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".
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".
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.
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.
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".
"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.
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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".
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