Bar Abbas not Barabbas

Saying Kaddish for Jesus

Tomorrow is Good Friday, commemorating the crucifixion of Barabbas at the hands of Rome over 2000 years ago. You may recognize Barabbas from the 1961 film “Barabbas” starring Anthony Quinn. The movie is fictional, as is the New Testament story on which it is based:

“At Passover, the Roman governor Pilate was accustomed to releasing a prisoner of the Jewish people’s choosing. At that time, he had two: an insurrectionist named Jesus Barabbas and Jesus, who is called the Messiah. Asked which they would have him free, the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowds to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus killed. The governor again asked them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release to you?’ They replied, ‘Barabbas.’ Pilate asked, ‘What should I do with Jesus, who is called the Messiah?’ All of them answered, ‘Crucify him!’ He asked, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted even more, ‘Crucify him!’” (Matthew 27:15-23 NRSVU, adapted. Early manuscripts of Matthew’s Gospel reveal Barabbas’s first name as Jesus.)

The story is false from the beginning. Rome never had a prisoner release program, and there is no way Pilate would release a terrorist instead of a pacifist. Here’s what actually happened:

Jesus, whom the people called bar Abbas–Aramaic for the Son (bar) of the Father (abbas)–entered Jerusalem the previous Sunday, riding on a donkey to mock the pageantry of Roman parades. Jews crowded the streets, waving lulav, closed palm fronds (Matthew 21:8-11). The lulav has many meanings in Judaism, including that of a “backbone” and God’s bounty. To the Romans, it signified victory. Waving lulavim and shouting hosanna/rescue us as Jesus bar Abbas rode into the city could easily be interpreted by Pilate as a call for revolution, urging Jews to stiffen their spines and trust that God will make them victorious over the Roman occupation.

Jesus inflamed the fears of Pilate and Caiaphas, the High Priest, when he entered the Temple courtyard the next day and condemned the Temple as a “den of thieves” (Matthew 21:13). The Temple was not only a place of sacrifice but also the country’s financial center. The thieves Jesus condemned were not the money changers, who were essentially bank tellers, but rather the Temple hierarchy, who owned and profited from the system itself.

Fearing riots, Pilate, with the support of Caiaphas, arrested Jesus. The crowds who adored Jesus bar Abbas on Sunday stormed the prison, demanding his release on Friday. Pilate refused and had him crucified. His crime? Insurrection, as the plaque on his cross made clear: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” (John 19:19).

Decades later, noticing that few Jews were converting to Christianity, and hoping to attract more Romans, the Gospel writers split Jesus bar Abbas into two characters—Jesus and Barabbas—shifted the blame for Jesus’s crucifixion onto Caiaphas and the Jews, and cleared Pilate and Rome of responsibility, thereby setting in motion the murder of millions of Jews over the next two millennia.

This rewriting of Jewish history was so obviously antisemitic that Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene opposed a bipartisan 2024 bill against Jew-hatred because “it could convict Christians of antisemitism for believing the Gospel that states Jesus was … crucified by the Jews.” Yes, the Barabbas story is antisemitic. However, the Bar Abbas story is not.

Jesus bar Abbas was a Jew who felt called to help the lost sheep of Israel (Matthew 15:24). He belongs to an esteemed group of over four dozen unsuccessful Jewish messiahs, including Shimon bar Kokhba, Shabbatai Tzvi, Jacob Frank, Eva Frank, and Menachem Mendel Schneerson, all of blessed memory.

Jesus was a Jewish mystic whose God was Ehyeh, the I AM revealed to Moses at the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:14). The Aramaic-speaking Jesus bar Abbas taught, “Ehyeh/I Am and the Father are one.” The Greek-speaking Gospel writers misunderstood this as “I/Jesus and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

The Aramaic-speaking Jesus bar Abbas taught, “Ehyeh/I AM is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no one comes to the Father except through Ehyeh.” The Greek-speaking Gospel writers misunderstood this as “I/Jesus am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

Where Jesus bar Abbas taught Judaism: love God and love your neighbor (Deuteronomy 6:4-5; Leviticus 19:18; Mark 12:29-31), his Greek followers taught Christianity: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

As New Testament scholar Walter Wink reveals in The Powers that Be, Jesus bar Abbas taught his fellow Jews how to resist the brutal Roman occupation:

“If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matthew 5:39). “Anyone” refers to the Roman soldier who could strike a Jew on the right cheek with the back of his hand as an act of dehumanization. By turning the other cheek, the left cheek, you compel the soldier to hit you with a fist or an open palm, actions that are only taken between equals.

“If anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile” (Matthew 5:41). Again, “anyone” refers to the Roman soldier who could reduce a Jew to a pack animal by compelling you to carry his rucksack for up to one mile. Jesus teaches you to reclaim your humanity by voluntarily carrying the pack an extra mile, a gesture of kindness that the soldier must refuse.

By dividing Jesus bar Abbas in two and promoting the false narrative of Jews calling for the crucifixion of Jesus rather than for his liberation, Christians have removed Jesus bar Abbas from his people and place and burdened us with the charge of deicide.

For centuries, many churchgoing Christians, driven to murderous frenzy by the story of Barabbas told on Good Friday, hunted down their Jewish neighbors to exact revenge for the crucifixion of Christ. From 1570 to 1955, Catholics beseeched their God on Good Friday to remove the blindness of “faithless Jews” so that they might “acknowledge the light of Thy Truth, which is Christ,” and “be delivered from their darkness.” Even today, affirmations of our blindness and hopes for our deliverance from darkness remain staples of Good Friday liturgies.

There isn’t much we can do to fix this, but we can counter it.

We can reclaim Jesus bar Abbas as one of us and share his history as part of our own. We can study and debate his teachings on resistance to oppression, and on the night of Good Friday, we can honor his death at the hands of our oppressors by saying Kaddish for him.

Additionally, we can reach out to our Christian neighbors and say, “Yours is the religion about Jesus. Ours is the religion of Jesus. To you, he is the Christ. To us, he is our cousin. We’ll reach out if we want to know more about his divinity. We'd love to talk if you’d like to know more about his humanity and the culture that defined it.”