk of this identification.

When the sense of the apology was not more understood, the later Christians removed "Jesus" from Jesus Barabbas, for obvious reasons.


Some interesting questions raised by this theory:
1) the license of the mock-king during 5 days is the same freedom of the Jesus who purifies the temple without be punished for this.

2) were the enemies of Paul who despised Jesus just the same rabbis who reduced Jesus to a mere mock-king?
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by Giuseppe »

Another question: and if the same founders of the cult were the Jews who did the ritual sacrifice of the Mock-King (Dujardin's view?)? They adored the victim as "Jesus-Barabbas" for the 5 days of the rite, after they mocked and crucified him (really or simbolically).

The not-Christians would have interpreted the rite as a real worship of real murderers and bad people. Paul himself was embarrassed by the Jewish Christians who "cursed" Jesus, i.e. the actor who emulated Jesus Barabbas in the original rite.

Then "Mark" introduced the episode of Barabbas and the rest is history.

Basically, the original gospel is the transcript of a rite of human sacrifice.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by Giuseppe »

Pilate was introduced in the sacred drama as known "shedder of Jewish blood".
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by Giuseppe »

Where did the Gnostic Christians (Paul) diverge from the original Christians?

For Paul the Crucifixion was done one time forever, in a celestial place.

For the Jewish Christians, the Crucifixion ritual had to be done every year.

The Galatians were to repeat the ritual of crucifixion in Galatia. Therefore Paul was saying them: "you are foolish because even if you repeat annually the rite, you don't understand it really".
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by Giuseppe »

Galatians 3:1
O foolish Galatians, who did bewitch you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth crucified?
The new interpretation would be: the Galatians were deceived just because they were persuaded to dramatize in a rite the Crucifixion of the Son.

In other terms, the Galatians were foolish insofar they were "euhemerizing" the rite in a rash way.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
Giuseppe
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Re: Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by Giuseppe »

If Paul represented a cult totally different from the cult of the Pillars, then the first euhemerizers were just the Galatians enemies of Paul.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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DCHindley
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Re: Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by DCHindley »

Giuseppe wrote:According to J M Robertson, there was an old sacrificial rite where a "Son of the Father" worked as expiatory sacrifice: he was emulated during this rite by a mock-king, a "king" for 5 days with complete license as king, to be killed in sacrifice after the 5 days.
Could you cite your source for this? I'm pretty sure that it is J M Robertson's Pagan Christs (1903, 2nd revised edn 1911), but I cannot locate my copy of the 1965 reprint. Years ago when I first read the book (late 1980s?) I was impressed, but when I more recently looked at it again I was surprised how poorly JMR documented his sources.

Chances are they were James George Fraser's The Golden Bough (1890 in two vols, 2nd ed 1900 in three vols, 3rd ed 1906-15 in 12 volumes) and Thomas Bulfinch's The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). I guess that Robertson just assumed that any well-read liberal type would have read those other works their original published form.

I felt the same way about poor documentation when I re-read James George Fraser's The Golden Bough , but I have one of those one volume abridgements (probably 1922), so maybe footnotes were omitted.

Same goes for Bulfinch, although I know him from the single volume edition which combines all three of his works on mythology, which goes by the name Bulfinch's Mythology, published in 1881.

Any time one has to compress or abridge, the footnotes are the first things to go.

DCH
Giuseppe
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Re: Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by Giuseppe »

DCHindley wrote: Could you cite your source for this? I'm pretty sure that it is J M Robertson's Pagan Christs (1903, 2nd revised edn 1911),
My source is "The Jesus Problem", where Robertson does his more complete case for how the Christ myth arose, having already debunked all the historicist theories in his previous book ("The Historical Jesus").
I find that the the thesis that the Gospels are allegorizing an ancient rite of human sacrifice is very well argued. I am curious about the possible effects of this view on what was the original myth (I mean: for Paul and the Pillars).


I find no mention of gnostics and of Marcion in the books of Robertson. It seems that his purpose in the reconstruction of the Origins is uniquely a "Reductio ad Judaeum": all has to be explained with Jewish references, therefore the absolute emphasis is on the expiatory sacrifice as the true essence of Christianity.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
andrewcriddle
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Re: Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by andrewcriddle »

See the middle essays in Magic and Religion by Lang for criticism.

Andrew Criddle
Giuseppe
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Re: Jesus Barabbas episode as apology against some rabbis...

Post by Giuseppe »

andrewcriddle wrote:See the middle essays in Magic and Religion by Lang for criticism.
I read this 'criticism' by Lang but it doesn't seem such:
...the part of the dying god in this annual play should be thrust on Jesus of Nazareth....' His death as the Haman of the annual mystery play of the dying god' impressed upon what had been hitherto mainly an ethical mission the character of a divine revelation culminating in the passion and death of the incarnate Son of a heavenly Father. In this form the story of the life and death of Jesus exerted an influence which it could never have had if the great teacher had died the death of a vulgar malefactor. It shed round the Cross on Calvary a halo of divinity,' &c.[1]
But all this halo could only be shed if the victim was[Pg 201] recognised by the world as dying in the character of a god, and as rising again in the person of Barabbas, the Mordecai of the year. We know on the best historical evidence that there was no such recognition. 'To the Greeks foolishness, and to the Jews a stumbling block,' was the Cross, as St. Paul assures us. Moreover, we know that ribaldry, not reverence, marked the multitude at the Crucifixion. By Mr. Frazer's theory Barabbas represented the re-arisen god, 'The Son of the Father.' Was Barabbas revered? No; 'some pretended to salute his mock majesty, and others belaboured the donkey on which he rode.'[2] Therefore, by Mr. Frazer's own explicit statement, the divine facts about Barabbas were not recognised. Yet he was the counterpart of the sacred Victim.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46480/46 ... 6480-h.htm

But he is doing precisely the point of Robertson: in the Gospels Jesus Barabbas was not revered for the precise reason that he, despite the name (meaning: "Jesus Son of The Father") - implying by itself alone the possibility of a deserved reverence -, had to be absolutely NOT confused with the true Jesus Christ of the cult, against the opinion of some Rabbis of the time.

Lang's "criticism" is de facto equivalent to the same apology seen at work by Robertson in the Barabbas episode.


In the words of Robertson:
A general statement that Jesus was the "Son of the Father", and that he had been put to death with ignominy, would elicit, as has been above argued, the objection that "Jesus Barabbas" was certainly no divine personage. The Barabbas story, then, explaining away that objection, is a comparatively late development, of which, accordingly, we find not a single trace in the Acts or the Epistles.
(The Jesus Problem, p.104, my bold)

The Karabas episode of Philo and especially the post-70 Talmudic mention that there was a Jewish ritual "Week of the Son, or, as some call it, Jesus the Son" related to circumcision, make it probable that some accused "that Jesus was simply a victim in the Barabbas rite" (p.105).

Robertson thinks that the accusers were not-Christian Jews.

I wonder if the accusers were real Mythicist Christians who abhorred as pure blasphemy the idea that Jesus the God was euhemerized at the level of the mere victim who emulated him.

In both the cases, only Mythicism alone explains perfectly the Barabbas episode.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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