Political Intertheology

ABSTRACT

The following paper introduces the concept of political intertheology as a post-secular counterpart to Carl Schmitt's notion of political theology. It elaborates this concept by examining two interpretations of the New Testament narrative regarding the choice between Jesus and Barabbas. Both interpretations revolve around the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The first, anti-antisemitic reading, emphasizes the identity between Jesus and Barabbas. The second, anti-anti-Christian interpretation, intensifies the political-theological antagonism. This article proposes a third, guilt-political interpretation. This perspective enables us to acknowledge both the inevitability of the distinction between Christians and what they perceived as Jews, and the fact that a politico-intertheological intensification (the accusation against the Jews of demanding the crucifixion of Jesus) was not inevitable. Understanding how it unfolded facilitates overcoming this fateful accusation at its core, without succumbing to a new accusation (against early Christians) and thereby replacing anti-Judaism with potential anti-Christian sentiment.

KEYWORDS:

• Political theology
• Barabbas
• intertheology
• Antisemitism
• Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI

Introduction

In the following paper, I develop the notion of political intertheology through a discussion of the New Testament narrative concerning the choice between Jesus and Barabbas.

By “intertheology,” I understand an approach that focuses on interactions between religions and assumes that their foundations have never been independent from other (related) religions.¹ In the cases of both Christianity and (Rabbinic) Judaism, we have to distinguish between (self-)constitution and the construction of an Other: with Christianity self-constitution is inevitably accompanied by the construction of a religious Other (“Judaism”) and by (Rabbinic) Judaism's own self-constitution and construction of an Other. The reciprocity of self-constitution and the construction of an Other is crucial here. By focusing on the story of Jesus and Barabbas, I will discuss what is perhaps the earliest moment that Christianity happened to constitute itself through constructing its Jewish other.

The intertheology under discussion in this paper could be more specifically qualified as political. By political intertheology, I refer to the political dimension of intertheology in general. This dimension becomes clear, for example, if we consider that the Roman Empire deeply influenced both the constitution of Christianity and that of Rabbinic Judaism (through the crucifixion of Jesus, the destruction of the temple, and the suppression of further Jewish uprisings until 135 AD). More specifically, this term is understood herein as a post-secular counterpart to the concept of political theology that Carl Schmitt coined almost exactly one hundred years ago.²

In the Gospels, Christianity, Judaism, and the Roman Empire are probably nowhere more closely connected than in the famous, or infamous, moment when Pilate presented the “crowd” with a choice between Jesus and Barabbas.³ In significant parts of the history of interpretation and impact of this passage, this choice appears as one made by “the Jews.” Further, this choice appears wrong, even evil, in two respects: “the Jews” not only opt for “the murderer,” Barabbas, but they also demand that the Roman power crucify Jesus, the Son of God. This scenario constitutes an extremely condensed version of political intertheology.

At the same time, the choice between Jesus and Barabbas concentrates different aspects of a politics of guilt. The first aspect here is that this judgement delivers a verdict of guilt. It concerns a verdict against Jesus, and the question of what exactly Jesus is found guilty of (whether the guilt is religious or political, whether the verdict is one of guilt at all, and so on). The second aspect bears on the question of who is responsible for making the guilty verdict. While, historically, almost everything suggests that the responsibility lay predominantly with the Roman Empire, but also with the high priests, two different and powerful stories of guilt converge: a fatal story that casts the blame for Jesus’ crucifixion on “the Jews,” which forms an anti-Jewish topos that has fueled modern antisemitism,⁴ but which also accords with Talmudic sources insofar as they seem to assume responsibility for Jesus’ death, affirming and virtually appropriating it.⁵ Further, there is a more recent and less violent anti-antisemitic counter-story according to which this act of blaming is a central root of Christian-inspired antisemitism, that is, the root of an anti-Jewish Christian history of guilt.

The literature on this passage is boundless. I will limit myself to a comparison between Barabbas and Jesus, and concentrate on two interpretations that, though seemingly adjacent, have almost diametrically opposite consequences for the Christian-Jewish relationship. The first reading could be called anti-antisemitic because it is motivated by an attempt to fight an (at that time growing) antisemitism; it emphasizes the identity of, or in-distinction between, Jesus and Barabbas (I will call this the “identity thesis”). The second can be called anti-anti-Christian, because it is motivated to fight against what is perceived as anti-Christian; it radically intensifies the political-theological difference of the two figures precisely by positing an extreme convergence between them (which could be called the “alter-ego-thesis”). Finally, I present my own reading, according to which the figures of Jesus and Barabbas stage two theological interpretations of the same figure. From this assumption new problems arise that, I suggest, may be answered with conceptual means deriving from a politics of guilt.

One more word about the perspective I have taken. By focusing on this intertheological primal scene as it emerges from the New Testament, the present contribution makes a “Christian” decision in advance. That is, it reflects political intertheology from a “Christian” or, more precisely, specific post-secular angle, one that, like the secular reading on which it is based, is itself a fruit of Christianity. From other perspectives, this approach might appear one-sided, or even irrelevant . This “Christian” (post-secular) starting point, however, is not about Christian partisanship. The post-secular presupposes a secular break with every religion and consequently also with Christianity.

I would also like to add a disclaimer: as a non-theologian my knowledge and competence in the field are limited, but I know enough to understand how risky it is to enter the hyper-complex and highly differentiated field of New Testament Studies. To make matters worse, I also side in part with a decidedly minoritarian thesis. However, I am ultimately a philosopher, and as such I accord myself the privilege that Odo Marquard described in his inimitable way as follows:

[C]ontrary to a widespread prejudice, he [the philosopher] is no longer the one who is in charge of the “totality” at all, but something quite different, namely […] he is the one who takes on the super-risky, semidetail in connection with which other scholars for the time being prefer, for reasons having to do with scientific respectability, to constitute the congregation of discreetly mourning bereaved ones, if the philosopher should suffer any misfortune in dealing with it. No longer the expert in regard to the whole, the philosopher is, rather, the specialist’s stuntman: his double in dangerous situations.⁶

Indistinguishing Jesus and Barabbas: an anti-antisemitic reading

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a thesis was put forward, perhaps for the first time, and given a clear justification. This thesis appears “remarkable” to experts in this field even hundred years later.⁷ It claims that Barabbas and Jesus were one and the same figure and that “the Jews” had demanded Jesus’ release, rather than his crucifixion. This reading is the most radical way of removing any basis for the accusation that the “Jews” are to blame “for God’s murder,” and thus of extinguishing one of the deepest sources of both Christian Anti-Judaism and modern antisemitism.

Some philological and religious-historical insights had paved the way for this thesis: James Frazer had recalled that Barabbas means “son of the father,” which brings Jesus ­ – who once significantly and provocatively called God his father – and Barabbas closer together.⁸ In his book The King Sacrificed (Le-Roi-supplicié), published in 1902, Salomon Reinach, recalled a much older knowledge (of Origenes) and specified that the Armenian and Old Syriac versions of Matthew 27.16 and 17 read Jesus Barabbas.⁹ Building on Frazer and this insight, Reinach notes the emphasis on duplication: “Thus Barabbas would be an alias for Jesus; and the whole story of the choice left to the people, an invention to explain the double name. These are grave conclusions, which I mention without adopting.”¹⁰

In 1905, two years after he already suggested it briefly in a footnote,¹¹ Heinrich Meyer Cohn took up this thesis, giving it its clearest formulation: “Jesus = Barabas.”¹² His text appeared simply under the initials “H.M.C.” Neither the author’s name, nor even his initials, are mentioned at the beginning of the issue in the list of authors. These are clear indications of how sensitive the contribution was considered to be. To this day, the author’s name is not easy to ascertain,¹³ especially since the text has gone virtually uncommented.¹⁴

Cohn had a clear anti-antisemitic interest: a critical engagement with a central tenet of Christian anti-Judaism seemed urgent against the backdrop of growing antisemitism. According to him, the later, pro-Roman editors of the Gospels put two figures in the place of the one person, Jesus (Christ) and (Jesus) Barabbas. The Jews could thus demand Barabbas’ liberation, while Pilate could seek to protect Christ from execution.¹⁵ However, as reported in the Gospels, Pilate’s attempt to save Jesus is, says Cohn (and many others), neither consistent with his character (historically known to be rather brutal), nor psychologically probable.¹⁶ Cohn argues that the explanation provided (the so-called “Paschal Pardon”) is stylistically conspicuous and lacks any historical basis.¹⁷ It would be comprehensible if the people had fronted up to the palace to demand the release of a prisoner in an act of sedition. But if instead the Jews had the right to demand the release of a prisoner, there would have been no reason for the procession before Pilate’s palace.¹⁸

The argument for the identity of Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas has been considerably clarified and extended since Cohn laid out some of its crucial elements. Yet despite having been taken up very rarely, not even for the sake of rejection,¹⁹ it has persisted to this very day.²⁰ Furthermore, the identity thesis eradicates, at its core, the very possibility of accusing the Jews as being "God's murderers," as having made the audacious choice in favor the "murderer" Barabbas and as having issued a bloodthirsty demand for the innocent Savior’s crucifixion. This thesis has thus, in turn, also served as a central source not only of Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism but also of a broader mistrust towards “the crowd.”

This does not imply that there aren't valid reasons for why the discussion of the identity thesis has been so limited. First, it is unable to provide an explanation for the infamous “crucify him” passage. More generally, by dismissing a crucial root of anti-Judaism, it also makes it more difficult to understand why any theological divisiveness between “Christians” and “Jews” arose before the destruction of the temple, as the Corpus Paulinum demonstrates. Furthermore, the emergent problem is that Cohn understood “identity” reductively; Jesus is practically reduced to Barabbas, whereby the latter becomes the truth of the former. Jesus simply becomes one insurgent among many. But apart from the fact that it then becomes inexplicable why this specific insurgent took on such theological significance, an overly political understanding of Jesus seems questionable.²¹ Incidentally, this problem also applies to the far greater number of – mainly non-theological – approaches that, without exegetically asserting the identity of Jesus and Barabbas, understand Jesus as political agitator and implicitly relativize the difference with Barabbas.

Hans Kelsen, writing in 1920, also relativized the difference between Jesus and Barabbas, viewing the former mainly as a subversive who threatened the state through his claim to absolute truth. The real decision, for Kelsen, was thus not one between Jesus and Barabbas, but one between Pilate and Jesus. Pilate stood for a democracy-enabling relativism, Jesus for a politically dangerous claim to truth that could lead only to violence.²² Kelsen advocates a view typical of liberalism, that is, the idea, based on a negative political epistemology, that politics and strong truth claims should remain separate.²³

Kelsen’s interpretation is important in our context because it helps to deepen and sharpen the concept of political theology and thus also that of political intertheology. It seems that in Schmitt’s eyes, Kelsen’s siding with “Pilate” and against “Christ” confirmed a hidden anti-Christian affect, or agenda, behind his liberalism, and perhaps behind liberalism more generally, with its celebration of indecision in matters of truth. By reappropriating, or even reclaiming, Bakunin’s pejorative notion of political theology, Schmitt not only forged this concept against the openly anti-Christian anarchist enemies of state (Bakunin as a sort of “anarchist Barabbas”); he also sought to counter the liberal, secular celebration of relativism and indecision as covertly anti-Christian. What he put forward as “political theology” is a conceptual apparatus by which the agents of secularization and neutralization could be de-neutralized. Schmitt (at least in times of the Weimar Republic) could then not only counter anarchism, but also de-neutralize indecision (that between Jesus and Barabbas) by interpreting it as anti-Christian, and by opposing it to the necessity of decision.²⁴ We could qualify this move as an anti-anti-Christian intensification of the relation between Christianity and secular political movements.

There is no doubt that Schmitt’s political theology had a Catholic background and displayed an anti-Jewish tendency, which became more visible during the 1930s. In this sense, it possesses a theological, and one might even say, a hidden "inter-religious’" dimension. However, its true adversary is, at least in the early 1920s, not so much another religion, but, as with Donoso Cortés, to whom he refers in his book Political Theology, primarily an anti-Christian anarchism and socialism. Since liberalism and the secular state that stems from it have abandoned a religious (Christian) orientation, they prove too weak against this foe and, therefore, have become subjects of criticism as well. In other words, the actual adversaries are not other religions, but rather secularisms: an anti-religious, anti-Christian secularism and an indecisive secular-liberal state that is defenseless against secularism.

When it happens that a structurally similar intensification is brought to bear not on secularism but on another religion, however, we ought to speak about “political intertheology.” Whenever an anti-anti-Christian intensification of a dissociation is no longer directed at some secular political movement, but instead at another religion, then political theology becomes political intertheology. To the extent that the post-secular is (also) a response to “the return of religion,” and more precisely, the return notably of Islam as politically relevant actor – the “‘return of the religious’ (read, the Iranian revolution)”²⁵ – it can be said that political intertheology is the post-secular pendant to political theology. Just as political theology is a reaction against secularism, so too is political intertheology a reaction against the “return” to political relevance of other religious traditions.

In the following, I would like to focus on Benedict’s interpretation of Jesus and Barabbas, which can be understood as paradigmatic of political intertheology. His take, as should become clearer by the end, amounts to what we might call an anti-anti-Christian re-intensification of the Christian-Jewish-relation.²⁶ (Benedict dealt in an analogous way with the Christian-Islamic relationship in his famous “Regensburg speech.”) This intensification results precisely from the extreme rapprochement of the two figures of Jesus and Barabbas. It thus seems to do justice to the possibility of the rapprochement between Jesus and Barabbas that has emerged from scholarly insights over the last 120 years, but without falling into an in-distinction that obscures the theological difference between Jesus and Barabbas, as well as, from this Christian point of view, between Christianity and Judaism, and thus also the question of the reason for their effective divorce.

Anti-anti-Christian intensification: Benedict’s political intertheology

In a text published in 2018, (“Grace and Vocation Without Remorse: Comments on the Treatise De Iudaeis”), the recently deceased Pope Emeritus Benedict/Ratzinger discussed the distinction between Judaism and Christianity.²⁷ This text is based on a twofold assumption that Judaism is not equal to the Old Testament or to “Israel,” and that neither are Judaism and Christianity two separate traditions. Judaism and Christianity not only stem from the same ground (Tanakh, the Old Testament), and from Israel; they emerge from the very same split. And this split seems to be directly related to the Roman Empire, and more specifically to its destruction of the temple: “In fact, there are two responses in history to the destruction of the temple and the new radical exile of Israel: Judaism and Christianity.”²⁸

That the destruction of the temple “was formative not only for rabbinic culture, but became a crucial point of orientation for all subsequent periods of Judaism,”²⁹ is beyond doubt. It is less clear, however, why the same historical events should be similarly relevant for Christianity. Even if all the Gospels were very likely written after the beginning of the Judean War, and probably after the destruction of the temple in 70 A.D. (so that the term “response” might appear appropriate), the Pauline corpus was written beforehand. Indeed, as Benedict adds a few pages further on, both the “faith of Israel” and Jesus himself anticipated the destruction of the temple.³⁰

This anticipation provided Christians with a “response” to the destruction of the temple avant la lettre, with an “answer,” as it were, prior to the question. In this sense, there is an intertwining of the historical and theological dimensions of the destruction; the historical event gains its theological meaning by confirming Jesus’ anticipation of it.³¹ The Jews, by contrast, comprised those who “could” not accept this answer: “As we know, only a small part of Israel has been able to accept this answer, while the larger part resisted it and sought a solution in some other way.”³² We might thus ask the following question: when precisely did the “Jews” constitute themselves as Jews by refusing this answer?

Benedict’s understanding of the diaspora is suggestive here. At one point he writes that the diaspora was also a “condition of punishment.”³³ This implies that Judaism was not just an “answer” to, or “result” of, the historical events of 70 A.D., but instead that these historical events were the result of “something” that Judaism had done before the events, which implies that Judaism existed prior to 70 A.D. And this “something” seems, in its turn, to be related to Christianity. Recall Benedict’s claims about the “resistance” brought against the Christian message, about the inability of the “larger part” of Israel to “accept” the “Christian” answer, that is, the reconciliation of faith and reason, the universal opening of this message. It obviously follows from this: By resisting the Christian answer, the Jews deliberately chose to oppose “the only thing that stood in the way” of the divine plan of salvation, namely “God’s binding himself to a single people and its legal system.”³⁴

We ought to note that, while Christianity and Judaism initially seemed to be sort of twin brothers, to have emerged together out of Israel, through their differing answers to the destruction of the temple and the diaspora, they turn out to have already preexisted this event and thereby to be much more closely related. Indeed, this connection stems not only from their having the same ground or site (the Bible, the Old Testament), not only from their appearing as different answers to the same historical trauma (the destruction of the temple), but from their having given opposite answers prior to the destruction of the temple, with one small part of Israel ( =  Christians) accepting the Christian message, and the “ larger part” rejecting it, and consequently being “punished” for so doing, beginning with the destruction of the temple.

But when did this decision happen? Here we must examine Benedict’s trilogy on Jesus of Nazareth, which he wrote during his Papal tenure between 2007 and 2012, and more precisely, his take on the famous choice between Jesus and Barabbas. From the Gospels, Benedict adduces evidence for the claim that Barabbas “was one of the prominent resistance fighters, in fact probably the actual leader of that particular uprising.”³⁵ Moreover, Benedict adopts the key arguments concerning the identity of Jesus and Barabbas. But he does not do so to prove the identity of the two, but instead to emphasize an inner contrast behind an outward similarity.

To decide for Jesus as “son of the father,” means opting for a violent Judean uprising. It is tantamount to opting against Jesus as “the son of God,” that is, as the universal opening of Israel and the logos. This choice anticipated the later uprising against Rome, the superior power, making it a matter of necessity, and hence also anticipated the destruction of the temple and the diaspora, which, in retrospect, could come to appear as a punishment for not having taken the right messianic choice. Consequently, the relation between both choices, that of Bar Abbas and that of a “great part of Israel” and the rabbinical tradition, seems evident enough, and Benedict further suggests it by directly relating Bar Abbas to the messianic figure of Bar Kochba.³⁶

We can now locate the point at which Benedict sees the relevant split between Christians and Jews. This point lies in the fateful decision for the wrong messiah, for the wrong understanding of the messiah, a decision that is even more fateful because it goes hand-in-hand with a decision against the true messiah. In doing so, Benedict seems to understand Judaism as having constituted itself through the act of deciding for political messianism and against Jesus as the Son of God. According to Benedict, this decision, this self-constitution, was an “historical reality (…) correctly described in the accounts of John and Mark.”³⁷

Here we have the twofold constitution of Christianity and Judaism as twins prior to the destruction of the temple. While the crucifixion of Jesus anticipates the event of the destruction, Judaism is (retrospectively) constituted prior to the destruction of the temple as anti-Christian political messianism, as a movement of resistance against both the Empire and Christ.³⁸ Benedict concludes as follows: “Barabbas figures here as a sort of alter ego of Jesus, who makes the same claim but understands it in a completely different way.”³⁹ The choice between Jesus the Son of God and Jesus the Son of the Father is the choice between

two messiah figures, two forms of messianic belief (…) a Messiah who leads an armed struggle, promises freedom and a kingdom of one’s own, and this mysterious Jesus who proclaims that losing oneself is the way to life. Is it any wonder that the crowds prefer Barabbas?⁴⁰

In part two of Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, this choice becomes even clearer; it is nothing less than that between truth/love and violence: “Again and again, mankind will be faced with this same choice: to say yes to the God who works only through the power of truth and love, or to build on something tangible and concrete – on violence.”⁴¹ In thus sharpening the choice between Jesus and Barabbas, it becomes almost indistinguishable from the choice between Christ and the Antichrist. And by relating this choice to the very origin of the constitution of Judaism, this constitution becomes tantamount to an antichristian election, to the election of the Antichrist in the place of the Christ. This, however, is exactly the interpretation that also constitutes the source of Christian anti-Judaism and which Benedict himself calls “fateful.”

But aren’t we perhaps going too far here? In the same Jesus-trilogy, does Benedict not seem rather determined to reject the interpretation that “the Jews” as people chose Barabbas over Jesus?

Benedict addresses the crucial question: “Who exactly were Jesus’ accusers? Who insisted that he be condemned to death?”⁴² He begins his answer with reference to the Gospel of John, for whom the accusers were simply “the Jews.” For Benedict, this expression does not in any way “indicate the people of Israel in general. […] In John’s Gospel this word has a precise and clearly defined meaning: he is referring to the Temple aristocracy.”⁴³ One argument for this restricted meaning of “the Jews” is that the word “Jews” would otherwise refer to the entire Christian community, an eventuality that Benedict thinks is excluded since it would otherwise imply that Christ’s very followers would have demanded his crucifixion.

In the next step Benedict refers to the Gospel of Mark. Here the circle of accusers is broadened in the context of the Passover amnesty (Barabbas or Jesus): the óchlos (masses, crowd of people⁴⁴) enters the scene and roots for Barabbas’s release.⁴⁵ This is misleading, however, insofar as the words “is broadened” presupposes the Gospel of John and, moreover, Benedict’s specific and questionable narrowing of “Jews” to the “Temple aristocracy,” even though it is very likely that Mark’s Gospel was written much earlier than John’s. Here, too, Benedict underscores the idea that the “people” (óchlos) is not to be understood as referring “to the Jewish people as such,” or to the common people. He limits this “people” to the specific “crowd” of Barabbas’s followers, even though they were more than a few⁴⁶: as “a rebel against Roman power, he could naturally count on a good number of supporters. Thus, the Barabbas party, the ‘crowd,’ was conspicuous, while Jesus’ followers remained hidden out of fear.”⁴⁷

On that basis, Benedict comes to the preliminary conclusion: “In Mark’s account, then, in addition to ‘the Jews,’ that is to say, the dominant priestly circle, the óchlos comes into play, the circle of Barabbas’ supporters, but not the Jewish people as such.”⁴⁸ If it were correct that mainly followers of the political agitator Jesus Barabbas gathered before Pilate, it nonetheless remains quite unclear why followers of the more peaceful Jesus Christ believed they had to hide.

Lastly, skipping over Luke, Benedict turns to Matthew. By placing the presumed last of the Gospels first, and the presumed earliest second, and the Gospel of Matthew, which lies chronologically between the two at the end, and by the double reduction of the “Jews” to “Temple aristocracy” and the “people” to “followers of Barabbas” Benedict again seems to make a further extension: “An extension of Mark’s ochlos, with fateful consequences, is found in Matthew’s account (27:25), which speaks of ‘all the people’ and attributes to them the demand for Jesus’ crucifixion.”⁴⁹

Contrary to his tendency to read historical testimony into the Gospels, Benedict emphasizes that “Matthew is certainly not recounting historical fact here: how could the whole people have been present at this moment to clamor for Jesus’ death?”⁵⁰ But aside from the fact that this argument is not particularly strong (the phrase “the whole people” is hardly ever meant to include all the individual members of a people), Benedict also omits an important detail: Matthew, when speaking of “all the people,” πᾶς ὁ λαὸς, (Mt. 27,25) all of the sudden switches from óchlos to laos, which points, in the Septuaginta as well as in Matthew, clearly in direction of God’s people of Israel, by contrast with óchlos, which rather indicates something like the masses.⁵¹ This is a hint that he obviously did not mean “all” in the quantitative sense of “all people,” but rather in the sense of the people of “Israel.”

This is also in keeping with Benedict’s theological interpretation. He agrees with Joachim Gnilkas’s “theological etiology,” according to which the election of Barabbas and the election against Jesus stands at the origin of “the people of Israel.”⁵² But by separating theological and historical considerations, he denies what he accepts in the case of John and Mark (and what constitutes a consequence of his very methodological approach)⁵³: a coincidence between historical and theological content. Moreover, our reconstruction of the origin of the split between Christians and Jews, as described in “Grace and Vocation Without Remorse” suggests exactly this historical claim, namely that Judaism was constituted through the choice between Jesus and Barabbas, or more precisely through the decision to side with Barabbas and against Jesus. “As we know,” says Benedict, “only a small part of Israel has been able to accept this answer, while the larger part resisted it and sought a solution in some other way.”⁵⁴

This seeming contradiction is based on a real dilemma, or even trilemma:

1. Benedict’s attempt to restrict the Gospel’s description of the Jews to a specific and delimited groups appears philologically violent and runs counter to his own theological and historical understanding.

2. If “Jewish people” is taken as such, Benedict would in turn have openly embraced an interpretation that had already had “fateful consequences.”

3. If, finally, the “Jewish people” is understood as all of Israel, that is, in such a general way as to include Christians, then it would remain inexplicable as to why the Christians had turned against Jesus from one day to the next and demanded his crucifixion.

We might nonetheless ask why this last-mentioned oddity does not apply to the óchlos people as well. Don’t the Gospels present Jesus’ reception only a few days before his crucifixion as that of a liberator? And isn’t it one of the main mysteries of the story of Jesus’ crucifixion that the mood could shift so quickly against him such that the Temple aristocracy – presumably as unpopular as collaborators and as privileged – could exert so much influence on the “people”? Even the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith held that “the crowd, for the most part certainly composed of Jews,” was “favourably disposed towards Jesus, except in one passion episode, where the chief priests pressure them to choose Barabbas (15:11).”⁵⁵ According to the New Testament, the crowd was still supporting Jesus a few days before the crucifixion, probably even the night before (because Jesus was secretly arrested when he was secluded from the people), and did not celebrate or triumph after the allegedly desired crucifixion, but “beat their breasts and went away” immediately after the crucifixion took place (Luke 23,48). Moreover, by using the term πᾶς ὁ λαὸς, Matthew seems to refer to Israel as such, not only to a part of it. The same might be true for Mark’s use of the term “people.” Lastly, none of the Gospels make these restrictions, and none mentions that Christians were not included in the crowd.⁵⁶

Before going further, let me summarize the dilemma: the explicitly or implicitly asserted identity of Jesus and Barabbas not only solves some riddles of the passion story, but it also removes what is arguably deepest root of Christian anti-Judaism (“murderer of God”). However, the Gospels provide little evidence that Jesus was a political rebel. And with the removal of any distinction, we lose the staging of the intertheological, Christian-Jewish divisiveness that did indeed take place.

The theological polarization of Jesus and Barabbas that interprets Barabbas as political alter ego of Jesus and relates it to the constitution of Judaism, in turn sharpens a Christian understanding of the intertheological difference between Christianity and Judaism. But apart from hermeneutic violence, it also easily falls back into a Christian anti-Judaism: the choice of Barabbas becomes interpretable as an anti-Christian self-constitution of Judaism, which in turn prepares the ground for the possibility of an anti-anti-Christian aggravation, which is to say, the politico-intertheological possibility of constituting Christianity vis-à-vis Judaism as anti-Christian at its very root.

To overcome the limits to both approaches -- the anti-antisemitic identity-thesis, and the anti-anti-Christian alter-ego thesis -- I shall attempt to connect Benedict’s theological insights (section 2) with the argument for an identity between Jesus and Barabbas (section 1). I will unfold this possibility in terms of guilt politics.

The guilt-political distinction

I want to begin with an insight first developed by Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism. In this, his final book, Freud mentions Jesus in passing as being nothing less than a “political-religious agitator.”⁵⁷ Thus, Freud implicitly in-differentiates Jesus and Barabbas. His student Theodor Reik had made an argument for their identity as early as 1923.⁵⁸ Freud, however, connects this lack of distinction with another distinction between Jews and Christians based on guilt:

It seems that a growing feeling of guiltiness had seized the Jewish people […] as a precursor of the return of the repressed material. This went on until a member of the Jewish people, in the guise of a political-religious agitator, founded a doctrine which – together with another one, the Christian religion – separated from the Jewish one. Paul, a Roman Jew from Tarsus, seized upon this feeling of guilt and correctly traced it back to its primaeval source. This he called original sin. […] Over and over again they [the Jews] heard the reproach: you killed our God. And this reproach is true, if rightly interpreted. It says, in reference to the history of religion: you won’t admit that you murdered God (the archetype of God, the primaeval Father and his reincarnations). Something should be added, namely: “It is true, we did the same thing, but we admitted it, and since then we have been purified.”⁵⁹

Unlike Freud, who ties guilt to the – almost unanimously rejected – thesis of the murder of a primordial father, I would like to locate this guilt dimension much more concretely in the unintentional complicity of “all the people” in Jesus’ crucifixion. I base this claim on arguments in support of the identity of Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas, as well as on my thoughts about a politics of guilt, which I have developed in detail elsewhere.⁶⁰

Indeed, if Jesus and Barabbas were identical and the “people” had gathered to demand the deliverance of Jesus, then it is possible that the Matthean reference to “all the people” would have included Jesus's followers. They, like the others present among the people, would have seen in Jesus a political messianic figure and would not only have celebrated his entry into Jerusalem but might, at least in principle, have demanded his release after his arrest by the Romans, like the rest of the people. I say “in principle” because they were more exposed and therefore had more reason to hide.

This highly political and messianic interpretation (or misinterpretation) of Jesus, held also by his own followers, would likely have resulted in Jesus being perceived as a rebel by the imperial rulers. Consequently, he might have been arrested, tried, and eventually crucified, regardless of his original intentions. The “choice of Barabbas,” or the interpretation of Jesus as a political-messianic figure (Jesus bar Abbas), sought to present him to Roman rule as a political insurgent, and to have him treated accordingly, in other words, to bring about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. At the limit, the “choice of Barabbas” could therefore be reduced to the formula: “crucify him!”

The disciples would have become aware of precisely this fact after Jesus’ death and resurrection, which means through a new, “Christian” understanding of the Messiah, an understanding that enabled them to hold on to the messianicity of Jesus. This novel understanding of his message as one that differed from political messianism would, after the outbreak of Judean War, be dramatically staged in the Gospels in the form of a twofold election of Jesus-Barabbas. There were not two different decisions, one for Jesus Barabbas and one against Jesus Christ, but only one. The “yes” to Jesus Barabbas could be understood retrospectively as a “no” to Jesus Christ.

From a Christian, post-Easter point of view, “all of the people” misunderstood Jesus (as “Barabbas”), and were unintentionally complicit in his crucifixion, including Jesus’s own followers. Moreover, as the latter knew him better, or at least had the chance to, their unintentional, retrospective guilt would be somehow more relevant, because they might have understood Jesus’ (retrospectively “true,” i.e., Christian) message while he was alive and thus have resisted being carried away by the widespread political-messianic enthusiasm that indirectly led to his death. In their post-Easter view, Jesus, who failed politically, did not coincide with political messianism; and precisely that is what he had sought, time and again, to explain to his obtuse disciples. Yet they had failed to grasp it and thus contributed to his death.⁶¹

As soon as this post-Easter Jesus is reinterpreted as “Christ,” their own complicity in his crucifixion could be recognized and assumed – a precondition for overcoming the guilt.⁶² For the first Christians in particular, a feeling of guilt and a community-building confession of guilt – the request for the forgiveness of sins⁶³ – might thus have become constitutive. Thus, it could be assumed both: that the whole Jewish people shared, in the eyes of the early Christians, a common unintentional guilt and that those who now knew themselves to be culpable thereby no longer belonged in the same way to that guilty people. Moreover, those who did not know they were guilty remained steeped in this very guilt, to the point of stubbornly denying it – at least they did in the eyes of those who had decided to confess. In other words, πᾶς ὁ λαὸς contributed to his crucifixion, but those among this people who had not understood and did not confess their guilt after the crucifixion, as the post-Easter Christians did, but instead denied it, became the really guilty ones. And isn’t this what Freud said? “[Y]ou won’t admit that you murdered God […]. ‘It is true, we did the same thing, but we admitted it, and since then we have been purified.’”

This dynamic of guilt, wherein those who felt particularly guilty could, through the recognition and confession of their guilt, be somehow purified by the act of confession, while those who did not acknowledge the same unintentional guilt were, in the eyes of Christians, deemed the actual culprits, might have been reinforced once again during the Judean War and the destruction of the temple. Those who did not believe in Christ, i.e., did not change their idea of messianicity after the crucifixion of Jesus and in consequence continued to view Jesus as a (failed) political rebel after his crucifixion, akin to a Barabbas, remained, from the Christian perspective, ensnared in a political-messianic error – one that would have fateful consequences. For, it was this adherence to a political messianism (“Barabbas”), which led to the Jewish revolt and the subsequent destruction of the temple. The uprising against Rome and the ensuing catastrophe, namely the destruction of the temple, could be interpreted as a repetition of that traumatic misunderstanding that had previously led to the catastrophic crucifixion of Jesus. The difference lies in the fact that, from a Christian perspective, one could henceforth have known better. The unintentional guilt of all now transforms into a guilt attributable to the ‘"Jews."

The (Christian) distinction between Christians and Jews, and the conflicts resulting from it, were likely unavoidable. However, the retrospective inscription of this distinction into the narrative of the crucifixion was not inevitable – and proved disastrous. This is where the later fateful accusation of the Jews (as “murderers of God”) arises.

This process is already evident in the development of the Gospels and can be seen in the portrayal of Barabbas. While he had (according to our interpretation) initially represented a (retrospectively wrong) understanding of the messiah, his depiction becomes increasingly negative. In the Gospel of Mark, we read that a man named Barabbas was “among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection.” (Mk. 15,7).⁶⁴ The Gospel of Matthew refers to Barabbas as ἐπίσημον, that is, as Luz points out, as “known, distinguished, famous.” Moreover, that “he could be negatively famous, that is, ‘notorious,’ does not correspond to the usual meaning of the word.”⁶⁵ In Luke, he is “a man who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection started in the city and for murder” (Luke, 23, 19), and in John (18,40), a “robber” or a “bandit,” or, in Martin Luther’s influential translation, “a murderer” (“Mörder”).

In parallel, the guilt for the act migrates increasingly over to the “Jews.” Thanks to this clearer separation between Jesus and Barabbas, as well as between Christians and Jews, the terms used in the Gospels (“all the people,” laos, crowd of people, óchlos, “Jews”) can be understood as referring to Jews without Christians. And thus these “Jews” could then, notably through the detraction of Barabbas – who had, for this very reason, to be separated out increasingly from Jesus⁶⁶ – be demonized as those who had opted for the “murderer” over and against the Son of God.⁶⁷ The Gospels, but least of all Mark, , can thereby be seen as contributing to an interpretation of the Jews as the true culprits for seeking and attending the death on the cross, and for demanding the release of a murderer. Christianity’s long anti-Jewish history of guilt begins with this interpretation.⁶⁸

Just as the reference to “all the people” indicates that the Gospels did not initially set out to blame the Jews for the crucifixion, so too is the exoneration of Pilate, and thus of the Roman Empire, quite understandable considering the circumstances in which the Gospel of Mark were presumably written, which is to say in Rome probably soon after the persecutions of Christians and in view of the additional danger surrounding the uprising in Judea after 66 A.D. -- whereby the Christians (who for the Romans were hardly distinguishable from the Jews) were also to be held jointly liable as enemies of the empire.⁶⁹ Against this background it can be understood that any open accusations of guilt levelled against the Romans and especially against the rulers (Pilate) had to be strictly avoided.⁷⁰ The person mainly responsible for Jesus’ death (Pilate) is increasingly exonerated, and thus the Roman Empire is as well.⁷¹ These moves might all be read as steps towards an integration into the Roman Empire that resulted in a long-lasting and close cooperation between Church and Empire, or Church and state – at the expense of Judaism.

The guilt-political interpretation of the Christian differentiation between Christians and Jews, based on the distinction between Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas, makes it possible to recognize the inevitability of such a distinction. In this sense, political-intertheological conflicts are also unavoidable. However, it also became apparent how the actual anti-anti-Christian intensification of the conflict occurred: namely, through a retroactive and anachronistic division of the “whole people” into Christians and Jewish deicides. This political-intertheological intensification was not inevitable. Understanding how it occurred makes it easier to overcome this ancient and fateful accusation at its roots, without establishing a new accusation (against the early Christians) and thereby without replacing antisemitism with potential anti-Christian sentiment. It is this understanding to which this text aims to contribute.

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Luca Di Blasi

Luca Di Blasi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Theological Faculty of the University of Bern and Associate Member of the ICI Berlin. His theoretical main interests include philosophy of religion, modern continental philosophy, postsecularism, and political theology. Main publications: Dezentrierungen. Beiträge zur Religion der Philosophie im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2018); Der weiße Mann. Ein Anti-Manifest (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013); Der Geist in der Revolte. Der Gnostizismus und seine Wiederkehr in der Postmoderne (Munich: Fink, 2002).

Notes

1 The term “intertheology” is of rather recent date, but I give it a new sense here. Simón Pedro Arnold, for example, limits intertheology to Christianity (“different ways of expressing Christian faith”). For more, see Arnold, “Decolonization and Interculturalism.” Sievers and Specker, “Intertheologie” use the term but put less emphasis on the construction of an Other. My understanding of the term comes closer to what Katharina Heyden and David Nierenberg describe with the notion of “co-produced religions.” See https://coproduced-religions.org/about

2 Schmitt, Political Theology.

3 Of this passage Oswald Spengler said in 1918: “But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then the world of facts and the world of truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility. It is a scene appallingly. distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism, such as the world’s history had never before and has never since looked at.” Spengler, The Decline of the West, 216. Hans Kelsen counted it, not without a critical edge towards claims of historical truth, among “the most sublime pieces of world literature”. Kelsen, “Foundations of Democracy.” Agamben, conversely emphasizing the historicity, called Jesus’ trial “one of the key moments in human history, in which eternity intersected at a decisive point with history.” Agamben, Pilato e Gesú, 8.

4 The IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) working definition of antisemitism refers in one place to the crucifixion of Christ as example of “classic antisemitism.” See https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism. On the relationship between Christianity and antisemitism, see also Karma Ben-Johanan in this issue.

5 Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, especially 63–74.

6 Marquard, In defense of the accidental, 51.

7 Davies, “Who Is Called Bar Abbas?”. Opponents prefer pejorative attributes like “fanciful.” See Brown, The Death of the Messiah., 813.

8 Frazer, The Golden Bow, 191–5. Rigg later argued that calling God his father (abba) appeared particularly provocative and could have led to Jesus’s being nicknamed Bar Abbas. See Rigg, “Barabbas.” Davies later emphasized: “The fact that Jesus addressed God as ‘abba’ was such a memorable aspect of Jesus’s teaching that the term ‘abba’ is preserved in Paul’s letters (Gal. 4. 5 and Rom. 8. 15) and in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 14. 35) in the original Aramaic." To address God as Father had not be a commonplace of ancient Jewish piety, and when it did happen, the form abba ‘Father’ or ‘My Father’, was never used." Davies, “Who Is Called Bar Abbas?” 261.

9 Reinach, “The King Sacrificed.” This interpretation has been reaffirmed repeatedly, e.g. by Moses, “Jesus Barabbas, a Nominal Messiah?” According to Luz, despite the very narrow attestation, most text-critical experts today accept the reading with “Jesus Barabbas” in Mt 27,16 and 17 as original. See Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus., 265, FN 3.

10 Reinach, “The King Sacrificed,” 103.

11 Cohn, “Sein Blut komme über uns.”

12 “Jesus = Barabas,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur (1905).

13 The magazine Ost und West: illustrierte Monatsschrift für das gesamte Judentum (Vol. 5, October 1905, Issue 10-11, p. 729–732) contained an obituary and tribute to his life. See https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/2592750.

14 An exception is Horace Abram Rigg, who is widely, but wrongly regarded as the founder of the identity thesis. Rigg presents this thesis forty years after Cohn, whom he mentions only briefly, and it is unclear whether he knew the content of Cohn’s text. Rigg, “Barabbas,” 423.

15 Cohn, “Jesus = Barabas,” 66.

16 Philo describes Pilate in Legatio ad Gaium (§§ 299–305) as unbending, headstrong, and unyielding (akamptos, authades, ameiliktoi). See also, Agamben, Pilato e Gesú, 17.

17 Rigg’s version of the identity thesis make central use of the same argument, developing it far more extensively and philologically accurately. See Rigg, “Barabbas,” 419–28. That „"no such custom existed” (Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1961), 94) seems to be the predominant scholarly opinion on this matter to this day.

18 Cohn, “Jesus = Barabas,” 67f.

19 Raymond Brown dedicates himself more with certain speculations than with basic arguments, making no mention of Cohn. See Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 811–4. Ulrich Luz devotes only a few lines to this thesis in his nearly 500-page long commentary on the Gospel of Matthew 26–28. See Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus.

20 In 1945, immediately after the end of the Holocaust, H. A. Riggs reached the same conclusion as Heinrich Cohn. See, Rigg, “Barabbas,” 435. In 1969, Z. Maccoby presented similar insights. See Maccoby, “Jesus and Barabbas.” Stevan Davies also supported this “remarkable theory” (which he wrongly attributed to Rigg) in 1981. See Davies, “Who Is Called Bar Abbas?” The Jewish Annotated New Testament also takes this position and uses it main arguments. See Levine and Brettler (eds.), The Jewish Annotated New Testament, 92.

21 Winter, On the Trial of Jesus, 148. By contrast, see, for example, Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots, who emphasizes the political side of Jesus.

22 This understanding becomes clear at the end of his text on democracy: “For those who believe in the son of God and king of the Jews as witness of the absolute truth, this plebiscite is certainly a strong argument against democracy. And this argument we political scientists must accept. But only under one condition: that we are as sure of our political truth, to be enforced, if necessary, with blood and tears-that we are as sure of our truth as was, of his truth, the son of God.” Kelsen, “Foundations of Democracy,” 39.

23 On the concept of negative political epistemology see Lapidot, Jews Out of the Question, 5.

24 The famous passage from his political theology reads: “Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises, existed for Donoso Cortes only in that short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question ‘Christ or Barabbas?’ with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.” Schmitt, Political Theology, 62.

25 Anidjar, Semites, 53.

26 I have taken a first step in discerning Benedict’s intention in renewing the Christian-Jewish conflict in Di Blasi, “Resuming Conflict.”

27 Since the text bears the name “Benedict XVI,” but he was no longer Pope at the time, I will refer to him as “Benedict.”

28 Ratzinger, “Grace and Vocation Without Remorse.”

29 See Bloch, “What if the Temple of Jerusalem,” 57. At the same time, the events of 70 CE were, according to Bloch, less decisive for Judaism's subsequent development. For, “[e]ven if the Temple had not been destroyed, Jewish sacrificial rituals would have slowly faded out of their own accord during late antiquity. Similarly, neither the Jewish diaspora nor the first synagogues were brought about by the Temple's destruction.” Ibid.

30 Ratzinger, “Grace and Vocation Without Remorse.”

31 The problem, of course, is that all the Gospels were probably written during the Jewish War and perhaps after the destruction of the Temple, thus already knowing about events that were still in the future in the narrated time.

32 Ratzinger, “Grace and Vocation Without Remorse.”

33 Ibid. 180.

34 Ibid.

35 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth.

36 Ibid. Chapter 2 (The Temptation of Jesus).

37 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth Part II, Chapter 7.3. This is a bold statement. The whole story of the decision between Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas was (very likely) written after 66 or 70 A.D., thus in the knowledge of these events. It is full of oddities and contradictions, clearly staged to narrate a specific theological message that could become visible as such exactly in light of the Jewish War and the destruction of the temple.

38 Benedict’s approach resembles that presented by Robert Moses (“Jesus Barabbas, a Nominal Messiah?”) and might be influenced by it.

39 For Agamben, Pilate, not Barabbas, is Jesus Christ’s “alter ego.” Agamben, Pilato e Gesú, 63. His claim is that Pilate and Jesus represent two principles, which Agamben renders to a point of indistinguishability. See Agamben, Pilato e Gesú, 53.

40 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, Chapter 2 (The Temptation of Jesus).

41 Jesus of Nazareth Part II. Holy Week. From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection (E-Book), Chapter 7.3. This reading is consistent with the apologetic Christian interpretation which recognized in the choice between Christ and Barabbas a "choice, decisive for all time, between the way of salvation of Jesus Christ and a political messianism and zealotry, […] a choice in the consequence of which the Jewish people committed the unfortunate and disastrous revolt against Rome, a choice that resulted in the fall of Jerusalem and sank Israel into a sea of suffering and misfortune, a choice that forced the Jewish people to an eternally unsteady, Ahasverian life of dispersion.” Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christlichen Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (1.-11. Jh.) (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1999), 131 (my translation).

42 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth Part II.

43 Ibid.

44 On an opposite understanding of the term óchlos, see Abeer Khshiboon in this issue.

45 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth Part II. Holy Week..

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., my emphasis.

50 Ibid.

51 See Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus, 277–80.

52 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth Part II. Holy Week, Chapter 7.3.

53 Ratzinger connects in his Jesus-books a Christological-canonical with a historical-critical hermeneutics.

54 Ratzinger, “Grace and Vocation Without Remorse,” 164.

55 See https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/pcb_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20020212_popolo-ebraico_en.html

56 Remarkably, a later and historically rather uninformative Talmudic source reports a sentence of “Jesus the Nazarene” and confirms this unanimity, claiming that nobody came to his defense. See Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud, 12.

57 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 139.

58 See Reik, Der eigene und der fremde Gott, 111f.

59 Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 138f, 145.

60 Di Blasi, Politik der Schuld.

61 It could be assumed that the trauma of the crucifixion and the associated sense of guilt might have been reactualized with the destruction of the temple, especially following the violent suppression of a recent political uprising.

62 Something analogous applies to Paul, for whom conversion had to be accompanied by an acknowledgement of the unintentional guilt of persecuting Christians.

63 Peter's denial in the courtyard (“I don’t know the man!” Matthew 26:72) takes on a new significance in the context of this thesis. It comes to symbolize a denial that is simultaneously accurate because it articulates that Peter's guilt lay precisely in his lack of knowledge or recognition of Jesus. (I thank Christoph Kerwien for this insight). In this context it is telling that the pre-Eastern Peter appears particularly militant insofar as he is the one who, according to John 18,10-11, cut off Malchus’ ear in an attempt to prevent Jesus’ arrest.

64 As Maccoby points out “Mark’s ambiguous expression makes it possible to suppose that Barabbas was arrested as a revolutionary but was in fact not one. This is a perfect description of the status of Jesus himself, if we accept Paul Winter’s thesis in On the Trial of Jesus. Mark’s equivocal description of Barabbas may be a faint echo of the status of Jesus himself.“ Maccoby, "Jesus and Barabbas," 59.

65 Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus, 271.

66 Rigg, “Barabbas,” 430.

67 In his Peri Pascha (On the Passover), written in the second century A.D., Melito of Sardis accuses the Jews, perhaps for the first time, of the murder of God.

68 The fact that even one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, basically remains within the scope of this interpretation, shows the power and insistence of this narrative. See, for example, Barth, Predigten 1919, 138.

69 Winter, On the Trial of Jesus.

70 This can still be seen in the Apostles’ Creed, where Pontius Pilate’s responsibility, considered unambiguous from an historical viewpoint, is obscured: "whoever suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.”

71 In some apocrypha, Pilate is portrayed almost as Christian. Agamben, Pilato e Gesú, 12–16, in the Coptic Orthodox Church Pilate is even venerated as a Martyr. In the one case where Pilate is depicted negatively, the emperor Tiberius receives a more glowing portrayal as quasi-Christian, thus likely to avoid any conflict with the imperial power. See Ibid. 16–21.