They become envious of the following of the movement.
So it would not have been strange for Barabbas to be named Jesus or Joshua Barabbas.Furthermore, it is possible to think of a situation in which a scribe copying the New Testament might be inclined to drop out that word Jesus before Barabbas. In spiritual things, those who have so to speak the establishment view, they are interested in maintaining the establishment and if there arises some movement in which there is an evident presence of the power of the Holy Spirit, the intention of those who are in authority is to somehow or other throttle it, because they become envious of the fame of the individual, and the individuals. It is very important that the things we learn in the word of God be applied. Of others there is little more than the mention of their names and a sketchy account of their part in the inspired drama. The parallel exists whether Jesus is a legitimate reading or not, but it’s as if Pilate were saying to this multitude of Jewish people, we have two people here. Jerusalem was seething with discontent at the present time, just like Hungary was seething with discontent in 1955 or 1956, and as many nations seethe in discontent politically from time to time.
I sometimes think that one of the failures that I have in my own ministry is that I do not seek to apply the word of God sufficiently.
The name may be an Historically, the release of Barabbas at the crowd’s behest, and their subsequent demands to crucify Jesus, have been used to justify Now it might seem hard to understand why Israel the nation would prefer a robber – an insurrectionist, a murderer, a notorious criminal – to our Lord Jesus Christ. What they say does not really have any true realism about it.You can tell that what they have done is take notes which they have derived from their professor, and now they are giving them to someone else and said, incidentally, Dr. Johnson a few of those notes are some of your notes.
He was a murder, a seditionist. And they hadthen a notable prisoner, called Barabbas. Barabbas, in the New Testament, a prisoner mentioned in all four Gospels who was chosen by the crowd, over Jesus Christ, to be released by Pontius Pilate in a customary pardon before the feast of Passover.
Now Jesus was a very common name.
The Apostle Peter, preaching in Acts chapter 3 after the resurrection described or says to Israel that they chose a murderer over our Lord Jesus Christ.
Well let’s notice first of all his name. For you see, ultimately, the Lord Jesus is the one who hangs upon that middle cross in the place of what Barabbas thought would be his cross.”Now we might reconstruct this. Therefore when therewere when they were gathered together, Pilate said unto them,Whom will ye that I release unto you?
And if he had gone out there with that multitude, and as he gazed upon our Lord Jesus, he could truly say in the physical sense that man died for me. More verses have to do with Barabbas than have to do with Judas, and yet Barabbas did no work. The wages of sin is death, the Bible says, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. It’s that simple. They of course hoped that he would opt for the freedom of Barabbas—Pilate was hoping of course that the people would decide for the freedom of Jesus, and thus get him off the horns of a dilemma, because he did not really believe that Jesus was guilty. His name is Barabbas. When a man decides that he will put his business over the claims of Christ, or his family over the claims of Christ, or his pleasure over the claims of Christ, he is guilty of the same kind of decision that prefers a Barabbas to the true son of the Father the Lord Jesus Christ.George Tenworth, in one of his terra-cottas has a beautiful master touch.
We each are under the death penalty for our sins.
Now is the accepted time. He has pictured two doors, and out of one has come Barabbas and the crowd is gathered around him, the Roman soldiers are extending hands of congratulation to him, rudely, coarsely congratulating him on the good fortune that has happened to him. Well, you trust the medicine. We have far more manuscripts of the New Testament than we have of any other ancient writing because the church was interested in studying the Scriptures.Now you can see a Christian scribe, reading this passage, and looking at the text before him, and seeing Jesus Barabbas as the name of this hardened criminal, would be inclined out to drop out the Jesus to keep from associating this hardened criminal with the Lord Jesus Christ, thinking that surely the scribe who wrote the copy before him, the one that he is copying, was guilty of an error of the eye and inserted Jesus from the fact that in verse 17 we do have Jesus who is called the Christ. But he had on the one hand uh appeal of his conscious and on the other the political appeal of expediency.