The Crucified King and the Witnesses Who Remain

Roman officials held court from first light, so the council had to be ready at dawn. Mark introduces Pilate without a word of explanation, as if every reader knew the name. A stone found at Caesarea in 1961 bears it: Pontius Pilatus, prefect of Judea, who governed from AD 26 to 36.

The Greek puts the pronoun first, which can carry surprise: you are the King of the Jews? “Thou sayest it” neither accepts nor refuses Pilate’s wording outright; it grants the title while leaving its meaning in Pilate’s mouth. It is the only answer Jesus gives the governor.

“Many things” can also be read as an adverb: they accused him vehemently, at length. Either way the prosecution now falls to the chief priests themselves, since the witnesses of the night hearing have been set aside.

Pilate’s “Answerest thou nothing?” is the high priest’s question from 14:60, almost word for word. Under Roman procedure a man who offered no defence could be condemned by default, so the question is also an opening Pilate is holding out to him.

“Yet answered nothing” is emphatic in Greek: no longer anything at all. Some hear an echo of Isaiah 52:15 in the Greek Old Testament, where many nations marvel at the servant and kings shut their mouths before him.

No source outside the gospels mentions this Passover release, and historians still debate how it worked. Mark presents it as a standing custom of the feast. “Whomsoever they desired” is literally “whomever they were asking for”.

Barabbas is Aramaic for “son of the father”, and some manuscripts of Matthew 27:16 call him Jesus Barabbas. Mark says “the insurrection”, as if his readers would know which uprising was meant, though no other record names it.

The crowd arrives asking for the customary favour before Jesus’ name has come up. “As he had ever done” means as he always did. The initiative for the release comes from them, and Pilate sees in it a way to use them.

“Will ye” is the verb for wanting or wishing, and Pilate uses it again in verse 12. He hands the choice to the crowd’s will twice, and from verse 11 onward that will belongs to the chief priests.

“He knew” is imperfect: he had been aware of it all along. Mark has already shown what they envied: in 11:18 the leaders feared him “because all the people was astonished at his doctrine”. Envy of a teacher’s following is the motive, and Pilate can see it.

“Moved” means stirred up, the word for an agitator shaking a crowd. In Luke’s account the accusers charge Jesus with exactly this, “He stirreth up the people” (Luke 23:5), using the same verb. In Mark it is the chief priests who do it.

“Whom ye call” shifts the title onto the crowd, as if it were their claim, not his. Pilate asks what to do with Jesus instead of simply releasing him, which is how a governor avoids owning a decision.

“Again” can mean back, in reply; this is the first time Mark has them shout it. Crucifixion was Rome’s penalty for slaves, bandits and rebels, and Cicero called it the cruellest and foulest of punishments. It was not a Jewish method of execution.

“What evil hath he done?” is the only question about guilt asked in the Roman hearing, and no one answers it. The crowd replies only by shouting louder, “the more exceedingly”.

“Willing to content the people” reflects a Latin idiom, satis facere, to do enough to satisfy, one of several Latin turns in Mark that suggest readers in Rome. Roman scourging used a whip weighted with bone or metal, with no legal limit on strokes, unlike the Jewish forty.

The Praetorium was the governor’s residence when he stayed in Jerusalem, probably Herod’s palace on the western hill. A “band” is a cohort, nominally six hundred men. Josephus says the auxiliaries in Judea were recruited from Gentile towns such as Caesarea and Sebaste and had little love for Jews.

Purple was the royal and imperial colour; Matthew calls it a scarlet robe, perhaps a soldier’s faded red cloak. Some scholars suggest the thorns were set to radiate outward like the spiked crown on emperors’ coins, which would make the mockery more exact. That is a suggestion, not a fact in the text.

The salute parodies the acclamation of an emperor, “Ave, Caesar”. The Roman crowd greeted its ruler with that cry, and the soldiers make up the same cry for a Jew with a bleeding head.

In 10:34 Jesus foretold that the Gentiles would “mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him”. By the end of this chapter all four verbs have come to pass, and the spitting here is done by the Gentile soldiers just as the prediction said.

Executions took place outside the city, as Leviticus 24:14 required even for Israel’s own capital cases; Hebrews 13:12 notes that Jesus “suffered without the gate”. His own clothes are put back on so that he can be stripped of them again at the cross (verse 24).

“Compel” is angareuo, a Persian loanword for requisitioning a civilian’s labour, the word in Matthew 5:41 for being forced to go a mile. Cyrene, in modern Libya, had a large Jewish community with its own synagogue in Jerusalem (Acts 6:9). The condemned usually carried only the crossbeam.

Golgotha is Aramaic for skull; the Latin calvaria gives the English “Calvary”. “They bring him” is literally “they carry him”, which may mean he could no longer walk unaided. The place was near a road, since passers-by are there in verse 29.

Proverbs 31:6 says, “Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish”, and the Talmud records that women of Jerusalem provided drugged wine for the condemned. Myrrh was thought to dull pain. The offer may have been a mercy, and it was refused.

In Greek the crucifixion itself is three words in the present tense: and they crucify him. Mark describes no nails and no wounds. The victim’s clothes were the executioners’ recognised perquisite, and John 19:23 says there were four soldiers.

The third hour is about nine in the morning. Mark marks the day in three-hour blocks, the third, sixth and ninth hours, then evening, like watches kept at a post. John 19:14 has Pilate still judging at “about the sixth hour”, and the two reckonings have been argued over since antiquity.

The charge was written on a board, a titulus, often carried ahead of the condemned or hung around his neck on the way, then fixed to the cross. Mark gives the shortest wording of the four gospels, the crime alone. John 19:20 adds that it was written in Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

Rome crucified insurgents in numbers to terrify a province; after the revolt of 4 BC the governor Varus crucified two thousand men around Jerusalem, according to Josephus. The present tense, “they crucify”, runs on from verse 24 as a continuing scene.

This verse is absent from the earliest manuscripts of Mark and appears to have been added from Luke 22:37, where Jesus quotes Isaiah 53:12. Modern editions print it in the margin or a footnote. The King James, following later manuscripts, keeps it in the text.

“Railed on him” is literally “blasphemed him”, the charge the council condemned him for in 14:64 now turned against him. “Ah” is oua, a cry of mock admiration found nowhere else in the New Testament: bravo, temple-wrecker.

“Save” is the verb Mark uses for healing: “thy faith hath made thee whole” (5:34, 10:52) is literally “thy faith hath saved thee”. It also recalls 8:35: “whosoever will save his life shall lose it”. The passers-by ask for the one thing he has taught his followers not to do.

“Mocking” is the verb Jesus used in 10:34 and the one Mark used of the soldiers in verse 20. The priests speak “among themselves”, about him rather than to him, a conversation held within earshot of a dying man.

The priests say “King of Israel”, the title as Jews used it; Pilate and the soldiers said “King of the Jews”, as outsiders would. “That we may see and believe” turns 4:12 inside out, where people see and do not perceive.

The sixth to the ninth hour is noon to three in the afternoon. Passover fell at full moon, when a solar eclipse cannot occur. Amos 8:9 had said, “I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day.”

Mark gives the cry in Aramaic, “Eloi”, where Matthew has Hebrew “Eli”. He keeps several of Jesus’ Aramaic words and translates each: Talitha cumi (5:41), Ephphatha (7:34), Abba (14:36), and this one, the last words Jesus speaks in the book.

“Elias” is the Greek form of Elijah. Popular belief held that Elijah, taken up alive, came to rescue the righteous in trouble. Mark’s readers heard in 9:13 that Elijah has already come and that they did to him whatever they wanted, words that point to John the Baptist.

“Vinegar” is oxos, the sour wine soldiers drank. Psalm 69:21 reads, “in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” “Let alone” means wait: let us see. Whether the drink was meant to help or to prolong the spectacle, Mark does not say.

“Gave up the ghost” translates one Greek word, he breathed out; in 1611 “ghost” meant breath or spirit. Crucified men usually died of exhaustion and slow suffocation, too weak to cry out, which is why a loud cry at the end was worth recording.

The temple had two great curtains: one at the entrance to the sanctuary, visible from the courts, and the inner veil before the most holy place. Which is meant is debated. Josephus describes the outer one as a Babylonian tapestry embroidered with a panorama of the heavens.

“Centurion” here is the Latin word written in Greek letters; Matthew and Luke use a Greek equivalent. He commanded about a hundred men and stood “over against him”, facing the cross. The Greek has no article, so “a son of God” and “the Son of God” are both grammatically possible.

Psalm 38:11 reads, “my lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off.” Magdalene means from Magdala, a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. “James the less” is literally “the little”, perhaps younger or shorter.

“Ministered” is the verb of 10:45, where the Son of man came “to minister”. Mark has used it of the angels in the wilderness (1:13) and of Peter’s mother-in-law (1:31). Luke 8:3 adds that such women supported Jesus out of their own means.

“Preparation” became the Greek name for Friday, the day for readying the sabbath, and Mark explains it for readers who did not keep one. Deuteronomy 21:22–23 forbade leaving a hanged body overnight, and the sabbath would begin at sunset.

Arimathaea is probably Ramathaim, the hill town of Samuel’s family (1 Samuel 1:1). “Craved” meant simply asked, requested. Rome often left the crucified unburied as a warning, so asking for the body of a man executed as a king was a risk worth the word “boldly”.

Crucified men commonly lasted a day or longer, so six hours was quick. “Marvelled if” means wondered whether. It is Pilate’s second marvelling in the chapter (verse 5): first at a silence, now at a speedy death.

“Gave” is the verb for granting a favour freely; Roman governors were known to sell bodies to relatives. In the oldest manuscripts Joseph asks for the body but Pilate grants the corpse, a different Greek word, as if the governor sees only a dead criminal.

Nothing is said of washing or spices; the hour allowed only the essentials, which is why the women come back with spices (16:1). Tombs around Jerusalem were cut into rock with a low entrance. Rolling disc-shaped stones were rare and belonged to wealthier tombs; most were sealed with a square block.

The verb is imperfect: they were watching, taking it in. Two named women see the burial; Deuteronomy 19:15 asked for two or three witnesses to establish a matter. This Mary is “mother of Joses” here and “mother of James” in 16:1, the same woman named by different sons.