Cinema: The Dark Brother of Christ

Barabbas. A mysterious figure. The Gospels say only that he was a thief and a murderer condemned with Christ but released by Pilate when the mob, asked to choose which one should live, cried out: “Not this man but Barabbas!” The church fathers say little more. Yet if Christ died for any man he died for Barabbas. What is the meaning of this fateful and God-chosen criminal who gleams in the shadows of the Christian understanding?

In a novel published in the U.S. in 1951, the same year he won a Nobel Prize, Sweden’s Pär Lagerkvist explored the question with spiritual insight and intellectual distinction. In the script for this film, which is based on the novel, Britain’s Christopher Fry has both dramatized and deepened the novelist’s reflections. With the result that Barabbas is a cinema curiosity almost as rare as a whale that spouts holy water: a full-color, widescreen, multimillion-dollar religious spectacle that is also, at many points, an intense and illuminating religious experience.

The film begins the story of Barabbas where the Bible lets it end. Flung from his cell by soldiers, the brutish criminal (Anthony Quinn) reels against the whipping post where Christ has just been scourged; when he rises to his feet his hands are covered with Christ’s blood. Flung into the sunlight, he stands blinking at a young man in white robes; is it merely the unaccustomed light that dazzles his eyes, or does he really see a radiance streaming from the young man’s face? As he stares, strangely moved, he stumbles against a big wooden cross, which almost falls on his back. Later Barabbas follows Christ to the Place of a Skull, where Christ dies the death that Barabbas, but for the grace of God, would surely have died instead. “Good,” the brute mutters guiltily. “He’s dead, the same as any other man. That’s the end of it.”

On the contrary, that is only the beginning of the passion of Barabbas, an agony not of hours but of years, a spiritual life and a ritual death that duplicate darkly the life and death of Christ. Like Christ, Barabbas goes into the wilderness; but whereas in the wilderness Christ came face to face with God, Barabbas turns away from him defiantly and resumes his wicked ways. Like Christ, he is brought to justice; but to his amazement he is once again delivered from death by the man who died that men might live. “A man who has been released by the people,” the Roman judge announces, “cannot thereafter be given a capital sentence.” Barabbas gasps. “I can’t be killed! He died in my place! The death has been paid! He has taken my death!” The judge smiles a little, and consigns the defendant to a fate rather worse than death: the sulphur mines of Sicily.

And so, like Christ, Barabbas descends into hell. In the third decade he rises again, a man transformed in body but not in spirit. He has thought continually of Christ, but still he cannot understand how God could exist if God cannot be seen, how God could be a man, how the death of that man could hold for all men a promise of eternal life. He cannot understand until, hounded by ignorance as other men are led by revelation, he gives his life blindly for the man who gave his life for him; he dies that God may live, he hangs on the Cross of Christ and then, peering into the darkness with a hopeless hope, Barabbas cries out into the emptiness as Christ once cried: “I give myself up into your keeping.”

The story has its lapses and the film its faults. Actor Quinn, though generally effective, sometimes sounds more like a punk out of Cicero than a hood from the Holy Land. And Director Richard Fleischer, impelled by Producer Dino de Laurentiis, has wasted time on spectacle that had more usefully been spent on theme Even so, the film is continuously alive and what keeps it alive is the burning sincerity of its search for the reality of God and the meaning of the hero’s singular and apocalyptic life.

The key to the meaning of Barabbas can perhaps be found in the curious fact that bar abbas in Chaldeo-Aramaic means “the son of the father”; and in the paleo-Christian legend that Barabbas and Christ had the same first name: Jesus. It can therefore literally be said that Jesus died for Jesus as well as for mankind, and it can be mythologically assumed that Christ and Barabbas are brothers. The script explicitly conceives Barabbas as the dark brother of Christ, the natural as opposed to the spiritual man, a counterpart to Cam and perhaps even to the Hermes of the alchemists. But in a religious sense the picture presents Barabbas as something more immediate, obligatory and dreadful He is the reality of religion in this world His life, as the film describes it. is the holy and unholy, horrible and wonderful story or what happens to any man who is merely man and who seriously lives in imitation of Christ.