The Dark Brother of Christ

Friday, Oct. 05, 1962

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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.