John 19:1-3

“ Then Pilate therefore took Jesus and scourged him; 2, and the soldiers, having plaited a crown of thorns, placed it upon his head and arrayed him in a purple robe;and they said, Hail, king of the Jews! And they struck him with rods. ”

Pilate had ascended his tribunal to pronounce the liberation of Barabbas. It was at this time that he received the message from his wife (Matthew 27:19). Hengstenberg thinks that his washing his hands must also be placed at this time. But this act must have accompanied the pronouncing of the condemnation, which did not take place until later (John 19:13-16). After the two ineffectual efforts which have been described, Pilate has recourse to a third and last expedient. According to the Roman criminal code, scourging must necessarily precede the punishment of crucifixion. This is proved by a multitude of passages from Josephus and the ancient historians. Comp. Matthew 20:19; Luke 18:33, where Jesus, when predicting His Passion, does not separate scourging from crucifixion; Matthew 27:26 and Mark 15:15 imply the same thing. But on this occasion a strange thing occurs. Pilate orders the punishment by scourging, without yet pronouncing the decision as to the penalty of crucifixion; he does not expressly make the first of these two punishments the preliminary step to the second. He evidently hopes, by giving this satisfaction to the enemies of Jesus, to awaken the pity of the more moderate ones among them, as well as the compassion of the multitude and the zeal of His friends, and thus to succeed in averting the extreme punishment. Scourging, as it was practised among the Romans, was a punishment so cruel that the condemned person very often succumbed to it. The scourge was made of rods or thongs armed at the extremity with pieces of bone or lead. The condemned person received the blows while fastened to a small post so as to have the back bent and the skin stretched. With the first blows, the back became raw and the blood spurted out. Sometimes death followed immediately.

The maltreatment described in John 19:2-3 is only the act of the soldiers; Pilate allows it with the design of turning to account that which takes place.

The crown of thorns, the purple robe, the salutation this whole masquerade is a parody on Jewish royalty.

The thorny plant is probably the Lycium spinosum, which grows abundantly about Jerusalem, and the flexible stalk of which, armed with strong thorns, can be easily plaited. The red mantle was a common soldier's mantle, representing the purple robe worn by kings. This mockery was addressed far less to Jesus personally, whom the soldiers did not know, than to the whole nation, despised and detested by the Romans. It is the Jewish Messianic expectations that the soldiers ridicule in the person of Him who passes for having desired to realize them.

This maltreatment and this scourging are evidently the same as those which are spoken of in Matthew 27:27 and Mark 15:16; only these evangelists place them after the condemnation was pronounced, the reason of which fact we shall see. If the accomplishment of the scourging which was ordered by Pilate in these passages of the two Synoptics is not mentioned afterwards in them, it is perhaps because it had already taken place at an earlier moment (John).

Pilate, having allowed things to take their course, pursues his purpose: