The Work
Barabbas (Barabbas, in the Swedish original) was published in Sweden in 1950 by Albert Bonniers Förlag and in English translation by Alan Blair the same year. At approximately 140 pages, it is a short novel of great theological density. It won Lagerkvist the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951 - the Swedish Academy citing his 'artistic vigor and true independence of mind with which he endeavors in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind.' A film adaptation was produced in 1953 (directed by Alf Sjöberg) and a major Hollywood production starring Anthony Quinn appeared in 1961.
The novel imagines the life of Barabbas after the exchange narrated in Mark 15:6-15 - the release of Barabbas in place of Jesus, which Pilate offered as a customary Passover concession. The Gospel accounts give no information about Barabbas beyond his name and the charge against him (murder, or insurrection, depending on the Gospel). Lagerkvist's novel is an imaginative reconstruction of what such a man - freed by an act he did not request and cannot understand - might do with that freedom.
Biblical Engagement
Mark 15:15 - 'And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be crucified' - is the novel's singular biblical hinge. Lagerkvist takes this verse with absolute seriousness: what is it to be the man whose release required another man's death? Barabbas did not ask for the exchange; he did not engineer it; he does not understand it. But he cannot escape it. The novel's entire trajectory is the story of a man living with an impossible debt he can neither repay nor forget.
Isaiah 53:5 - 'But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed' - is the theological subtext for the Barabbas exchange. The atonement theology of substitutionary redemption - that the innocent suffers for the guilty - finds its most stark narrative embodiment in the Barabbas story: this man, this actual guilty criminal, is literally released because that man, that actual innocent teacher, is killed in his place. Lagerkvist makes the substitution not a theological abstraction but a biographical fact that shapes one man's entire subsequent life.
Luke 23:46 - 'And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost' - is echoed in the novel's closing scene. Barabbas is crucified in Rome as a Christian, falsely. He dies not in faith but in a kind of desperate reaching toward the darkness: 'To thee I deliver up my soul.' He does not know to whom he speaks. The words are the words of the Psalms (Psalm 31:5, which Jesus quotes in Luke 23:46), emptied of their confident faith and filled with Barabbas's characteristic uncertainty. He dies with Jesus's words in his mouth but without Jesus's faith in his heart - the most poignant image of the novel's central theme: the man who cannot believe and cannot stop being drawn to the one he cannot believe in.
Psalm 22:1 - 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' - is invoked indirectly throughout the novel. Barabbas's entire life is a form of this question: he was saved by the death of someone he cannot understand, and God - if God exists - gave no sign of his presence to Barabbas. The novel takes seriously the experience of divine absence as a genuine theological category, not merely a symptom of unbelief.
Author and Context
Pär Lagerkvist (1891-1974) was born in Växjö, Sweden, into a devout Lutheran family. He lost his religious faith as a young man in the face of both the new scientific worldview and the catastrophic violence of the First World War. His work is defined by a persistent wrestling with the absence of God - he was not an indifferent secularist but a man tormented by the loss of a faith he could not recover and could not be without. His earlier works (Anguish, 1916; The Eternal Smile, 1920) established this existential posture; Barabbas was the first work in which he addressed it through a specifically Christian narrative.
The novel was written in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Lagerkvist was Swedish - Sweden was not occupied - but he was deeply engaged with the moral catastrophe of the war years. The figure of Barabbas - a man freed by another's death, unable to believe, unable to forget, perpetually haunted by a grace he did not seek - was Lagerkvist's image of the modern secular person: formed by Christianity, unable to affirm it, unable to escape it.
The Scandinavian literary context includes Ibsen's wrestling with Christianity and the later existentialism of Kierkegaard, which shaped Lagerkvist's intellectual formation. Barabbas can be read as a novelistic exploration of the Kierkegaardian question: what would it mean to stand before the absolute, unable to make the leap of faith, yet unable to look away?
Themes
The novel's central theme is the condition of the person on the margin of faith: close enough to the sacred to be permanently altered by proximity to it, but unable to make the movement of belief that would allow them to be transformed by it. Barabbas witnesses the crucifixion, hears the accounts of the resurrection (which he half-believes and half-suspects to be wish-fulfillment), falls in with a community of early Christians in Rome, and eventually dies as a Christian - but never with conviction. He is always a step behind, always watching from outside, always unable to say 'I believe' with any certainty.
A second theme is the nature of substitutionary sacrifice. The novel takes seriously the possibility that the Barabbas exchange is theologically significant: that the death of the innocent in place of the guilty is not merely a miscarriage of Roman justice but a prefiguration and embodiment of the atonement. Barabbas cannot process this possibility - it requires a faith he doesn't have - but it pursues him.
Reception
The novel was acclaimed internationally from publication. In Sweden it was immediately recognized as a masterwork. The Nobel Prize confirmed its status. Theological readers found it a profound engagement with doubt; secular readers found it a moving exploration of existential uncertainty. It has been continuously in print since publication.
Legacy
Barabbas established the genre of the twentieth-century theological novel focused not on the believer's inner journey but on the observer who cannot believe - the figure who witnesses the sacred from outside. It influenced subsequent literary engagements with Jesus, including Lagerkvist's own Sibyl (1956), and contributed to a tradition of serious secular fiction that takes the claims of Christianity seriously without affirming them.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Mark 15:6-15 (the Barabbas exchange), Isaiah 53 (the suffering servant), Psalm 22 (the cry of dereliction), Luke 23:33-46 (the crucifixion in Luke), Romans 5:6-11 (Christ dying for the ungodly), and Hebrews 9:22-28 (the necessity and sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice).
Further Reading
- Leif Sjöberg, Pär Lagerkvist (1976) - the standard English-language account of Lagerkvist's life and work. - Otto Lagercrantz, Pär Lagerkvist (1958, English trans. 1983) - the earlier Swedish biography, more personal and impressionistic. - Robert Gordis, 'Barabbas and the Bible,' Judaism 2 (1953) - an early Jewish theological response to the novel's engagement with the Passion narrative.