- verses
- 10
- first named
- Matthew 27:16
- last named
- John 18:40
- period
- the New Testament
- role
- Man
Description
Who was Barabbas?
Barabbas was a notorious prisoner mentioned in all four Gospels (Mat.27.16-26; Mrk.15.7-15; Luk.23.18-25; Jhn.18.40). He was in custody during the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate. According to the Gospel accounts, it was customary during the Passover feast for the Roman governor to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd. Pilate offered the people a choice between releasing Jesus or Barabbas. The chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude to ask for Barabbas and demand Jesus' crucifixion. Pilate, although convinced of Jesus' innocence, yielded to the crowd's pressure and released Barabbas while condemning Jesus to death. Some manuscripts of Mat.27.16-17 refer to Barabbas as "Jesus Barabbas," suggesting that he may have also been called Jesus. Barabbas is described as a notorious criminal, with Mark and Luke mentioning that he had committed murder during an insurrection. His release in place of Jesus highlights the irony and injustice of the situation.
Relations
Direct connections
Every entity the graph places in a stated relation with this one, grouped by the kind of link. Each relation is authored once and its inverse derived, so both ends always agree. Rows marked “registry” come from the identity spine rather than from a verse, and a row marked “which bearer is the source’s decision” is one where the name could have meant more than one person. The last group is not a relation at all — it counts the events two entities stand in together.
Places
Where this happens
A person is placed by the events they take part in, and an event has to clear three things to place them: it must say where it happened, that place must be one the gazetteer can put a coordinate on, and the verse must report it rather than foretell, command or ask it. Nothing anchored here clears all three. Where the text names a setting no gazetteer surveys — a vineyard, a palace, a plot of ground — it is left off rather than guessed at; where a place is named only in a prophecy, the map does not draw what was said to be coming as though it had happened; and a place reached only through a relation is not inherited, because standing beside somebody is not being somewhere.
No verse Atlas has read as a report puts this person anywhere.
Not read yet
The pattern
Where Barabbas is named
Every book of the corpus in the order it is read, each as wide as the chapters it holds. A bar is the verses of that book which write the name, and the flat stretches are as much of the answer as the bars.
10 verses across 4 of 66 books; 62 write the name nowhere. Named in Matthew (5), Mark (3), Luke (1) and John (1).
Read it
Where to read it
Every verse of the text carried here that names this entity — 10, across 4 books. The name is written 12 times in them.
Onward
Where this page goes
Nothing in the graph stands one hop from this entity yet. These are the best-connected entities of the same type, so the page still ends somewhere. Descriptions by STEPBible TIPNR.
Where they appear
Chapter by chapter
Atlas's reading of each chapter this person appears in, in canonical order. One line per chapter, and each leads to the whole of it.
- Matthew 27Barabbas was the notorious prisoner whom the crowd chose to have released.
- Mark 15Barabbas was released to the crowd while Jesus was handed over to be crucified.
- Luke 23Barabbas was released to the crowd although he had been imprisoned for insurrection and murder.
- John 18Barabbas was the prisoner chosen for release instead of Jesus, and the narrator calls him an insurrectionist.
Sources