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 an "Epistle of Herod to Pilate", and an "Epistle of Pilate to Herod", spurious texts that are no older than the 5th century. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church recognized Pilate as a saint in the 6th century, based on the account in the "Acts of Pilate", as it does his wife, named Procla, whose strange dream of Jesus Christ induced her to try to stop his crucifixion. There are many other legends about Pilate in the folklore of Germany, particularly about his birth, according to which Pilate was born in the Franconian city of Forchheim or the small village of