Jesus Barabbas

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jesus Barabbas is a religious-historical novel by the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderberg . It was published in 1928 and has the subtitle From the memoirs of Leutnant Jägerstam ( Swedish : Ur löjtnant Jägerstams memoarer ).

Emergence

Hjalmar Söderberg had long been interested in religious topics. In 1918 he examined the Moses theme in the novel Jahves eld (German: JHWHs Feuer ). So dealing with the New Testament was only consistent. Söderberg himself has named his deep urge to search for the truth as the reason for this religious studies research.

action

The narrator of the novel is a lieutenant Jägerstam who lives in Copenhagen in the 1920s and remembers an earlier existence as a Jew Ruben bar-Jona at the time of Jesus . Of course, he reports especially about Jesus, e.g. For example, how he briefly went to his father's apprenticeship as a tailor, how he experienced him as a preacher or how it was back then when Jesus and his followers were arrested and condemned after the violent uprising in the Temple of Jerusalem and the crowd got him screaming loudly. So Jesus is not crucified here, because he is identical to the well-known prisoner Barabbas , whose first name was Jesus. At the same time, Jägerstam tells of his own life story and creates an interesting picture of the time, e.g. B. from his academic years in Alexandria. The book also contains a series of academic conversations conducted by Jägerstam's Copenhagen friends, including an apostate theologian and an active pastor. The novel is characterized by the typical style of Söderberg, a mixture of irony and seriousness.

reception

The thesis that Jesus and Barabbas were one person and that Jesus was not crucified at all, aroused great outrage and wild insults in the Swedish newspapers. They refused to recognize Söderberg's serious scientific approach. In 1932, a purely scientific treatment of the topic with the title The Metamorphosed Messiah (Swedish: Den förvandlade messias ) and the subtitle Jesus Barabbas II followed . In 1982 Sven Lagerstedt examined Söderberg's theses on the basis of the more recent theological specialist literature and determined how much they were ahead of their time.

expenditure

  • Jesus Barabbas . Bonnier 1928
  • Jesus Barabbas . in: Skrifter Vol. 8. Bonnier 1978.
  • Jesus Barabbas . BoD 2012. ISBN 978-3-8482-0221-8 . Translation from Swedish by Martin Abraham.

literature

  • Martin Abraham. Epilogue to the 2012 translation.
  • Bure Holmbäck. Hjalmar Söderberg: Ett författarliv . Bonnier 1988. ISBN 9100472956 .
  • Sven Lagerstedt. Hjalmar Söderberg and religions . Almqvist and Wiksell 1982. ISBN 91-22-00564-1 .

Web links