show_no_mercy

Imagine if we brought this into a modern analogy.

The US is occupying Iraq back in 2005. Let's say that a warden of a jail in Iraq named Captain Pilate is a US Army officer in charge of a prison in Baghdad. In this jail, there's an Iraqi insurgent named Saddam "Son of the Father". He was recently arrested for having detonated a road bomb and killed a few Iraqi civillians and some US troops.

The Sunnis bring to Captain Pilate an otherwise innocent man also named Saddam who we learn early in this story refers to himself in third person all the time as "The Son", is always praying to "the Father" and the Sunnis want him arrested and executed. Captain Pilate finds no reason to arrest and execute this man. But, Captain Pilate has a tradition where he releases a known insurrectionist and terrorist (murderer) from his jail because Ramadan is coming up... while the US is unpopularly occupying Iraq.

The Sunnis start a ruckus demanding the release of known insurgent Saddam "Barabbas" and that Captain Pilate execute the otherwise innocent Saddam, the "Christ".

Captain Pilate's reaction? "I guess I'll let a known killer and insurgent go and execute an innocent man as long as the situation doesn't get worse because these Sunnis are getting rowdy. I mean, it's not like this insurgent Saddam Barabbas is going to try again to plot the removal of US occupation in Iraq once he's freed...".

This is madness.

mountainman

The madness might be historically focussed when we realise that the press release for this incident that we are examining above has been delayed by about 300 hours, and that when it was finally released to the public announcement systems, the communique was actually sourced from Captain Pilate's Commanding President Constantine and his loyal propagandist and minister for Communications, Eusebius of Presidentarea, possibly writing from Rome, in a sealed off area inside the Vatican State, underground, and with the archives at hand.

Its the 300 hour delay that troubles me the most along with the fact that the entire "official version" of the narrative which we all now see was edited after the event, perhaps even personally, by Pilate's Boss Bullneck, the Commander of the Troops and his staff. What did he have to gain?

Steven Carr

It isn't really such a good analogy as Pilate would already have had Barabbas executed.

Unless this uprising that Barabbas was in had only happened in the previous few days.

In which case, why were the authorities bothered about Jesus, when they had an uprising on their hands?

And why were no questions asked of Jesus about his possible involvement in this uprising, what with him calling himself the Messiah?

Surely there could not have been a recent uprising, Pilate having a known Messiah-claimant on his hands, and Pilate wanting to let this know Messiah-claimant go, just after an uprising.

This is madness, to use an apt term.