Jesus’ Two Bodies
In the earliest of the gospels, Mark, Barabbas is presented: “Now a man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder during the insurrection [ἦν δὲ ὁ λεγόμενος Βαραββᾶς μετὰ τῶν συστασιαστῶν δεδεμένος οἵτινες ἐν τῇ στάσει φόνον πεποιήκεισαν].” Barabbas translates in the Aramaic vernacular of ancient Palestine as “son [bar] of the father [abba]”, just as Jesus is presented throughout the gospel as the Son of God, the messiah. Of course, Jesus will cry to his father, abba, upon the cross before his death, crucified between two of the insurrectionists. In some variants of the gospel of Matthew, written later and with Mark as a source, the distinction between Jesus and Barabbas is intensified by identifying Barabbas as Jesus Barabbas (Matt. 27:16). Whether Barabbas was a historical or literary figure, Matthew presents the “crowd” of Jews as having decided upon the wrong Jesus. “The Jews” errant judgement favours one who seeks insurrection [stasis] over the Jesus who will die upon the cross refusing insurrectionary violence. Further, Jesus Barabbas is presented as a scapegoat, who is allowed to live while the innocent victim is killed before the passover, which happened to fall on the sabbath. Matthew, the only of the synoptics which includes “Jesus Barabbas”, and not just “Barabbas”, is often considered the most “Jewish” of the gospels. The committee of the text critical edition of the UBSGNT consider that the manuscript divergence in Matthew would suggest that “the original text of Matthew has the double name in both verses and that Ἰησοῦν was deliberately suppressed in most witnesses for reverential considerations.” These “reverential considerations” are witnessed in Origen, who refuses to allow the name Jesus to be shared with any other.
Matthew’s polemic against “the Jews”, the force of which is covered over by later traditions, witnesses to the auto-constitution of Christianity against a guilty Jewish other. Later Rabbinic text will counter this narrative by witnessing to the proximity of Jesus to the Roman authorities as reason for his just execution. In each of the gospel accounts the Roman governor Pontius Pilate uses Barabbas to attempt to save Jesus from execution. In a comment upon the proper lawful execution of the death penalty this accusation is laid against Jesus:
Ulla said: and how can you understand this proof? Was Jesus the Nazarene worthy of conducting a search for a reason to acquit him? He was an inciter to idol worship, and the Merciful One states with regard to an inciter to idol worship: “Neither shall you spare, neither shall you conceal him” (Deuteronomy 13:9). Rather, Jesus was different, as he had close ties with the government, and the gentile authorities were interested in his acquittal. Consequently, the court gave him every opportunity to clear himself, so that it could not be claimed that he was falsely convicted.
Peter Schäfer has suggested this represents a familiarity with the gospel accounts’ insertion of the option for Barabbas over Jesus. If this is true, there is a rejoinder being offered to the Christian implication of the guilt of the Jews for the execution of Jesus. The rejoinder is not, however, to lay the blame on Roman authorities. Rather, it is to suggest that Jesus was killed in accord with the law, and justly so, as one who was inciting the Jews to idolatry. In this way there is no guilt, but it is the Christians who are guilty of following Jesus, who represents an idolater who was close to Roman authority, the gentiles. Of course, later Rabbinic sources from the fourth century are becoming familiar with the increasing proximity between the Christians and imperial power.
In Matthew’s account, Pilate, after offering up Barabbas to the crowd, sits down on the judgement seat (βήματος) and his wife comes to him warning him to “Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him.” (Matt 27:19). Returning to the Chief Priests and Elders Pilate once more offers up Barabbas. Upon their refusal, and the threat of riot (θόρυβος) Pilate washes his hands stating, ““I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”” (Matt 27:24-25). Here Matthew places the guilt firmly upon the Jewish crowds and their progeny. Pilate, then, never makes a judgment, but hands Jesus over (παρέδωκεν) to be killed. This moment of sovereign indecision provoked by fear of insurrection lies at the heart of the conflict between Rabbinic and Christian disputes over what I am calling the two bodies of Jesus. For the Christian, the guilt remains on the Jews and their children for their act of decision in the face of sovereign indecision read as “close ties with the government”. So it is that this dispute does not play out at the level of the political directly, but at the level of confessional civil war threatening the state.
The Christian polemic distinguishes between the messianic hopes of the nascent Christian communities assembling their narratives of the life of Jesus, and the hope that remains of the “Jews” for a revolutionary leader promising political deliverance. In these earliest documents of Christian history, then, we find a doubling of the body of Jesus, Jesus Barabbas and Jesus of Nazareth, centring on the question of stasis, insurrection, revolution, civil war. Insurrection or revolution will come to be, for Christianity, the marker of refusing the realisation of messianic deliverance in the recuperation of the death of Jesus as a final victory to be realised in interiority. Indeed, not only is Barabbas a marker of stasis, but he is the site of the civil war internal to Judaism (if such an object exists) that Jesus represents, and that produces Christianity. The introduction of the distinction illuminates the decision Matthew and the other synoptic authors are making upon “the Jews”, their failure to interpret messianic failure as fulfilment. Civil war, stasis, however, is famously the bloodiest of wars, a fraternal war that cannot be won without the elimination of the enemy. Hence, Christianity places this absolute elimination of the enemy in eschatological perspective represented by Erik Peterson: it is the failure of the Jews to convert that holds back the second coming, the coming of the kingdom of God. It is here that the indistinction between Schmitt’s katechon and Peterson’s ecclesial deferment comes into relief in and through the political-theological.
Christianity has often sided with Pilate’s indecision, it has preferred the katechon to divine violence. Indeed, in some sense, one could read the origins of political theology as a discipline out of this distinction. Barabbas or the failed Messiah, hopes for concrete historical liberation or the interiorisation of the messianic. Gil Anidjar has pointed to what he calls “the enemies two bodies”, constituting the political-theological distinction. On the one hand, a “theological” enemy is produced through the “Jew” who is not a political rival, but the rival claimant to a theologic. On the other, the “political” enemy emerges in the figure of the “Arab” who confounds the distinction between the political and the theological and so remains external to theological contestation. Extending Anidjar’s argument here, I want to suggest that Christianity’s primordial moment already covers up the problem of messianic claimants through the reduplication of the body of Christ, first in the decision on Barabbas and the Messiah, and second in the extension of the body of Christ through the katechontical function of the Church and State, the political-theological relation itself. Sovereign is he who is indecisive.