Barabbas is the link between Marcion and Jesus ben Ananias

[Giuseppe]

A rapid balance on Barabbas:

FACT 1: The Barabbas episode means a resistance against Jesus being called the Jewish Christ.

FACT 2: The Barabbas episode finds his historical nucleus in the release of Jesus ben Ananias by Albinus.

FACT 3: The link Barnabas/Barabbas in Acts means simply that the Judaizers hated the radical Gentilizers: only polemical propaganda required that the Catholicized Paul had to abandon/release Barnabas/Barabbas. Paul as Pilate.

What was the link between Marcion and Jesus ben Ananias ?

there was one Jesus, the son of Ananus, a plebeian and a husbandman[1], who, four years before the war began, and at a time when the city was in very great peace and prosperity, came to that feast whereon it is our custom for every one to make tabernacles [2] to God in the temple, began on a sudden to cry aloud, “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds[3], a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides[4], and a voice against this whole people!” …Hereupon our rulers, supposing, as the case proved to be, that this was a sort of divine fury in the man, brought him to the Roman procurator[5], where he was whipped till his bones were laid bare; yet he did not make any supplication for himself, nor shed any tears, but turning his voice to the most lamentable tone possible, at every stroke of the whip his answer was, “Woe, woe to Jerusalem!”[6]…for as he was going round upon the wall, he cried out with his utmost force, “Woe, woe to the city again, and to the people, and to the holy house!” And just as he added at the last, “Woe, woe to myself also!” there came a stone[7] out of one of the engines, and smote him, and killed him immediately; and as he was uttering the very same presages he gave up the ghost[8].

1. Mark 12: …built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen 2. Mark 9:5: …let us make three tabernacles 3. Mark 13:27: …shall gather together his elect from the four winds 4. Mark 2:19: …while the bridegroom is with them 5. Mark 15:1: …carried him away, and delivered him to Pilate 6. Mark 14:21: ..woe unto that man… 7. Mark 5:5: …cutting himself with stones; Mark 16:4: …stone is rolled back 8. Mark 15:37: …gave up the ghost

Jesus ben Ananias aka Jesus Barabbas aka the Marcion's "Jesus Son of Unknown Father", was euhemerized by propagandistic Acts as the old Ananias who "appeared" before Paul:

Acts 9:10-17

In Damascus there was a disciple named Ananias. The Lord called to him in a vision, “Ananias!”

“Yes, Lord,” he answered.

11 The Lord told him, “Go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying. 12 In a vision he has seen a man named Ananias come and place his hands on him to restore his sight.”
…
17 Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. Placing his hands on Saul, he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord—Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here—has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” 18 Immediately, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and he could see again. He got up and was baptized, 19 and after taking some food, he regained his strength.

Hence, Marcion was the early Christian who had made his own Jesus the Jesus ben Ananias released by Albinus. In opposition to the original Jesus.

The origin of the opposition between Jesus called Christ and Jesus Barabbas was the opposition between the followers of Jesus the last anointed high priest and Jesus ben Ananias.

[Giuseppe]

Note the contrast:

• Jesus ben Ananias was considered killed by Jews, even if a Roman stone killed him.

• Jesus ben Saphat was quasi killed by Titus.

In the long (temporal and spacial) distance, in oral memory, these two Jesuses became a Jesus killed by evil Jews and a Jesus killed by evil Romans.

Respectively, the icon of Gentilizers and the icon of Judaizers.

[Giuseppe]

The Risen Jesus appeared before the Paul of Marcion, as reported by Catholic Acts:



Corollary:

Jesus Barabbas == Jesus ben Ananias.

[Giuseppe]

"Mark" (author) merged the already confused tradition of the two Jesuses (= Jesus ben Saphat and Jesus ben Ananias). However, he didn't like the Jesus tradition originated from Jesus ben Ananias, since that tradition found his Christian champion in the hated figure of Marcion. Hence, both Jesus ben Ananias and his Christian champion Marcion found their place in Mark by the Barabbas episode (essentially, a polemical Judaizing attack against the marcionite Jesus, docet Couchoud/Stahl).

"Mark" was a Moderate Gentilizer, not a Radical Gentilizer as Marcion.

[Giuseppe]

Further evidence that Barabbas == Jesus son of Ananias:

Ananias who tried to keep money for himself in Acts 5:1-5:

Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.

Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied just to human beings but to God.”

When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died.

...is a Catholic parody against the marcionite Jesus (ben Ananias), who commanded the Marcion's Paul to ignore the Judaizers, against the "so-called" Pillars's warning:

“remember the poor, Paul!”

[Giuseppe]

CONCLUSION:

• 1) Barabbas episode is already per se independent evidence that the marcionite Jesus Son of (Unknown) Father was parodied as the criminal Jesus Bar-Abbas.

• 2) The anti-Marcionite parody of Ananias in Acts (respectively as the Revealer appeared before Paul and as the pauline figure who ignores the Poors) , connects Ananias with Marcion.

• 3) the points (1) and (2), united with the surprising similarities between the Jesus ben Ananias in Josephus and the Mark's Jesus, and united with the similar fate of both Jesus ben Ananias in Josephus (released by Albinus) and of Barabbas in Mark (released by Pilate) make stronger the case that Marcion's Jesus was Jesus ben Ananias.

[Giuseppe]

Doudna appears to agree with me that the Marcion's Jesus was Jesus ben Ananias:

I do not see a Barabbas/Barnabas connection myself, but I did learn from the Couchoud and Stahl analysis of Barabbas which I read from an earlier recommendation from you (“Jesus Barabbas”, Couchoud and Stahl, 1930 [eng. trans. https://vridar.org/wp-content/uploads/2 ... ngl.pdf%5D). The key point is that Barabbas is another version of Jesus which conflicts with the version in which Jesus is crucified. These two versions do not derive from distinct figures, nor are they to be harmonized as if both are aspects of a single true narrative. Rather, the negative portrayal of Barabbas in the Gospels’ Passion story reflects contemporary extant stories or versions of Jesus’s fate, one in which Jesus was crucified, another in which Jesus was not. Furthermore, the version in which Jesus had not been crucified was no trivial alternative or fringe story but held by significant sectors of proto-christians as early as can be known, one stream of which survives to the present day in a major world religion, Islam, which regards Jesus as a holy man who had not, however, been crucified. This ancient belief should not uncritically be assumed to be fringe or secondary or a marginal oddity, simply because those who held that view did not win the 2nd CE heresy-defining wars. It is possible that neither of these two conflicting and alternative versions of Jesus’s fate is derivative from the other, in keeping with a range of ancient comparative examples concerning conflicting reports of deaths and legend generated therefrom, e.g. Alexander son of Herod and Miriam (Ant 17.324-338 [in passing I am surprised that historians have so readily accepted Josephus’s source’s claims of imposture in this case founded solely upon–as represented–the wise Augustus Caesar’s claim of suspicion and the confession of the unfortunate man under threat of death if he did not confess, against–according to the account–then-universal Jewish claims and popular hopes raised saying he was Alexander, saved by others having been killed in the place of him and his brother thereby deceiving Herod, and his identity believed by all Jews even “those who had been very intimate with Alexander”]); Nero’s suicide/flight east]; Niger the Perean [Pseudo-Hegesippus]; Josephus [War 5.541-547]; to these perhaps add Jesus). Arguably, it was the 2nd CE victory of catholic Christianity and its texts–as well as the Tacitus passage–which established the perception to historians and scholars to the present day that the crucifixion of Jesus was the most historical of facts about Jesus, and the other ancient, early, widespread story of a Jesus who was not mythical but whose crucifixion was, to be rejected as an ancient curiosity or frivolous tale.

The story of Niger the Perean, told in Pseudo-Hegesippus (the early 1575-1579 edition “A Compendious and Most Marueilous Historie…”, pp. 85-86, not the later translation of Blocker which inexplicably omits most of the relevant story), is especially interesting and entertaining as a comparison. Niger, a commander and military hero of the Revolt in 66 CE, is reported and believed and lamented as dead in battle at Ashkelon. But later he is found astonishingly to have survived in a cave within an area destroyed by fire by the Romans, regarded as a miracle, with Niger peshering his own survival in terms of divine will that he live to destroy more Romans, to the praise and rejoicing of all who heard the story. (Compare Gospel stories of Jesus peshering his post-crucifixion appearances.)

I have not seen noticed before in discussions of Barabbas that Josephus may be one of those who understood and told the version in which Jesus was not crucified (War 2.261-263; 6.300-305). This possibility draws first from the work of Lena Einhorn (A Shift in Time, 2016) in arguing that Jesus of the Gospels belongs in the 50s CE in terms of political context and the Egyptian false prophet, and then the work of Theodore Weeden (The Two Jesuses, 2007) discussed earlier on Vridar, of Josephus’s story of a trial of a Jesus which correlates so strikingly to the Gospels’ trial of its Jesus that literary borrowing is presumed. However, unlike the Passion story of the Gospels, the trial of Josephus’s Jesus of ca. 62 CE did not result in a crucifixion but instead a Barabbas-release outcome (because the Roman governor wanted to save Jesus from his accusers on the grounds that Jesus was an idiot, in the version of Josephus [War 6.300-309]). Admittedly it is only the Gospels, and not Josephus, which link the themes of the Egyptian false prophet (said in Acts 21:38, whether rightly or wrongly, to be a leader of Sicarii) and the subsequent trial of Jesus who is released not crucified. The Jesus of Josephus has a message sounding exactly like the Olivet prophecy of Jesus of the Gospels, and it is more or less standard current scholarship that Jesus’s Olivet prophecy originated later than 30 CE when scholars suppose Jesus “really” lived (based on the Gospels and other testimony derivative from the Gospels). Josephus says in conclusion of his story of the war that this Jesus–who like Barabbas was released and uttered prophecies like the Olivet prophecy–was a more fearful sign or omen than any other of the miraculous omens of Jerusalem’s destruction listed by Josephus (War 6.300).

Josephus also has what reads to me as what may be a second account, a doublet, of the Egyptian-uprising (Ant. 20.188, cp. War 2.259-260). In the second account the leader is killed in the crushing of the insurrection, whereas the first account reflecting more accurate information says that whereas many of the Egyptian’s supporters were killed and dispersed, the Egyptian false prophet himself escaped alive (War 2.263; Ant 20.169-171), his fate untold.

As for the Pilate dating of Jesus, one possibility that occurs to me is that that came into Christian historiography and texts via an original Josephus Testimonium, situated by Josephus in its present position in Greek mss. at Ant 18.63-64 at the time of Pilate (18.55-62), and that Josephus put it there because he was referring to Jesus’s birth at that time. There already is a scholarly theory that the associated Paulina stories of Josephus, which immediately follow the Testimonium in Antiquities, are an aspersion on the Christian virgin birth story of Jesus (Albert Bell, “Josephus the Satirist? A Clue to the Original Form of the ‘Testimonium Flavium'”, JQR 67 [1976]: 16-22).

What has not received attention at all in any discussion of the Testimonium–so far as I can tell–is that the existing Testimonium in the standard Greek text of Antiquities, of the Loeb edition et al, directly says, in direct reading of the Greek text at Ant 18.63–that Jesus was born “about this time”, the time of Pilate. Ginetai de kata touton ton chronon ‘Iesous… “About this time was born Jesus…” All classical Greek lexicons on the Perseus Digital Library site appear unanimous in saying that when the verb gignomai, of which ginetai is 3rd masc. sing. present indicative, is followed by the name of a person, it means “born” at that time, e.g. Middle Liddell: “of persons, to be born … of things, to be produced… of events, to take place”. By this seemingly plain reading it is Jesus’s birth which is the expressed tag of Josephus’s attention and would explain why Josephus originally placed a passage beginning with “about this time Jesus was born” at the time of Pilate at the time that Jesus was born. Following the Testimonium Josephus has an immediately following story that may be–some read it as–debunking the Christian virgin birth story. A dating of Jesus’s birth around the time of Pilate would be compatible with activity of that Jesus in the 50s or 60s CE. My article making the case that Josephus’s John the Baptist passage is a chronologically dislocated tradition of the death of Hyrcanus II (in Pfoh and Niesiolowski-Spanò, eds, Biblical Narratives, Archaeology, and Historicity: Essays in Honour of Thomas L. Thompson, 2020) I think has removed the security of assumption that there was a John the Baptist in the 20s-30s CE, thereby removing that perceived support for dating Jesus’s activity to that time.

[Giuseppe]

I am indebted to this article, surely, in this thread.

What the author of that article doesn't add, is the fact that, being "Bar-Abbas" the Judaizing parody of the Marcionite Jesus, then the historical nucleus of the release of Barabbas by Pilate was the release of Jesus ben Ananias by Albinus.

[Giuseppe]

Doudna rejects the Tim's view about Ananias:

Hi Giuseppe, I think both the articles of Couchoud/Stahl (“Jesus Barabbas”) and also of Tuccinardi (“Barabbas dans l’histoire”) on Barabbas are very insightful and bring out that Barabbas of the Gospels is an ancient polemical response to another version of Jesus as a warrior. The response of the Gospels does not dispute that there were widespread ancient contemporary stories circulating that Jesus had been a warrior with an army but insists that was a different person who could not have been the pacifist Jesus Christ of the Gospels.

On the “Tim Stepping Out” blog post of your link, the first part listing allusions in the Gospel of Mark in common with the Josephus story of Jesus b. Ananias makes sense but I disagree with the second half in which he links Josephus’s Jesus b. Ananias to the figure Ananias of Acts with wife Sapphira executed by Simon Peter. I see no connection between those two Ananias names (very common name) and think that goes off the rails there. (Perhaps consider instead Ananias the merchant of Josephus with his no-circumcision recommendation for gentiles converting to being Jewish [Ant 20.34-47] = Ananias of Damascus the mentor of Paul of the Paul story of Acts [Acts 9:10-26] = Ananias the wealthy man executed at Jerusalem [Acts 5:1-11]?)

I do not see “Barabbas” and “Barnabas” related as names, nor that the figure Barnabas of the letters of Paul (or of Acts) is related to Barabbas. I do think there conceivably could be a relationship between the names “Barabbas” and “bar-sabas” or “bar-sapphas”, the name Barsabas of Acts 15:22 (but not necessarily at Acts 1:23 of the figure rejected from being made an apostle–the arguably more original Codex Bezae has “Barnabas” at 1:23 not Barsabas, with Barsabas arguably secondary reflecting copyist error).

I continue to think the trial of Jesus/Barabbas (the two are versions of the same figure) of the Gospels reflects the trial of Jesus b. Ananias of ca. 62 or 63 CE of Josephus at which Jesus was released by a Roman governor against his accusers’ wishes. (From Josephus’s context, the release presumably would have involved bribery behind the scenes, the way other Sicarii were magnanimously released by Roman governors against accusers’ wishes.) The Gospels’ Jesus seems to combine stories of both Jesus b. Ananias and Jesus b. Sapphat of the 60s into one Passion Story. While this combination of elements from these two figures in Josephus could be explicable wholly in terms of authorial storytelling and composition, I am not sure that is the full explanation. Here is my analysis. Whereas Jesus b. Sapphat is historical (Josephus knew him well), Jesus b. Ananias is more ambiguous, as discussed by Wedeen. Although at first sight it may seem a tough sell as an argument, I think a credible argument can be made that whereas Jesus b. Sapphat is historical, Jesus b. Ananias as a distinct figure told by Josephus may be historically illusory, originating at the outset from florid hearsay accounts of survivors of the siege to Roman interrogators actually applicable to Jesus b. Sapphat, then shaped tendentiously for purposes suiting Josephus’s editorial interests. Anyway this is my take on the matters you raise.

In the same page, it becomes clear who is Barnabas:

At Gal 2:13 Paul alludes to Barnabas as having backslidden into Judaism, which corresponds to Josephus–Josephus did not renounce Jewish identity but instead advocated for Jewish tradition and history and standing in his literary works addressed to Roman and Greek audiences, unlike Paul who had abandoned living as a Jew.

As I have written:

reading Doudna's posts, I can’t help saying: that’s exactly what happened!

[perseusomega9]

there was one Jesus, the son of Ananus, a plebeian and a husbandman[1], who, four years before the war began, and at a time when the city was in very great peace and prosperity, came to that feast whereon it is our custom for every one to make tabernacles [2] to God in the temple, began on a sudden to cry aloud, “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds[3], a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides[4], and a voice against this whole people!” …Hereupon our rulers, supposing, as the case proved to be, that this was a sort of divine fury in the man, brought him to the Roman procurator[5], where he was whipped till his bones were laid bare; yet he did not make any supplication for himself, nor shed any tears, but turning his voice to the most lamentable tone possible, at every stroke of the whip his answer was, “Woe, woe to Jerusalem!”[6]…for as he was going round upon the wall, he cried out with his utmost force, “Woe, woe to the city again, and to the people, and to the holy house!” And just as he added at the last, “Woe, woe to myself also!” there came a stone[7] out of one of the engines, and smote him, and killed him immediately; and as he was uttering the very same presages he gave up the ghost[8].

1. Mark 12: …built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen 2. Mark 9:5: …let us make three tabernacles 3. Mark 13:27: …shall gather together his elect from the four winds 4. Mark 2:19: …while the bridegroom is with them 5. Mark 15:1: …carried him away, and delivered him to Pilate 6. Mark 14:21: ..woe unto that man… 7. Mark 5:5: …cutting himself with stones; Mark 16:4: …stone is rolled back 8. Mark 15:37: …gave up the ghost

How's that all look in Greek?