Pietro Sarubbi is Barabba in the film “The passion” by Mel Gibson
Unscrupulous criminal or brave revolutionary?
Despite the objective difficulty of reconstructing his life and work due to the scarcity of biographical sources, moreover not without inconsistencies, modern historiography tends to re-evaluate the figure of Barabbas, the man to whom the crowd avoided the execution of the death sentence to the detriment of Jesus, inclined to consider him more of a libertarian enemy of Rome than a hardened criminal.
And without neglecting hypotheses suggestive to say the least, which I refer to in the following article, written some time ago for Notizie.it.
The liberation of Barabbas (print)
Who really was Barabbas , the man preferred to Jesus of Nazareth and saved from the crowd instead of him?
The biographical information on this character contained in the Gospels are scarce: Matteo he defined him as a "famous prisoner" , for Giovanni he was "a brigand" , according to Marco and Luca he would have been responsible for a violent revolt and perpetrator of a murder, but apart from the inevitable conclusion that he was a real " hothead", there are no other certainties.
The release of a prisoner awaiting trial was not a rarity at that time:Roman law contemplated this possibility by placing it all in the hands of the governor, who could release a man with an act of clemency called abolitio , while Jewish law provided for the pardon of a condemned person on the occasion of the Passover celebrations; according to many historians, the choice to oppose Barabbas to Jesus was due to the charisma and strong influence of man over the masses, who considered him leader undisputed national liberation struggle.
However, the origin of the name in Aramaic has opened up a further and fascinating hypothesis: Bar-Abbà it would mean “son of the Father” and this has led some scholars to consider "Barabbas" simply a name referring to Jesus himself, a thesis that would be reinforced by the fact that in some Greek and Syriac copies of the Gospel of Matthew, Barabbas is preceded by the proper name Iesous, equivalent of the Aramaic Joshua, or Jesus (Article taken from:www.notizie.it).