BARRABbas

WHO do you want me to crucify, cried the praetor, to the king of the Jews, to Jesus the Nazarene or to Barabbas. The rabble vomits a terrible saying, a cry whose echo reverberates throughout history.

−To Jesus Nazarene.

−Regem vestrum crufigam? Let him crucify your king?

−He is not our king

Pilate, who had just received the message from his wife, was sure that Jesus was innocent and did not know what to do. The name of Barabbas sounds like thunder from the pulpits every Good Friday. The synoptics are not very explicit about him, they tell us that he was a thief, a caravan raider in the mountains of Judea. But his name is mentioned in the scriptures more times than in references to the Virgin Mary. San José only once. This laconicism is discouraging for those of us who follow the Master, but faith is believing what we did not see.

  Par Lagerkvist in his novel Following the Apocrypha describes Bar Rabah (Rabah's son) as a Jewish activist who fought against the Roman occupation of Palestine. He committed several murders including that of his own father.

He was on death row on the day of the case.

When he was free, he followed from afar the procession that executed that rabbi that everyone talked about in the Holy City, who called himself the son of God. But the fact that he posed as the promised Messiah by dying on a cross was inconceivable for an Israelite.

They expected a liberator of flesh and blood who would make Israel master of the world. The return to the promised land, to the fountains where milk and honey will flow. And he came with the song of affection for each other, he was a friend of slaves and whores and he interacted with publicans and treasury agents who paid tribute to the Romans.

That first Good Friday after setting foot on Skull Mountain (for the Jews it was an impure place) he returned to the house of a friend who ran a brothel inside the city walls, he got drunk with her and made love to her. Brave way to celebrate Easter!

  Another of her pupils was a mysterious hetaira with torn lips due to a hare's beak physical defect. Following her steps she went to the tomb where the Nazarene had been laid. When the woman with the cleft lip saw that the stone had been rolled away, she began to scream... he is not here, he has risen. Barabbas, who was following closely, rubbed his eyes, seized by a hallucination: he saw a six-winged seraph with a radiant sword and after a few moments he disappeared. The poor whore with the harelip returned to Jerusalem announcing her news and, apprehended by agents of the Sanhedrin, she was sentenced to be squandered in Gehenna or Dunghill.

  Indignant Barabbas attended the dilapidation but stabbed the knife into the back of one of the priests without anyone knowing when he ordered the first stone to be thrown. Even so, he still did not believe that an Israelite who had just suffered the vilest of deaths was the messiah.

Although he liked what they said about Christianity, that it was a religion of slaves and slaves would make the Roman Empire succumb. In hindsight we see Barabbas in the copper mines, one of the most terrible punishments.

  Those condemned to extract the mineral did not live more than a year but he, like his companion Zahah, an Armenian who was tied with hand shackles, jesses and dumbbells the entire time the sentence lasted, were saved and were able to come to the surface thanks to his good behavior and the jailer who sympathized with the followers of the man who died on the cross.

The Armenian was a Christian, he refused to burn incense to the gods, he was crucified. Barabbas who agreed no.

  Chapters before this unique novel we find Barabbas in Rome rehabilitated and manumitted in the house of a senator. He still did not believe in the Redeemer but he was wearing a copper medal, a gift from his brother Zahah, on the back of which he had painted a Eucharistic fish, symbol of the Christians of the catacombs, and on the front the name of the emperor.

They had councils in the catacombs and one day Barabbas proposed to burn the Eternal City. Word spread that Christians started the fire when in reality it was the Jewish sect trying to shake off the Roman yoke in Palestine through terrorism. Bizarre nonsense but that's how history is written. Barabbas was crucified with the group accused of setting fire to Rome. He died on the pole next to Saint Peter but was skeptical about the New Order that brought Christianity to the world.

  Of Lagerkvist we will say that he was a Swedish author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1951. The novel by him that I have just read translated into French with all the honors of André Gide could appear as an appendix to the Apocrypha. After reading this Swede's vibrant novel I have to say with Saint Andrew O bona crux salvum me fac. Glory to the saving cross, which welcomes the poor, the exiled, the faint-hearted, the persecuted, the mutilated who walk in anxiety. Yes, Christianity is a slave religion p