John 19:4 - Exposition

And Pilate , with grim insouciance, allows the mockery to take place, and then, with his poor derided sham-king at his side, he went forth again £ from the Praetorium to the public seat, where he kept up the conflict with the accusers and the ever-gathering crowd, and saith to them , with more of passion than before, imagining that this pitiable caricature of a king would reduce the cry of "Crucify him!" into some more moderate and less preposterous demand. Behold, I lead him forth to you , crowned, but bleeding, robed as a king, but humiliated to a condition worse than a slave, that ye may know that I find no crime £ in him ; literally, no charge; i.e. no "crime." Pilate rims renews and varies his testimony to the character of the Holy One! He makes another fruitless appeal to the humanity and justice of the maddened mob. But what a revelation of Pilate's own weakness and shame! He can find no fault, but has connived at, nay, ordered, the worst part of this atrocious punishment. Keim would have us think that Pilate's anxiety to save a Jew is a mere invention made by the second-century fabricator. There is however, nothing incompatible with a Roman official's anxiety not to commit a judicial murder, for his own sake, and perhaps for the honor of his order. The hypothesis is irrational that the entire representation of Pilate's desire to screen or save Jesus from the malice of the Jews was a device of the author, due to his Gentile nationality and proclivities, anxious to put even the Roman officials in the best possible light. Surely Christians had no temptation to mitigate their judgments upon Rome at the time of the persecution under Marcus Antoninus. Thoma, like Strauss, finds the basis of the representation in the prophetic types of Isaiah 53:1-12 . and Psalms 22:1-31 .