How did life on Earth begin? Recent scientific advances suggest that all living beings are descended from a single gene that existed around 4 billion years ago. This gene produced two proteins that created the genetic code, the universal language of life that marks the separation from the inanimate world. The scientists who discovered these proteins, recognizing their central role at the dawn of existence, gave them familiar names: Adam and Eve.

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Darwin's Promise: A Path to the Origin

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”1 German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote these words a decade after a new scientific theory shook the prevailing religious dogma to its core. In his 1871 book The Descent of Man, English naturalist Charles Darwin openly defied the Biblical narrative of Adam and Eve: human beings could not have been created directly by God in the Garden of Eden, because they were the product of evolution and shared a common ancestor with apes2. In the context of the origin of life, Nietzsche’s statement was eerily accurate: Adam and Eve were dead, and Darwin was the executioner.

The void left by Adam and Eve’s demise was occupied by a tantalizing promise. Darwin’s theory established a familial link between all living organisms, which would mean that “probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this Earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."3 If the evolutionary tree could be traced back to its very root, such was the promise, the secret of the origin of life would be revealed.

Advances in molecular biology in the second half of the 20th century validated Darwin’s hypothesis. The common origin was beyond any reasonable doubt: all organisms without exception use the genetic code, a code so universal yet so complex that it is impossible to envision it emerging multiple times independently. To perform their essential functions, all cells need to make proteins that are encoded in DNA sequences; the genetic code is the language that translates the genetic information from the four-letter alphabet of DNA to the twenty-letter alphabet of proteins. During evolution, natural selection acts on small changes in the sequence of DNA that accumulate as they are passed from generation to generation. The genetic code, however, has remained almost unchanged since the first microbes began to populate the Earth. Species evolve, but the code is an immutable facilitator. Any attempt to decipher the origin of life must address this question: how did the code that enables everything else come to be?

The answer is present, like a living fossil, in every cell of every living creature on the planet. It remained encrypted until 1995, when pioneering scientists Sergei Rodin and Susumu Ohno followed Darwin's trail to its very end and found a singular ancestral gene simultaneously coding for two proteins in a perfectly complementary manner. Brilliant but esoteric, the Rodin-Ohno hypothesis faded into obscurity until the laboratory of Charles Carter, an obstinate American biochemist, demonstrated it experimentally two decades later. Biblical Adam and Eve had fallen, but at the end of the Darwinian path that replaced them lay an equally mystical and fascinating duo: molecular Adam and Eve, the two proteins that created the genetic code.

A Code to Rule Them All

Proteins are the most extraordinary molecules on Earth, perhaps even in the entire universe. They are the molecules that perform nearly all the vital functions of living beings: from generating energy and synthesizing organic matter to enabling movement and communication. Despite their seemingly simple structure—repetitive chains of twenty different amino acids—they are powerful molecular machines, capable of catalyzing a vast range of chemical reactions with exquisite speed and precision. The success of proteins lies in the fact that while their function depends on three-dimensional folds, the information to produce them is stored linearly in DNA molecules. The ease of DNA replication through the generation of a complementary strand pairs perfectly with the versatility of proteins to generate new functions as their sequence changes.

The partnership between DNA and proteins, with RNA serving as a crucial intermediary, is governed by the set of rules defined by the genetic code. It is a convoluted code without any seeming internal logic—a puzzle that stumped leading researchers Marshall Nirenberg and Har Gobind Khorana in the 1960s as they laboriously identified which of the 20 amino acids are specified by each of the 64 possible DNA base triplet combinations. Understanding the origin of the genetic code involves a paradox: the code is read and interpreted by proteins that are themselves encoded in it. The ribosome, the cellular machine responsible for protein synthesis, is made of a mixture of proteins and RNA. The translation from the alphabet of DNA bases to that of amino acids is carried out by a specialized group of proteins called aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (hereafter referred to as synthetases for simplicity). These are the molecules that implement the code because they perform the critical task of reading base triplets and selecting the corresponding amino acids, which they then attach to transfer RNAs (tRNAs, adapter molecules) used during protein synthesis.

There are 20 different types of synthetases, one for each of the 20 amino acids that make up proteins. All living organisms must have at least one of each type, and each of these synthetases has a slightly different sequence that allows it to recognize its corresponding amino acid and tRNA. This specificity had to evolve over millions of years of Darwinian evolution. Yet the prerequisite for protein evolution is a preexisting code, creating an apparently unsolvable cycle akin to the chicken-or-egg- dilemma: what came first, the code or its interpreters?

A Treasure Hunt to the Beginning of Time

In the early 1990s, Novosibirsk University Professor Sergei Rodin and his son Andrei enjoyed passing the long Russian winters unraveling biological puzzles. Molecular biology was in the midst of a long golden era, ignited by the invention of a groundbreaking DNA sequencing method in 1977 by English biochemist Fred Sanger. This technique, which helped uncover relationships among living organisms, was revolutionizing fields as diverse as human genetics, pathogen research, and the development of recombinant drugs.

Sergei and Andrei turned their attention to the study of tRNA, the adapter molecule that facilitates protein synthesis. Together, they uncovered evidence within current tRNA sequences of a primordial system, hinting at the early stages of the genetic code4. Their findings caught the attention of Japanese scientist Susumu Ohno, a renowned evolutionary biologist known for his contributions on gene duplication, who led a laboratory at the City of Hope Medical Center near Los Angeles. During a scientific conference in Moscow, Ohno persuaded Sergei Rodin to swap the cold of Siberia for the warmth of California and join him in tackling a central problem in the paradox of the origin of life: the role of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases as the code interpreters.

Sergei Rodin and Susumu Ohno focused on trying to provide an explanation for a finding that baffled experts: the existence of two entirely different classes of synthetases. To understand this, consider that just as DNA sequence similarity between cousins indicates a recent common ancestor, so does protein sequence similarity suggest a common evolutionary precursor. For instance, humans see in three colors thanks to the action of three closely related opsin proteins, each adapted to detect a specific wavelength of light (blue, red, and green). The similarity in their sequences indicates that they evolved from a single ancestral opsin, like the one found in more primitive animals that perceive only one color.

In the case of synthetases, sequence analysis by various groups in the late 1980s revealed similarities among them, but with an important caveat: the 20 synthetases were divided into two separate classes, completely distinct in terms of sequence and three-dimensional structure56. The reason this was surprising is that proteins that catalyze very similar chemical reactions tend to be related to one another, indicating a single evolutionary origin. Even more intriguing, for the 20 amino acids that exist and make up proteins in all living organisms, scientists discovered a perfect symmetry: exactly half (10) are decoded by Class I synthetases, and the other half by Class II. This suggested that billions of years ago, the ancestors of Class I and Class II synthetases originated separately, each evolving over millions of years into 10 different protein families. Explaining how the function that implements the genetic code evolved once was challenging; explaining how it evolved twice seemed insurmountable.

Rodin and Ohno contended that the perfect symmetry between the two classes could not be a mere coincidence. Could it be hiding a fundamental property of the code, essential for its functioning? The two scientists embarked on a meticulous analysis of numerous synthetase sequences, looking for patterns that could establish some link between Class I and Class II and provide a clue on their evolutionary past. Despite exhaustive efforts, their search seemed destined for failure: the protein sequences of the two groups shared no discernible similarity. Shifting their focus from the proteins to the underlying DNA sequences that encode the two classes, however, led to a major turning point. Suddenly, a striking relationship emerged: in a mesmerizing pattern, the triplets coding for Class I synthetases tended to be complementary and in reverse order to those for Class II. Their statistical analysis yielded such a strong correlation that it all but ruled out any possibility of coincidence. The implications of this finding became immediately clear to the two researchers: going back in time, the only way such pattern could have emerged was through one single gene. A primordial gene that simultaneously encoded the ancestor of all Class I synthetases on one strand, and the ancestor of all Class II synthetases on the reverse complementary strand. 

Rodin and Ohno’s breakthrough pointed to the moment in time where chemistry gave rise to biology. If their hypothesis was correct, the gene they postulated had created a language that would be the backbone of an explosion in complexity that has been growing exponentially for 4 billion years. They envisaged this gene to be made of RNA, because DNA is generally accepted to be a more recent evolutionary invention. Despite its transcendental significance, their discovery was largely overlooked. Unlike other fields like physics, purely theoretical studies in molecular biology are uncommon and are often met with skepticism by a scientific community used to the tangibility of wet lab data. Rodin and Ohno published their results in 1995 in the journal Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, a relatively niche publication7. Their article received scant recognition, reflected in the minimal number of citations from subsequent studies.

It was not until after the turn of the millennium that their work began to attract some attention. An article published in 2002 in Molecular Cell, a journal with a wide readership among molecular biologists, proclaimed that the Rosetta Stone validating the Rodin-Ohno hypothesis had been found8. The lead author was Charles Carter, a professor at the University of North Carolina who had spent his career studying three-dimensional structures of proteins with the question of the origin of life in mind. Carter’s bold assertion was grounded in a 1994 study he had recently stumbled upon: it reported that a species of freshwater mold contained a bidirectional gene that, for the first time seen in a living being, mirrored the concept proposed by Rodin and Ohno9. Specifically, in this particular mold gene, the DNA sequence coding for one protein in one strand is perfectly complementary to the DNA sequence coding for a second protein in the reverse strand. Furthermore, these two proteins are each distantly related to one of the two classes of tRNA synthetases: glutamate dehydrogenase to Class I, and Hsp70 to Class II. Carter reasoned that this had to be a living relic of the original Rodin and Ohno gene.

In the years that followed, Carter transformed his laboratory to test Rodin and Ohno's theory experimentally. His team carefully dissected the various domains within synthetases, determining which parts were evolutionarily older and which were more recent. As they went back in time, the symmetry between the two synthetase classes was consistently maintained: at each evolutionary stage, both classes shared similar sizes, mirror configurations (with the start of Class I corresponding to the end of Class II), and most importantly, an underlying DNA sequence with a high degree of complementarity10111213. The decisive breakthrough occurred in 2015, when, with the help of computational tools, the Carter lab constructed a candidate sequence for the primordial Rodin and Ohno gene: a segment of DNA that encoded two 46 amino acid-long proteins, one on each strand and in a perfectly complementary manner, that respectively contained the ancestral core of each of the synthetase classes. They synthesized the two proteins in the laboratory and, in a pivotal moment, demonstrated that both were biochemically active14.

These two proteins, emerging as mirror images from the same gene, form the foundation of all subsequent encoded proteins. Given their central role in the inception of the genetic code—perhaps the most critical moment in the origin of life—Carter named them Αδάμ and Εωε (Adam and Eve, in Greek characters)15. Their existence underscores a fundamental principle: a code can only arise when there are at least two options to choose from.

Through the pioneering biochemical experiments conducted by the Carter laboratory, it was revealed that molecular Adam and Eve exhibited distinct specificities towards different groups of amino acids. This specialization allowed them to carry out an initial, albeit rudimentary, production of proteins (themselves), marking a significant advance over random synthesis. Over millions of years of evolution, these two proteins each diversified into ten distinct forms. The fact that the symmetry was maintained between the two classes suggests that they were still part of bidirectional genes as they coevolved. The diversification process mirrored the complexity of the genetic code itself: the incorporation of new amino acids led to the addition of new codons, and at the same time allowed the synthetases to become more accurate at decoding genetic information. This cycle of coevolution between the code and its interpreters elegantly exemplifies how a code can be refined by the very entities it generates.

Adam and Eve Live On

Despite recent technological advances in chemistry and genetics, there is no universally accepted model for how life originated from inorganic matter. Fundamental questions about the location, energy source, and the identity of the first biological molecules to evolve remain controversial. Molecular Adam and Eve do not answer all these questions, but, like their Biblical counterparts, offer a snapshot of creation. In The Descent of Man, Darwin tacitly refuted Biblical Adam and Eve and proposed a hypothetical tree of life linking all living organisms to a single evolutionary origin. Today, we know that at the root of Darwin's tree are molecular Adam and Eve.

The existence of these two ancestral aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases offers a hardly intuitive explanation for life's origins, diverging from the simple elegance of the Neo-Darwinian model. The primordial gene—we can refer to it as the Gene of Eden— underpins the existence of a very rudimentary initial code, that became progressively more complex. The idea of a code recursively defining itself is hard to fully grasp. Yet the existence of a single ancestral gene provides an explanation to the genetic code's origin paradox: the only way to create a code whose interpreters are encoded by the code itself is through an iterative process in which code and interpreters emerge in tandem.

The discovery of molecular Adam and Eve remains far from the public spotlight, eluding broad recognition even within the scientific community. Perhaps its remote, almost metaphysical nature is not well aligned with the zeitgeist of the 21st century, centered on engineering advances. Or it could be the uncomfortable feeling that an important piece of the puzzle is still missing. Bridging the gap from the inanimate world of Earth's early days to the significant complexity of Adam and Eve is not a straightforward process; so much so that Sergei Rodin, the theory’s initiator, and Charles Carter, its validator, had opposing interpretations of what came immediately before. While Rodin believed in the existence of a pre-protein RNA world16, a widely held but unproven theory in the origin-of-life field, Carter contended that life started with coevolution between very short proteins and RNA sequences17. This discrepancy exposes the fact that Adam and Eve do not offer a self-evident explanation for how the Gene of Eden replicated, and reproduction is a key component required for Darwinian evolution. Despite these unresolved questions, the overwhelming evidence of the existence of Adam and Eve stands as a monumental discovery. They left an undeniable trace to the present day, visible through the phylogenetic tree of synthetases and their still recognizable specular configuration1819. 

The Genesis myth about the creation of humans in the Garden of Eden emerged over 2,500 years ago in a small Eastern Mediterranean community. Over the centuries, it spread along with the three major Abrahamic religions —Judaism, Christianity, and Islam —becoming the predominant explanation for humanity’s beginnings throughout the world. The advent of Darwinism in the 19th century led to its decline, and religious precepts gradually gave way to scientific ones. With the discovery of the origin of the genetic code, however, Adam and Eve live on as a powerful metaphor of creation. They represent a unique moment in time in the distant past, at an undetermined location on planet Earth, where the duality of two perfectly complementary beings started the journey of existence.

This article was edited by Daniel Holoch

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“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians 3:28)

In millions of Christian churches worldwide, the scene of an execution engages visitors with a profound spiritual experience. The figure of a man on a cross is displayed as a powerful symbol of the sacrifice made by the son of God for the redemption of humanity’s sins. The story of Jesus is universal, shared among people of all backgrounds who travel the path of faith on their way to salvation. A small placard nailed to the cross is the only element that connects a timeless representation to the actual man who was executed nearly two thousand years ago. It contains a revealing inscription: “INRI”, the Latin initials for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”. Despite his transcending influence, the life of the historical Jesus remains shrouded in mystery: was he driven by political motivations, as suggested by the designation “King”? What was the reason for his execution? The man behind the myth is hidden by a veil of religious allegories, a nebulous historical record, and the foundational circumstances of the cult he created.

Jesus lived during a politically agitated time that was crucial for the fate of Israel. One hundred and thirty years before his birth, a Jewish rebellion against Greek rule had established an independent kingdom after centuries of exile and foreign control. This achievement, still celebrated by Jews today during the festival of Hanukkah, was soon threatened by the rising power of the Roman Empire. The historical period surrounding Jesus’ life, extensively documented by 1st-century historian Flavius Josephus, was marked by the struggles of the Jews to maintain their independence. Numerous revolts against Roman domination resulted in ultimate defeat in the early 2nd century CE, and a Jewish state was not to reemerge in the Levant until the creation of modern Israel in the 20th century.

In addition to the inscription on the cross, there are several indications that Jesus was not removed from the political turmoil of his time. His title, “Christ,” is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word “Messiah” (meaning “anointed”); a term that has significant political implications in the Hebrew Bible, as it designates the ruler of a united Israel under God. Jesus was given a Roman punishment typically reserved for individuals engaging in subversive behavior, such as the slave leader Spartacus and his fellow combatants or several Jewish rebels mentioned in Josephus’ chronicles. According to the four canonical Gospels, the fate of Jesus was tied to that of a political prisoner, Barabbas, a man “who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection made in the city, and for murder” (Luke 23:19). When the Jewish crowd chose for Barabbas to be pardoned over Jesus, the Son of God was crucified between two members of the rebel band. If Barabbas, not Christ, was truly the ringleader of the insurrection, the royal treatment in the inscription INRI would seem more fitting for him than for the man who was crucified. In comparison to someone like Barabbas, how could Jesus represent such a threat for both Romans and Jews? The history of how Christianity developed after Jesus’ crucifixion holds illuminating insights into these apparent contradictions.    

The case for the existence of Jesus

“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man” (Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.63)

The question of the historical Jesus is complex because there are no documents written during his lifetime that attest to his existence. Jesus was crucified around 33 CE, but the first non-Christian reference to him (a brief and controversial fragment in one of Josephus’ books) does not appear until 93 CE. The Gospels, which relate the story of Jesus’ life, are believed by historians to have been written between 70 and 100 CE. Their focus is on Jesus’ miracles and teachings, and their metaphorical style makes it difficult to discern the historical figure behind the narrative. The parallels in the story to other ancient divinities and the scarcity of early sources have led some scholars to posit that Jesus may not have existed as a historical person, but rather as a mythological figure created by early Christians. This perspective, known as mythicism, is far from widely accepted among historians, but has gained attention and support in recent years.

The earliest written references to Jesus that have survived to the present day are the letters of Paul the Apostle, written in Greek like the rest of the New Testament and sent to various incipient Christian communities around the Mediterranean. In his Epistle to the Galatians (54 CE), Paul laid the foundations of Christian doctrine that remain in place today. He introduced the notion of faith in Christ as a means to escape the constraints of the Law of Moses, extending the cult of the Jewish God to non-Jews and effectively making the new religion universal. Despite not being one of Jesus’ twelve closest disciples, Paul called himself an apostle and was a major figure in early Christianity. His missionary travels were instrumental for the spread of the new religion, and his writings made him one of the most influential thinkers of all time.

Paul’s letters contain surprisingly little information about Jesus’ life: There is not a single reference to his childhood, Mary and Joseph, or Nazareth. Nothing on Pontius Pilate, Barabbas, or the appearance before the Sanhedrin. The first person to leave a written testimony about Jesus did not seem to know a lot about the main character in his works. While this point is one of the pillars of the mythicist thesis, there are two key arguments that strongly suggest that Jesus did in fact exist. The first is the robust historical evidence supporting the crucifixion event: in addition to being a central topic in Paul’s writings, it is mentioned in several independent sources, making it hard to claim that it would be based on a fabricated fact. The second one is that Jesus had a brother whose name was James and who played an important role in the Church of Jerusalem following Jesus’ death. James appears in the Gospels, in the Acts of the Apostles, in Paul’s letters, and also in Josephus’ historical record. The fact that Jesus had a sibling challenges the notion of Mary’s perpetual virginity, so the Church has traditionally argued that he was not an actual brother, but rather a cousin or a stepbrother, even if the Greek word used in every text (adelphos) unequivocally means brother. He was not referred to as brother in the sense of comrade, because some of the men who were closest to Jesus, including Peter and the other apostles, did not receive that designation. Paul described meeting James during one of his trips to Jerusalem: “I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas [referring to Peter] and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles – only James, the Lord’s brother” (Galatians 1:18-19). If James was a real person, his brother Jesus must have been real, too.

Paul vs James: A conflict between Greek and Jewish Christianity

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ” (Galatians 1:6-7)

The way the life of Jesus was portrayed in the New Testament was defined by the outcome of a fundamental conflict that took place within early Christianity. Paul and James were at the helm of two bitterly opposed factions among Jesus’ followers: James, on the one hand, asserted that the principles of the law of Moses must be kept. In his view, the cult of Christ had to be restricted to Jews. Like Jesus, James’ native language was Aramaic. Paul, on the other hand, advocated for the Christian creed to be opened to Gentiles, people who were not bound to follow the Jewish Law. He was a Roman citizen, born into a family of diaspora Jews living in Tarsus, in modern-day Turkey, and he wrote in Greek. An important focus of Paul’s writings was dedicated to defending his views over those of his rivals, whom he called “Judaizers”. His revolutionary idea to break with Hebrew tradition and distance the new cult from Jewish practices, in particular circumcision, was not well received in the Jerusalem community. In one of his trips to the Judean capital, Paul was arrested after being confronted by James and his followers: “The next day Paul and the rest of us went to see James, and all the elders were present. […] They said to Paul: ‘You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law. They have been informed that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs.’” (Acts 21:20-21).   

The religion spread by Paul initially took hold in cities with a large presence of Hellenized Jews, Jews who like Paul had adopted Greek as their first language and had grown culturally apart from their co-religionists in Israel. Paul’s missionary trips around the Mediterranean were a resounding success and the Christian community grew exponentially by adding members from various religious backgrounds. Christians that continued to adhere to Jewish Law, on the other hand, were severely weakened after the First Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 CE. After the Roman army put Jerusalem under siege and eventually destroyed the Jewish Temple (of which only the Western Wall still stands today), Jewish Christians formerly led by James dispersed across the Levant. The existence of Jewish Christian communities such as the Nazarenes and the Ebionites is documented up to the 7th century, but their importance gradually faded and was eclipsed by Gentile Christianity. The entire body of literature of early Christianity is written in Greek and none of the original Jewish Christian texts, presumably written in Aramaic or Hebrew, have survived to our day.

The theological victory of Paul’s followers over James’ followers and the creation of an entirely new religion rather than a new sect within Judaism meant that Gentile Christians got to tell the story of Jesus’ life and teachings in their own terms. But the original Jesus, the man who died on the cross, surely had more in common with his brother than with Paul, a man he never met and who persecuted Christians before converting on the road to Damascus. The designation “Christ” was probably given posthumously, as Jesus is unlikely to have used a Greek title as an Aramaic-speaking Jew who spent most of his life in the land of Israel. Based on his brother’s stance, the inscription on the cross, and the Roman punishment he received, Jesus was probably a pious Jew who potentially opposed the occupation of his nation by the Romans. As historian and archeologist Robert Eisenman points out in his book James, the brother of Jesus: “Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus”. Paul himself acknowledged that the Jesus he described might have been very different from the Jesus described by Judaizers: “For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the Spirit you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough” (2 Corinthians 11:4).

Jesus Barabbas, the insurrectionist

“We have found this man subverting our nation. He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be Messiah, a king” (Luke 23:2)

In his Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, 3rd-century biblical scholar Origen of Alexandria devoted significant attention to the following quote: “Pilate said to them, ‘Whom do you want that I release to you? Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?’” (Matthew 27:17). For the modern reader, this passage holds a surprising revelation: in the source text that Origen was using, both Barabbas and Christ were named “Jesus”. Origen found it implausible for a criminal to have the same name as the Messiah and thus favored simplifying it to just “Barabbas”. Most later copies and modern translations of the New Testament adopted this variation, even if it may have represented a deviation from Matthew’s original text. But what Origen (writing in Greek) did not mention was that Barabbas also held a significant title: in Aramaic, Barabbas means “Son of the Father”. It is a patronymic surname – a commonly used form in Semitic languages - where bar means “son” (similar to ben in Hebrew, or bin in Arabic), and abba means “father” (abba in Hebrew, ab in Arabic). So in the original Gospel of Matthew, the man who narrowly escaped crucifixion shares not only his first name with the man who took his spot on the cross, but also the same designation: Jesus Christ himself is referred to as the “Son of the Father” in the Bible, only using the Greek term instead of the Aramaic one.

The story of Jesus Barabbas is much more aligned with the historical context than that of Jesus Christ: the story of a Jewish insurrectionist who was sentenced to death by the Romans for leading a rebellion, a man who proclaimed himself king of the Jews (INRI), the Aramaic Messiah, the brother of James, who fought to uphold the Jewish Law. It is possible that the historical Jesus was none other than Barabbas, whose death on the cross with two of his accomplices inspired the start of a new cult within Judaism. The figure of Christ as it is reflected in scripture - the Greek Messiah, the apolitical miracle worker and teacher, the timeless deity - might have emerged later as Paul and his followers distanced themselves from James, Judaism and the original Jesus. The narrative of a Jewish patriotic leader was at odds with a message constructed around salvation for all humanity, so Paul may have deliberately avoided the subject of Jesus’ political motivations and chosen to focus on the topics of crucifixion and resurrection. By the time the Gospels were written, decades after the events in question, Paul’s “other Jesus” might have become so different from the historical person that Jesus Christ and Jesus Barabbas were presented as two different people, each of them implicitly associated with a different branch of the nascent religion.

Some modern Bible scholars such as Bart Ehrman question the historicity of Barabbas: the Roman custom of releasing a prisoner in honor of the Passover festival is not documented anywhere outside the New Testament, and in all other instances Pilate proved to be ruthless against anyone who challenged Roman authority. According to this view, the Gospel representation would have been conceived with the purpose of shifting the blame for Jesus’ execution from the Romans to the Jews. This premise can also be used to conclude, however, that from the two men in the scene it is actually Barabbas who reflects the historical Jesus, whereas the allegorical figure of Christ would have been introduced later in a way that could not be associated with the original Jewish insurgent.

The search for the true nature of Jesus has captivated Christians and non-Christians alike for nearly two thousand years. Centuries of theological debate, centered around Jesus’ divinity and the meaning of his teachings, have shaped Christianity and its different denominations, leading to divisions and even war. A more empirical approach has been limited by gaps in the historical record, such that every hypothesis inevitably contains an element of speculation. What does clearly emerge from the Bible’s inconsistencies, however, is that some of the most relevant dogmas in Christianity, such as its universal character and the primacy of faith, were forged in the context of a religious confrontation after Jesus’ death. There are clear omissions in the New Testament around Jesus’ political standing at a time of struggle, but there is also an indelible fingerprint of a Jewish man who was executed by the Romans for claiming to be king. Jesus the man certainly existed, but he is also the personification of a revolutionary concept, “God is salvation,” which perhaps not coincidentally is the etymological meaning of the name “Jesus” in Hebrew. Was Jesus a rebel leader, an apocalyptic prophet, or was he a mythological figure? He might just have been all three. 

Edited by Daniel Holoch

In July 2021, seven months before launching an attack on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin wrote a history essay that implicitly made the case for war. Ukrainian independence, his reasoning went, is only justified “through the denial of its past”, as it is a country “shaped on the lands of historical Russia”.

The Ukrainian question is of high emotional significance for the Russian national story. It goes deep into one of the central elements that form the very concept of Russia: its own name. Modern Russia derives its appellation from the Land of Rus’ (commonly referred to as Kyivan Rus’), a medieval state that existed between the 9th and 13th centuries and that had its center of gravity in the city of Kyiv. The Russian foundational myth portrays the Rus’ as a semi-legendary people at the apex of all East Slavic populations: “Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians are all descendants of the Ancient Rus”, Putin writes. At the time, the Rus’ were one of many warrior tribes that roamed around Europe in pursuit of conquest. They were originally foreign, Scandinavian Vikings that, sailing across the Baltic Sea from the shores of modern Sweden, established their rule over predominantly Slavic populations all the way to the Black Sea. The term Rus’ itself originated from an Old Norse word meaning “the men who row” and has the same root as the Swedish coastal region of Roslagen and the Finnish name for Sweden (Ruotsi).

The Nordic origin of the name of Russia is a subject of debate with considerable political charge. During World War II, as German troops advanced towards Moscow in the midst of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi propaganda machine used the Viking origin of the Rus’ to spread the slander that the Russian nation owed its existence to a racially superior Germanic elite. This prompted alternative theories to proliferate within the Soviet Union, the most popular being one that suggested a link to the Ukrainian river Ros and an Old Slavic term meaning “river people”. After the crushing victory by the Red Army put the theories of Germanic supremacy to bed, the historiographic consensus slowly shifted back towards the Normanist hypothesis. Common Russian names such as Olga and Igor are Scandinavian in origin and trace back to the first rulers of the Rus’, all of which had etymologically Norse names.

But why is the most powerful Slavic nation, the largest country on Earth, still waging wars in the name of a long extinct state founded by Vikings? This may have to do with the way the Duchy of Moscow cemented its authority as it evolved from a small Principality into the vast Eurasian empire it is today. When in 1480 Ivan the Great, direct descendent of the Rus’ rulers, freed Moscow from over two hundred years of Mongol domination, he set out to bring all the former Rus’ territories under the same roof. By crowning himself as “Tsar of All the Russias”, his grandson Ivan the Terrible laid claim over areas, such as modern Ukraine, that had belonged to different political entities for centuries. “Two Romes fell, but the third – Moscow – stands, and a fourth will never be” says the first Tsar in Sergei Eisenstein’s brilliant movie about his life. The nascent Russian state was modelled after the Roman empire, with a centralized rule around the city of Moscow and an autocrat whose title was the Slavic version of the word “Caesar”. Moscow used the narrative around a common ancestral people to justify its imperial wars of conquest, and the region that was known as Muscovy gradually became recognized as Russia.

By sending a column of tanks to Kyiv, “the mother of all Russian cities”, Vladimir Putin resumed the old Tsarist goal of ruling over all the territories of the Ancient Rus’. By failing to take Kyiv, Putin may have added a key new chapter to Ukraine’s own foundational myth, away from the rowing men.