Jesus' Two Bodies: Barabbas and the Christ

This paper takes up the question of the doubling of the body of Jesus in Barabbas and Jesus in the Mark's gospel narrative, and situates this doubling in the context of the destruction of Jerusalem in the wake of which the text is written. It shows how the destruction of Jerusalem serves for the Flavians as the vindication of their rule and, for Mark, the vindication of Christainity. Reading this site with Barabbas' return in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, I suggest we might see this primal scene of supersession as necessarily predicated upon the staging of a civil war out of which a sovereign body emerges. Showing the way Schmitt reads these two sites, I suggest that ingredient to the production of "new-Schmittianisms" is the production of civil war superseded.