John 19:18

John 19:18. Where they crucified him, and with him two others, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst. On the lingering torture of death by crucifixion it is unnecessary to dwell. We learn from the earlier Gospels that the two crucified along with Jesus were robbers (Matthew 27:38; Mark 15:27). To this death they too must have been doomed by the Roman power, and as we find the Roman governor writing the inscription and Roman soldiers taking part in the crucifixion and dividing the spoils (comp. John 19:23), it is reasonable to think that it was also a Roman, not a Jewish, arrangement by which the two robbers were suspended on either side of Jesus. If so, the object must have been still more to bring out that idea of His royalty with which Pilate to the last mocked the Jews. Not only, however, did he mock them thus. Following the custom of the time, by which an inscription describing the crime for which a malefactor suffered was nailed to the cross, he ordered this to be done now, and he himself dictated the words.