fpb: (Default)
fpb ([personal profile] fpb) wrote2009-03-13 01:17 pm

Has anyone noticed this?

The two most important men in the West, opposed to each other on most things, share one thing. Barack in Arabic, and Benedictus (Benedict) in Latin, both mean "blessed".

[identity profile] becomethesea.livejournal.com 2009-03-13 06:08 pm (UTC)(link)
I had not noticed that. Interesting!

[identity profile] mentalguy.livejournal.com 2009-03-13 11:35 pm (UTC)(link)
Yep! I noticed that a few months ago when I was researching Obama's childhood and ran across an article which mentioned the meaning of his name.

I think it is one of those little jokes one finds in history, like the first Roman king and the last western Roman emperor sharing a name, or Barabbas meaning "son of the father".

[identity profile] fuzzybunny916.livejournal.com 2009-03-15 02:34 am (UTC)(link)
Benedict in "Jesus of Nazareth" makes a good case that Barabbas (with a name like "son of the father" and being guilty of murder, among other reasons) was a revolutionary and another Messiah - the opposite Messianic image of Christ.

[identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com 2009-03-15 03:56 am (UTC)(link)
That is a widespread belief among scholars, However, just because the habit of freeing a prisoner for Easter is not testified elsewhere in our material does not mean that it did not exist; this is exactly the sort of local tidbit, with no relevance to overall affairs, that might turn up in a local narrative and be wholly ignored by more systematic historians like Tacitus or Josephus. The otherwise incomprehensible Talmudic allusion to an appeal for defence witnesses that found no-one might be a distorted or propaganda-twisted memory of this.

[identity profile] mentalguy.livejournal.com 2009-03-15 09:02 pm (UTC)(link)
Could you elaborate on that a little bit? It's interesting, but I may be misunderstanding it since I'm not sure I see the contradiction indicated by "however".

[identity profile] fpb.livejournal.com 2009-03-15 09:48 pm (UTC)(link)
"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.