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
Pontius Pilate Jewish leaders remind him that Jesus' claim to be king is a challenge to Roman rule and to the Roman deification of Caesar. Roman magistrates had wide discretion in executing their tasks, and some readers question whether Pilate would have been so captive to the demands of the crowd. Pilate was later recalled to Rome for his harsh treatment of the Jews. With the Edict of Milan in AD 313, the state-sponsored persecution of Christians came to an end, and Christianity became officially tolerated as one of the religions of the Roman Empire. Afterwards, in 325, the First Ecumenical Council