Robert said

I think it is too simplistic of a question to ask merely whether or not Mark was Jewish or non-Jewish, and have this settle other, more complex issues. As Bart has recently admitted, even the passage that he himself has relied upon as definitively showing that Mark could not have been Jewish really does not prove this case.

A better question, even less likely to be asked or answered definitively, but a much better question nonetheless, was whether or not Mark wrote for a purely Gentile community or audience. It is pretty clear to me that this is not likely to have been the case. There are just too many items of interest to Jews and Jewish proselytes to rule out the presence of at least some Jewish Christians within Mark’s intended audience. For example, even Mark’s interpretation of the pericope in Mk 7 that in his private teaching to the disciples ‘Jesus effectively made all all foods clean’ evidences a concern among his audience about whether or not they were to follow kashrut. This would not have had any relevance to Mark’s audience if there were not at least some among them who were at least influenced by Jewish or Jewish Christian concerns about this issue. And Mark’s gospel rather quickly spread to a group that felt a need to remove this aspect of the story, as can be seen in Matthew’s version of this story.

Roger Aus himself thinks that the gospel of Mark was written in Palestine, sometime relatively soon after 67 CE. We only know of the Archelaus story because of Josephus writing about it for his Roman audience in Greek. Whatever may have existed in terms of Josephus’ earlier sources used might have also been available and of interest to anyone living in Palestine. Josephus himself knew of the story, and he was living in Palestine around the time Mark’s gospel was being written. One cannot deny the obvious relevance of the story of high priests preferring the release of one associated with violent rebels post 67 CE, but it is more difficult to imagine the relevance of the Barabbas story told as part of an independent passion narrative or separate tradition decades earlier.

godspell said
If Mark knew the author of this hypothetical work, he would be familiar with its genesis, and in that case I don’t believe he’d use it.  It wouldn’t resonate for him the way it did for the earlier writer.  The reason Aus thinks this lost book would have been out in the years after Pilate was removed, is that the new Roman governor was much easier on the system, and this created a more positive feeling towards Roman governors in general, that retroactively gets applied to Pilate.  This author is Jewish, but he’s at odds with most of his fellow Jews, and particularly with the Temple authorities of that time (who are also gone by the time he writes).  …

I certainly do not believe that anyone can prove that Mark was the first to create the story, but neither can it be claimed that it was more probably written prior to Mark. Everything said of an hypothetical author of the story prior to Mark can apply just as well, if not more so, to Mark himself.

godspell said
… Aus’ argument is hard to summarize, particularly when it involves so many things I’m not conversant with (or languages I’m not  conversant in).  But I am a connoisseur of good arguments, and I think he makes one here.  At least it’s some kind of explanation for a story that otherwise makes no sense on any level.  There were no people named Barabbas (though there were names that could get turned into that).  There was no tradition of releasing prisoners, and there probably weren’t a lot of prisoners to release, because there had been no recent insurrectionary violence (Matthew may have known this, and thus avoids repeating Mark’s mistake of identifying what Barabbas was charged with–keeps it vague).  Most importantly, Pilate was not even the least bit inclined towards clemency when it came to radical Jewish leaders, whether they were violent or not.  
Aus believes the work was fairly popular among Aramaic-speaking Christians who could read, which wasn’t a huge audience, but it would have included Mark.  But Mark not being Jewish, and coming along decades later, he didnt’ quite understand what he was reading.  

There are plenty of reasons for why the story would not have taken place historically, but I think the presence and function of the story in Mark’s gospel, written around the time of the Jewish revolt, makes more sense than Aus’ reconstruction of a hypothetical author decades earlier.

The real reason why some think the story of Barabbas is traditional rather than part of Mark’s redaction is their belief that the gospel of John, which also contains Barabbas, was not dependent upon any of the synoptic gospels. There are plenty of excellent scholars who argue credibly otherwise, but even if one does not accept direct literary dependence, one cannot deny the possibility of indirect, nonliterary dependence upon any of the synoptic gospels upon the traditions and communities that ultimately came into contact with the community in which John’s gospel was written.  

You make many sage points I have no issue with, but I still prefer Aus’s argument at this time.  It has the fewest problems, but that doesn’t prove it’s correct.  If you get a chance to read it sometime, maybe you can let me know what you think–you’d understand some of it much better than me. 

Obviously the multiple attestation principle favors Barabbas, since all four gospels mention him.  But I think Aus is right in saying this is because the story became popular before any complete gospel was written, for its deep allegorical power–it added something to the story they were creating together, to explain the story that really happened, to give it a deeper resonance, to make it more than just a series of random events, so to speak.  It began as one storyteller’s symbolic flourish, and it caught on.  And we all know this does happen.  (Does anybody really believe the Trojan Horse happened? The Trojan War clearly did.)

John says Barabbas was a robber.  No mention of insurrection or murder.  So like Matthew, he’s taking a very implausible story he’s come across that he likes very much (because it shows the Jews in a very bad light) and fixing the part that makes no sense–Pilate pardoning somebody who has rebelled against the authority of Rome.  He’s got the story in there because everybody already has the story, is expecting it.  If we had five or six more gospels, they’d all have it.  Just like every Superman movie has Krypton blowing up (frankly, I’d kill for just one that didn’t). 

Now we have no evidence Pilate ever pardoned anybody.  Presumably not everyone charged with a crime under his aegis was crucified (that’s a lot of wood), some probably served sentences of penal servitude, but to just let him go instead of somebody accused of wanting to create an independent Jewish kingship is a complete non-sequitur. 

Matthew and John are both arguing the evil Jews are determined to see Jesus crucified, and need to convince a reluctant Pilate to go ahead with a procedure he has probably performed hundreds (thousands?) of times.  Pilate wouldn’t have needed any convincing at all, based on what we know of him.  They have passed a lawful sentence as is their right under Roman rule (as opposed to freelance stoning), and it’s his job to carry it out, and he never showed any compunction about doing so. Far as he’s concerned, this is the system working the way it’s supposed to.  The pesky Jews are doing it right for once, policing their own ranks, keeping the peace. 

Probably the one thing that most bothered early Christians about Jesus’ execution is precisely how perfunctory and downright quotidian it was.  Just a matter of routine, one crucified criminal among many (The Life of Brian really does get that right, in spite of the satiric overkill).  So the impulse to set him apart, to create drama where there was none, would be irresistible.  And they knew so little about the inner workings (because they were running for their lives or hunkering down), there were many blank spaces to fill, and they filled one of them with Barabbas. It is in all four gospels because it’s a story everyone wanted to hear.  But it’s not a story based on anything that happened the day Jesus was crucified.  Who came up with it first is, I freely admit, a question unlikely to ever be answered to everyone’s satisfaction, but what else is news? 

Based on what little I’ve read of him, Aus depends heavily on his deep knowledge of rabbinic literature (he himself is not Jewish, but–I believe–Lutheran).  He is reading later (still ancient) Jewish texts and using them to forensically recreate what Palestinian Jews believed in Jesus’ time (we don’t know nearly as much as we should).  Extrapolating backwards, which he concedes is not without its shortcomings as a system, but it’s better than nothing. 

Thus he makes an educated guess as to what a Palestinian Jewish convert might be writing in the years following Jesus’ death, when they were in constant conflict with the great majority of their coreligionists.  And he posits that he’d take accounts of an earlier event in Jewish history (with a participant named Bar Rabban), and meld it into Jesus’ story.  And this is impossible to prove.  But as an explanation, it does in fact work better than Mark or someone else deciding to just make up Barabbas out of nothing. 

Probably Matthew got Pilate’s prophetic wife from somewhere else as well.  Just not from Pilate.  (Take my wife, please!  Anachronism is fun.)

😉

Aus believes only a Palestinian Jew writing maybe two or three decades after the crucifixion would be likely to not only remember the Archelaus incident of pardoning after insurrection (and the specifics pertaining thereto) but to find parallels between it and the Passion story.  Mark was probably not a Jew, probably not from in or around Jerusalem (the faith had spread far in the ensuing years), and at the time he wrote his gospel it had been a fairly long human lifetime since that earlier incident.  Probably even most Jews had forgotten by then, with more recent and horrible atrocities to ponder on.  Josephus truly did yeoman’s service preserving these memories, or we’d know far less than we do.  (The Romans could not have cared less.) 

If there is no earlier written account in Aramaic for him to read and translate (and clearly he is translating something, or why bother to render the original lines in Aramaic several times?), how would he learn about it?  Not from Josephus.  It was only a strong memory for the Jews of Jerusalem because several thousand of them were reportedly slain in the uprising. 

Again, not ruling out your explanation, and I certainly do believe Matthew and Luke are following Mark’s lead.  I have no dog in the fight about whether John knew any of the earlier gospels, though I do see some indications of him reacting strongly against things found in them (such as the baptism story).  They are all reacting to each other, because just like the three of us here, they all have related yet differing conceptions of what happened, and are loathe to abandon them. 

It could have been a later narrative–maybe it was the Gospel of the Hebrews (which of course would also have earlier sources, I don’t believe the first account describing events from Jesus’ life was an attempt at telling the entire story at such length–very ambitious).

At this point, we’re unlikely to persuade each other, and we’ve each read different things.  I suggest we set a good example and let the matter rest for now.  Unlike some I might name.  😉 

As I mentioned, I’ve read three articles by Aus (and the one about where the story of Jesus walking on the water came from I just skimmed, pardon the pun).  I stated earlier that his arguments are challenging to summarize.  Even more challenging when you haven’t read them, I would assume.  I would strong advocate for you reading his Barabbas article, and maybe someday I’ll read what he has to say about Mark, but obviously there’s a lot more competition there.  I read Aus precisely because I couldn’t find much else about Barabbas.  (I actually prefer his article about the Pericope Adulterae, which really does clarify a lot of things about that story.)

I have no opinion at all about where Mark was living when he wrote his gospel, but unless Mark was a Jew living in or near Jerusalem, very unlikely he’d be transposing the Archelaus story into his gospel. I said ‘in and around Jerusalem’, which is vague, granted, but certainly does not suggest that Mark lived some vast distance away from Palestine.  I think Aus would probably place Mark somewhere in Palestine in part because he’d be more likely to run across Aramaic manuscripts written by Palestinian Jews there, and his arguments do somewhat depend on Mark finding those.  (Not like he could use Indus.com)

If we agree that Mark got the story from somewhere other than genuine recollections of the crucifixion, and that Matthew and Luke got it from him, and that possibly none of them understood it all that well (but still thought it added something), I don’t really see much disagreement at all here.  Agreeing to disagree obviously entails disagreeing about something.  I think we agree you haven’t read Aus’ Barabbas article.  😉

I prefer to believe that there’s a good explanation for this story that I don’t believe really happened being in all four gospels, and so far, Aus’ is the best I’ve read.  If you can recommend another, I’m all ears.  But I’d recommend you read Aus as well.  You really don’t know his argument from reading my synopsis of it.  Trust me on that, at least. 

Then why not the entire story of Barabbas, and Pilate’s thwarted attempt at sparing Jesus?

And leaving veracity aside, why would Mark edit out a subplot that explains Pilate’s actions better than his (probably copied) account of an incident possibly cribbed by an earlier writer from a much earlier real-life event?  

Matthew sees a motivation problem for Pilate–he wasn’t a merciful man, he wouldn’t have cared about Jesus.  Therefore, some way must be found to explain his desire to not have Jesus’ blood on his hands (which conveniently places it on the heads of all unconverted Jews and their children–Matthew is ‘improving’ the story in more than one way).  Thus the psychic wife and her prophetic dream.  

Isn’t it obvious that Matthew was adding to a story he’d read?  But if Mark copied him, why would Mark not only edit out Pilate’s wife, but make Barabbas an insurrectionist (instead of just ‘a notorious prisoner’)?  That makes the story less believable, because nobody living under Roman rule in Palestine is going to credit an insurrectionist who has committed murder being released by a Roman governor because a Jewish mob demanded it.  

You can make an argument that in this instance, Matthew might have drawn from a source other than Mark.  But it’s simply impossible credibly argue that Mark was copying from Matthew.  Mark got his story from a source we don’t have, and the reason it doesn’t make sense is that the author of that earlier account was drawing upon a completely different incident that didn’t involve Pilate and Jesus.  And there never was a Barabbas.  There never was a Jewish mob braying for Jesus’ blood.  None of that happened.  

I wish you’d made this request before I returned the book.  Might be a while before it’s reshelved.  I could copy the article and send it to you.  Where would I be sending it?  Is there a PM system on this forum?