Should We Be Surprised?

[j2k4]

Originally posted by Biggles@4 April 2004 - 14:51
Agreed

Although the Austrians were spoiling to attack the Serbs too. They caught Kaiser Bill out with their enthusiasm, he was on holiday on his boat at the time and had to cut short his vacation - much to his annoyance.

I have always felt sorry for Ferdinand. He was ok as Dukes go and was disliked by the Austrian Emperor for marrying a commoner. He really did want to win over the Serbs. A man caught between the ice bergs of history.

Well put!

[Phyltre]

I attended a seminar (non-religious, historical/practical) on that movie recently, and it posed a very good question:

Why does "the crowd" that is pro-Jesus in the first part switch over to demanding Barabus instead? What explanation could there be for such a change in public sentiment?

(Several factors were offered for an answer, I'm just curious what you people think.)

[KazaaBoy]

I will give you my factor.

The crowd that wanted Barabus were the ones that were against Jesus from the begining but were afraid to confront him or talk to him because they knew he is very hard and impossible to defeat in an argument. YEAH, go Jesus, you show em


The ones that were with Jesus all along were hiding and abandoned him because they were afraid. Not just the apostles. Everyone that witnessed his miracles abandoned him.

When the Anti-Christ comes, the power of darkness will overshadow everything and will force people to go into hiding, history repeats it's self, or join the evil one because the hardships he will enforce on the world will be without any mercy as it's his last chance ever to get as many souls as possible.

Everything Jesus has done in his public life, the Catholic Church has followed him in all his steps and one of them will be the Crucifixion. All Christians will be crucified through out the whole world for denying the Anti-Christ and accepting Jesus Christ.



Please share with us your factor Phyltre. I would love to hear it.

Oh yeah, I got some of that Anti-Christ stuff there -->http://catholicforum.tk

[Phyltre]

The main idea that the symposium seemed to put forth was that the second crowd was, in fact, not really a crowd at all. Because the Roman authorities had actually almost resolved NOT to attempt to apprehend Christ due to the public opinion in his favor (seizure might cause a revolt,) the second crowd was very much suspect.

Analysis of the scene where the crowd negotiates for Barabus instead of Jesus offers certain interesting clues. We know, for instance, that Pilate was an exceptionally ruthless leader; he was reprimanded by his superiors (who were very brutal as well, that should tell you something) for improperly handling--you guessed it--crowd situations, and generally killing hundreds of people at once to maintain control. More on this in a moment.

Also, we know that Barabus was not a thief as usually interpretted but a "freedom fighter," with anti-government followers. Therefore, trying to have him freed would have been an indirect insult to Pilate--for in truth, if not in name, Barabus was Pilate's enemy as a governor. They would have had a very practical reason for being present and pushing for Barabus's release. The second crowd is believed to be Barabus's most devout followers, very much anti-government type people.


Looking at both of these interesting points together, one can draw several conclusions. One, that the crowd in the first and second part are, obviously, not formed of the same types of people, which is why the public opinion seems to turn around so swiftly. Two, that an actual crowd of say, dozens or hundreds of people DEMANDING a release of a particular person in any manner would have most likely been killed out of hand by Pilate. So we see that our numbers here have dropped from 50-1000 to maybe 12--and that's a very polite crowd, indeed.

And third, that the more peaceful followers of Christ wouldn't have been present here, because if they were all killed by Pilate then there wouldn't be anyone to carry on the message, which was basically half of why Christ had come in the first place. It would have been like traveling to a country that had been receiving threats of being nuked: illogical and probably fatal.

The people that WERE there, therefore, were anti-government hoodlums, basically, who didn'y much care if they were killed so long as they acted defiantly.
They were there to stage the recovery of Barabus in a successful manner--which they did.

[Biggles]

My understanding was that Barabus was a zealot. In this respect he represented both rebellion to the Roman Empire and the Jewish religious cause.

Many had thought Jesus would be the Messiah to throw off the Roman shackles - Barabus at that point looked a better bet.

It was the zealots that 35 or so years later brought the whole might of the Roman Empire down on the Jews and resulted in the destruction of the Jewish state. The Jews were taken as slaves into the Roman Empire (the ones that survived obviously) and their descendants settled in whichever part of the Empire they ended up in.

[Phyltre]

Personally I can't argue the point; the speaker at the symposium just said he was a freedom fighter, based on the translation of the original terms used to refer to him. I'm sure as to the ultimate accuracy there as personally I no knowledge of these dead languages.