"Paulist Christians, by a trick of orthography"? Paul wrote ca. 55-65CE, and the stories you refer to come not from Paul or his circle but from the gospels, written down at a minimum a decade - and more likely a generation - later.
The Wikipedia article is not bad on the subject: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabbas>.
The one undoubted and important point (noted in MacCulloch's recent and encyclopedic "Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years") is that Jesus of Nazareth is described in the gospels as referring perhaps uniquely in the time to YHWH as "abba" = "daddy."
The story of the substitution is repeated in the Synoptic gospels and in the fourth gospel as well as in various extra-canonical literature. The reference to "the Jews" as demanding responsibility is found uniquely in Matthew, the Christian gospel most concerned with disputing the heritage of the religion of ancient Israel with the Pharisee party, already engaged in reconstituting Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the public religion. The point of Matthews' gospel is to show that "Christians are better Jews than rabbis (Pharisees)."
I see now how you could argue that in a different way that's what Paul was on about, too. But there's little warrant to say "that 'Jesus' and 'Bar Abbas' were one and the same person." What historical sources we have, Christian and non-Christian, make it clear that the Roman occupation government executed Jesus; they apparently reserved the right of capital punishment in Judea, as in other colonies.
On 9/22/10 9:17 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>
> On Sep 22, 2010, at 7:58 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> There's no evidence for that, and - given the subsequent relations between
>> the Christian movement [founded by a Roman police agent] and the Roman
>> authorities - it's highly unlikely.
>> On 9/22/10 3:52 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
>>> ...The historical fact is that "Jesus" and "Bar Abbas" were one and the same
>>> person. Jesus, a notable rebel, had no legitimate father to give him a
>>> patronymic and so called himself son of the father...
>
> So "Jesus Son of the Father" and "Jesus Bar Abbas" don't refer to the same
> person? Perhaps I can convince you, and anyone reading this, by this simple
> exercise: (remembering always that Bar{son} and Abbas{father} are pronounced
> as two separate words, like you would pronounce Bar Kochba, Ben Gurion, or Bin
> Laden) read in a loud voice these two scriptural statements:
>
> The Jews exclaimed "free Bar Abbas"
> The Jews exclaimed "free Barabbas"
>
> So now you hear in your own voice how the Paulist Christians, by a trick of
> orthography, turned the Jewish demand that Jesus be freed into something that
> persuaded their dupes down the millennia that the Jews demanded His crucifixion!
>
> And so created the blood libel of deicide, the emotional basis for the
> Holocaust and all the pogroms down the millennia that adumbrated it.
>
> Shane Mage
> "Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
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