Reflections of a stormy petrel

"However" is because, in the version I heard, part of the argument was that the habit of freeing a prisoner to the crowd every Easter is not testified anywhere else in the existing literature. Unfortunately, I haven't yet got to that part of the Pope's book, and it may be that he builds the argument differently. Certainly the Greek word in "now Barabbas was a robber" soon came to mean an armed rebel as well; indeed, it is a common topic of middle and late classical writing that rebellious persons or armies are routinely assimilated to bandits.