Basic reason why the name of Pilate was absent in the Earliest Passion Story extrapolated from Mark

[Giuseppe]

the action of being rescued or set free.
"prayers for deliverance"

so according to you, when Jesus is said to mean "YHWH is salvation" then this means that "YHWH is being saved"?

Deliverance means liberation therefore the deliverer is a liberator.

Pilate is a liberator of Barabbas.

[Giuseppe]

Even Deepl translates the French "délivrance":

Une des racines de la délivrance en hébreu est: פלט (plt) or c’est aussi celle de Pilate

...as "deliverance":

One of the roots of deliverance in Hebrew is: פלט (plt) but it is also that of Pilate

But Secret Alias wants that "deliverance" has only one root and it is "escape". How can I explain this approach? Is he a troll?

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

But what do you have then? Apparently a very short, neutral account of the death of Jesus, which could be considered historical in its brevity and sobriety. Is that your goal?

More correctly, I have then:
A very short epilogue for the first gospel.
Merely the more simple and direct translation of the original myth (= demonic ἄρχοντες τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου crucifying Jesus in lower heavens) in earthly terms.

Why would an ancient religious writer have transformed a myth into such a sober, brief, and seemingly historical account?

Mark has transformed myth into a new myth. Matthew, Luke/Marcion and John did the same. Papias, Justin and Thomas did the same. The author of the Acts of Pilate did the same. Probably there is no exception in ancient times.

Sometime in the 18th and 19th centuries, some scholars began to invent short historical accounts of the Passion and called what they did "reconstructing".

[Giuseppe]

I think that the limit of Secret Alias consists in the deliberate eclipse of the expression "causatively" in the following definition for PLT:

Strong's Exhaustive Concordance
calve, carry away safe, deliver, cause to escape
A primitive root; to slip out, i.e. Escape; causatively, to deliver -- calve, carry away safe, deliver, (cause to) escape.

https://biblehub.com/hebrew/6403.htm

Therefore rightly Maurice Mergui writes;

Pilate, de par son nom, est un libérateur ou un libéré. La racine plt en hébreu, signifie libérer.

https://www.lechampdumidrash.net/humour ... ratologie/

Deepl:

Pilate, by name, is a liberator or one who is set free. The root plt in Hebrew means to set free

Secret Alias is saying: even if PLT means also (causatively) "liberator", I claim that PLT means only "one who is set free".

But I have just proved that the Secret Alias' objection is utterly absurd.

[Giuseppe]

More correctly, I have then:
A very short epilogue for the first gospel.
Merely the more simple and direct translation of the original myth (= demonic ἄρχοντες τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου crucifying Jesus in lower heavens) in earthly terms.

Why would an ancient religious writer have transformed a myth into such a sober, brief, and seemingly historical account?

because the first need of the propaganda among gentile masses required that the original myth was understood in clear sober, brief and seemingly historical terms. The alternative would have been to explain to everyone the cosmogony of the lower heavens, to explain to everyone the various password given by Jesus to descend in incognito through the lower heavens, to explain why the final password was not given hence the Jesus's silence caused his condemnation by the demons from Firmament. Without sharing the same cosmogony and the same demonology and angeology, hardly an agreement on few objective "facts" could be found easily.

[Secret Alias]

Do you know what "causatively" means with respect to Hebrew verbs?

[Secret Alias]

As such plT means to escape. End of story. When you find someone named someone named "Hippolytus" maybe your crazy theory will work.

[Giuseppe]

It's commonly used to convey causative actions, such as "to cause to build," "to cause to eat," and "to cause to drink."

precisely. Pilate causes Barabbas to escape.

But you want at any cost to exclude a such reading, by making Pilate the escaped guy.
For you then Pilate can't cause Barabbas to eat because Pilate can only be eaten! Absurd!

[Kunigunde Kreuzerin]

because the first need of the propaganda among gentile masses required that the original myth was understood in clear sober, brief and seemingly historical terms.

Hence the success of Acts of the Apostles

[Joseph D. L.]

yes but there is a third option: that the interpolator of the Barabbas episode knew the Hebrew and wrote in Greek.

There are instances of this being case in the Gospels, particularly the crucifixion in Matthew and Mark to highlight the ignorance of the Jewish crowd, but in these cases [or this, shared case] it seems more probable that the author had a lackluster grasp of Aramaic, not the fluency reacquired for this feat. I just don't see a logical succession of reasonable motives to make what you are suggesting possible.

i. What was the original scene sans Pilate and Barabbas?
ii. What was the motivation to include Pilate and Barabbas?
iii. What did the first draft of the scene look like?

I realize you have hypotheses, but as you know I don't find these convincing enough to explain these features and the implications they infer.

Now I am by no means a linguistic expert. Heck I only speak English and struggle with that as it is. I have read at least one author say that the entendre present in the Johannine scene in 3:3-5 also works in Syriac. Cannot confirm or deny that claim. But thinking about it, you are not really saying that this is a pun or an entendre, but a coded cypher which is far harder to prove. Then you are no longer just arguing your claim but also trying to argue intent.

The "translation" (or better the irony) is gained by merely removing the vowels: Pilatos minus "i", "a", "o" would become PLTS (since the Hebrew is without the vowels). Hence the term "translation" is not so apt. With "Barabbas" we can talk more correctly about a "translation": "bar abbas" ("son of father") or "bar rabbas" ("son of the rabbi").

I know acrostics were a popular in-the-know technique professional writers would use, especially back then. But removing certain letters to correspond to words in an utterly alien language would be so in-the-know as to make it inefficient and thus self defeating for the author's intent.

Like I said, it's an interesting thought experiment but that is as far as I can go with it. I am more of the thinking that meanings were derived out of these texts through osmosis rather there being any single clear meaning in them at bottom.