Thus the most distinguished critic of the biographical school has no account to give of a second salient item in the record which, being entirely non-supernatural, must be held to have been inserted for some strong reason. It in fact closely involves the whole myth-theory. Barabbas was in all probability a regular figure in Semitic popular religion; and the name connects documentarily with that of Jesus. The reading "Jesus Barabbas," in Mt. xxvii, 16, as we have noted, [48] was long the accepted one in the ancient Church; and its entrance and its disappearance are alike significant. It is obviously probable that such a name as "Jesus the Son of the Father" (= Bar-Abbas [49]), applied to a murderer, would give an amount of offence to early Christian readers which would naturally lead in time to its elimination from the current text. [50] But on that view there is no explanation of its entrance. Such a stumbling-block could not have been set up without a compulsive reason. The anthropological and hierological data go to show that an annual sacrifice of a "Son of the Father" was a long-standing feature in the Semitic world. A story in Philo Judæus about a mummery in Alexandria in ridicule of the Jewish King Agrippa, the grandson of Herod, points pretty clearly to a local Jewish survival from that usage. A lunatic named Karabas is said to have been paraded as a mock-king, with mock-crown, sceptre and robe. [51] In all likelihood the K is a mistranscription for B. In any case, "the custom of sacrificing the son for the father was common, if not universal, among Semitic peoples," [52] as among others; and the Passover [53] was originally a sacrifice of firstlings, human and animal, [54] the former being probably most prevalent in times of disaster. "Devotion" was the principle: surrogate sacrifices would normally be substituted. Sacrifice of a king's son, in particular, was held to be of overwhelming efficacy by early Hebrews and other Semites, as among other races in the savage and barbaric stages. [55]