Barabbas Barabbas Barabbas (; "Bar ʾAbbaʾ", literally "son of the father") is a figure mentioned in the New Testament of the Bible, in which he is an insurrectionary held by the Roman governor at the same time as Jesus, and whom Pontius Pilate freed at the Passover feast in Jerusalem, while keeping Jesus as a prisoner. According to all four canonical gospels there was a prevailing Passover custom in Jerusalem that allowed or required Pilate, the "" or governor of Judea, to commute one prisoner's death sentence by popular acclaim, and the "crowd" ("ochlos"), "the Jews" and "the multitude" in some
Matthew 27:58 to approach Pilate, and also has Pilate exclaiming on how quickly Jesus died. Matthew, Luke, and John do not have these details. Gundry notes that at the time Mark was written the question posed by skeptics was whether Jesus really was dead. By the time Matthew was written this had faded as an issue, to be replaced by the allegation that the disciples had stolen Jesus' body. Thus Matthew drops the sections emphasizing that Jesus was truly dead, and adds much evidence that the body could not have been stolen. There is also a much longer version of this scene