Luke 23:20-25

This manoeuvre having failed, Pilate returns to the expedient on which he reckons most; he will try to satisfy the anger of the most infuriated, and to excite the pity of those who are yet capable of this feeling, by a beginning of punishment. The real contents of the declaration announced by the προσεφώνησε, he spake again to them, Luke 23:20, are not expressed till the end of Luke 23:22: “ I will therefore chastise him, and let him go. ” But Pilate is interrupted before having uttered his whole thought by the cries of the Jews, Luke 23:21; his answer, Luke 23:22, breathes indignation. By the τρίτον, for the third time, allusion is made to his two previous declarations, Luke 23:4 and Luke 23:14-15. Γάρ bears on the idea of crucifixion, Luke 23:21: “Crucify him? For he has done...what evil?” But this indignation of Pilate is only an example of cowardice. Why scourge Him whom he acknowledges to be innocent? This first weakness is appreciated and immediately turned to account by the Jews. It is here, in Luke's account, that the scourging should be placed. John, who has left the most vivid recital of this scene, places it exactly at this moment. According to Matthew and Mark, the scourging did not take place till after the sentence was pronounced, agreeably to custom, and as the first stage of crucifixion.

Ver. 23 summarizes a whole series of negotiations, the various phases of which John alone has preserved to us (Luke 19:1-12). Jesus, covered with blood, appears before the people. But the rulers and their partisans succeed in extinguishing the voice of pity in the multitude. Pilate, who reckoned on the effect of the spectacle, is shocked at this excess of cruelty. He authorizes them to carry out the crucifixion themselves at their own risk; they decline. They understand that it is he who serves as their executioner. To gain him there remain yet two ways. All at once changing their tactics, they demand the death of Jesus as a blasphemer: “ He made himself the Son of God. ” But on hearing this accusation, Pilate shows himself still less disposed to condemn Jesus, whose person had already inspired him with a mysterious fear. The Jews then determine to employ the weapon which they had kept to the last, probably as the most ignoble in their own eyes, that of personal intimidation. They threaten him with an accusation before the emperor, as having taken a rebel under his protection. Pilate knows how ready Tiberius will be to welcome such a charge. On hearing this threat, he understands at once, that if he wishes to save his place and life, he has no alternative but to yield. It is at this point that the four narratives again unite. Pilate for the second time ascends the judgment-seat, which was set up in a raised place in the open square situated before the praetorium. He washes his hands (Matthew), and again declining all participation in the judicial murder which is about to be committed, he delivers Jesus over to His enemies.

Ver. 25 of Luke is the only passage of this narrative where the feelings of the historian break through the objectivity of the narrative. The details repeated here (Luke 23:19) regarding the character of Barabbas bring into prominence all that is odious in the choice of Israel; and the words, he delivered Him to their will, all the cowardice of the judge who thus declines to act as the protector of innocence. Matthew and Mark here narrate the abuse which Jesus had to suffer from the Roman soldiers; it is the scene related John 19:1-3, and which should be placed before the scourging. The scene of it, according to Mark, was the inner court of the praetorium, which agrees with John. It was less the mockery of Jesus Himself than of the Jewish Messiah in His person.

3. The Crucifixion of Jesus: Luke 23:26-46.

John indicates, as the time when Pilate pronounced sentence, the sixth hour; Mark, as the hour at which Jesus was crucified, the third. According to the ordinary mode of reckoning time among the ancients (starting from six o'clock in the morning), it would be mid-day with the first, nine o'clock in the morning with the second. The contradiction seems flagrant: Jesus condemned at noon, according to John, and crucified at nine. according to Mark! Langen brings new arguments to support an attempt at harmony which has often been made that John reckoned the hours as we do, that is to say, starting from midnight. The sixth hour would then be with him six o'clock in the morning, which would harmonize a little better with Mark's date, the interval between six and nine o'clock being employed in preparations for the crucifixion.

But is it probable that John adopted a mode of reckoning different from that which was generally in use, and that without in the least apprizing his readers? We incline rather to hold with Lange, in his Life of Jesus, that Mark dated the beginning of the punishment from the time of the scourging, which legally formed its first act. In this Mark followed an opinion which naturally arose from the connection in which scourging was ordinarily practised. It is John who, by his more exact knowledge of the whole course of the trial, has placed this part of the punishment of Jesus at its true time and in its true light. The scourging, in Pilate's view, was not the beginning of the crucifixion, but rather a means of preventing it. Thus it is that Mark has ante-dated the crucifixion by the whole interval which divided the scene of the Ecce homo from the pronouncing of the sentence and its execution.

It is absolutely impossible to suppose that the whole long and complicated negotiation between the Jews and Pilate took place between the last sitting of the Sanhedrim (which was held as soon as it was day, Luke 22:66) and six o'clock in the morning. See my Comment. sur Jean, ii. pp. 606 and 607.

The punishment of crucifixion was in use among several ancient peoples (Persians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Indians, Seythians, Greeks). Among the Romans, it was used only for slaves (servile supplicium, Horace), and for the greatest criminals (assassins, brigands, rebels). It was abolished by Constantine. The scourging took place either before setting out, or on the way to the cross (Liv. 33:36). According to Plutarch, every criminal carried his own cross. There was borne before him or hung round his neck a white plate, on which his crime was indicated (titulus, σανίς, αἰτία). The punishment took place, as a rule, beyond inhabited houses, near a road, that the largest possible number of people might witness it. The Talmud of Jerusalem relates that before crucifixion there was offered to the prisoner a stupifying draught, which compassionate people, generally ladies of Jerusalem, prepared at their own cost. The cross consisted of two pieces, the one perpendicular (staticulum), the other horizontal (antenna). Nearly at the middle of the first was fixed a pin of wood or horn (πῆμα, sedile), on which the prisoner rested as on horseback. Otherwise the weight would have torn the hands, and left the body to fall. They began ordinarily by setting up and fixing the cross (Cic. Verr. 5:66; Jos. Bell. Jude 1:7; Jude 1:7.6. 4); then by means of cords the body was raised to the height of the antenna, and the nails driven into the hands. The condemned person was rarely nailed to the cross while it was yet lying on the ground, to be afterwards raised.

The cross does not seem to have been very high. Langen thinks that it was twice the height of a man; that is the maximum; and it is probable that generally it was not so high. The rod of hyssop on which the sponge was held out to Jesus could not be more than two or three feet in length. As to the feet, Paulus, Lücke, Winer, and others have more or less positively denied that they were nailed. They appeal to John 20:25. But would it not have been singular pedantry on the part of Thomas to speak here of the holes in the feet? He enumerates the wounds, which were immediately within reach of his hand. It is the same when Jesus speaks to Thomas, Luke 23:27. Then they allege the fact that the Empress Helena, after having discovered the true cross, sent to her son the nails which had been fastened in the hands of Christ. But it is not said that she sent to him all that she had found. The contrary rather appears from the tenor of the narrative (see Meyer, ad Matthew 27:35). Hug, Meyer, Langen have proved beyond doubt, by a series of quotations from Xenophon, Plautus, Lucian, Justin, Tertullian, etc., that the custom was to nail the feet also; and Luke 24:39 (written without the least reference to the prophecy of Psalms 22) admits of no doubt that this practice was followed in the case of Jesus. For how could His feet have served as a proof of His identity (ὅτι αὐτὸς ἐγώ) otherwise than by the wounds the mark of which they bore?

The small board (suppedaneum), on which the representations of the crucifixion usually make the feet of our lord rest, is a later invention, rendered in a way necessary by the suppression of the sedile in those pictures. The feet were nailed either the one above the other by means of a single nail, which would explain the epithet τρίσηλος, three-nailed, given to the cross by Nonnus, in his versified paraphrase of John's Gospel (4th century), or the one beside the other, which generally demanded four nails in all, as Plautus seems to say, but might also be executed with three, if we suppose the use of a nail in the form of a horse-shoe having two points. Was the sole of the foot supported on the wood by means of a very full bend of the knee, or was the leg in its whole length laid to the cross, so that the feet preserved their natural position? Such details probably varied at the caprice of the executioner.

The crucified usually lived twelve hours, sometimes even till the second or third day. The fever which soon set in produced a burning thirst. The increasing inflammation of the wounds in the back, hands, and feet; the congestion of the blood in the head, lungs, and heart; the swelling of every vein, an indescribable oppression, racking pains in the head; the stiffness of the limbs, caused by the unnatural position of the body; these all united to make the punishment, in the language of Cicero (in Verr. 5:64), crudelissimum teterrimumque supplicium.

From the beginning, Jesus had foreseen that such would be the end of His life. He had announced it to Nicodemus (John 3:14), to the Jews (Luke 12:32), and once and again to His disciples. It was the foresight of this which had caused His agony in Gethsemane. No kind of death was so fitted to strike the imagination. For this very reason, no other was so well fitted to realize the end which God proposed in the death of Christ. The object was, as St. Paul says (Romans 3), to give to the sinful world a complete demonstration (ἔνδειξις) of the righteousness of God (Luke 23:25-26). By its cruelty, a death of this sort corresponds to the odiousness of sin; by its duration, it leaves the crucified one time to recognise fully the right of God; lastly, its dramatic character produces an impression, never to be effaced, on the conscience of the spectator.

Of all known punishments, it was the cross which must be that of the Lamb of God.