Bible Study series: Mark 15:1-20: He was also mocked and violently mistreated.
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Let’s begin.
Scripture: Mark 15:1-20
1 Next, early in the morning, the chief priests, with the elders and teachers of the law and the entire council, made the decision. They bound Jesus and brought and delivered him over to Pilate. 2 Pilate asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” In reply, Jesus said to him, “You are saying so.” 3 The chief priests accused him of many things. 4 Again Pilate asked him, saying, “You don’t reply to anything?” Look how they accuse you of many things!” 5 But Jesus still gave no reply, with the result that Pilate was amazed.
6 At the feast, Pilate would customarily release to the crowd one prisoner whom they requested. 7 There was man named Barabbas, imprisoned with the insurrectionists who had committed murder during the riot. 8 The crowd came up and began to request just what he would do for them by custom. 9 But in reply Pilate said, “Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?” 10 (For he knew that the chief priests out of envy handed him over.) 11 But the chief priests stirred up the crowd, that he would instead release Barabbas to them. 12 Then, in reply, Pilate again said, “What then do you want me to do with the one you call ‘the king of the Jews’?” 13 And they shouted back, “Crucify him!” 14 Pilate said to them, “What crime has he committed?” But they cried even louder: “Crucify him!” 15 Then Pilate, wanting to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas to them and handed Jesus over to be flogged, so that he would be crucified.
16 The soldiers led him out into the palace (that is, the Praetorium) and called together the entire cohort. 17 They put on him a purple robe, and weaving a crown of thorns, they placed it on him. 18 Then they began to greet him, “Hail, king of the Jews!” 19 They beat his head with a reed and, kneeling, they paid him homage. 20 Then they ridiculed him. They stripped the robe from him and put his own clothes on him.
They led him out to crucify him. (Mark 15:1-20)
1-5:
This scene carries on from the previous chapter. The main reason the trial was held at night in the Sanhedrin is that Roman trials were held early in the morning (Lane, in his comment on v. 1).
Jesus was accused of blasphemy by the Jews, but they had no more authority to execute. So they have to accuse Jesus of the political crime of sedition or fomenting rebellion. Luke 23:2 says that the Jewish authorities brought three charges before Pilate: (1) Jesus’s subversive movement; (2) his opposition to paying taxes to Rome; (3) he claimed to be Christ the king.
The Jewish leaders bound Jesus and led him through the city from the quarters of Caiaphas to the fortified palaces of the Herods (Lane’s comment on v. 1), to turn over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. The chief priests and elders go with him too. The council is the Sanhedrin.
Please see this post for more information on these characters:
Quick Reference to Jewish Groups in Gospels and Acts
And now let’s introduce Pilate for the first time.
The Christian creeds remember him as the governor under whom Jesus Christ suffered (1 Tim. 6:13) (see the Apostles Creed). The NT calls him governor while other sources call him prefect (his official title). Pontius was his nomen (tribal name) and Pilate was his cognomen (family name). His praenomen (personal name) is nowhere recorded. He came to power in A.D. 26. He was an anti-Semite. He brought into Jerusalem the insignia of the Roman military bearing the image of Caesar. He planted armed Roman soldiers, disguised as civilians, among the populace. This may have been the historical occasion for Luke 13:1, which says that Pilate mingled Galilean blood with their sacrifices. It is surprising then that he felt pressure from the Jewish authorities to put Jesus to death. However, he could have believed his position in the empire was precarious; John 19:12 says that if he released Jesus he would be no friend of Caesar. The NT writers were eager to show that he was innocent in regards to Roman law. Yet the only way the Jewish Council could convict Jesus was to accuse him of claiming to be king. Pilate’s name does not appear in Judea after A.D. 36/37, and this indicates he was removed shortly after he slaughtered Samaritans on Mt. Gerizim (Holman’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary).
“Are you the king of the Jews?” I decided, after reading Decker, to make this emphatic. Is Pilate being skeptical? Is he mocking? From the context, maybe a little of both. It must have been difficult for him to believe that an eccentric Galilean commoner would claim a kingship for himself.
In any case, Pilate asked a fair question, but Jesus was ambiguous. Why? He wanted to allow the falsehoods to pile up. When people cannot spot the truth but are arrogant and powerful, they are often victims of divine irony. Irony is this: you think you know, but you do not; you are actually ignorant. When you add a religious component to it, it become “divine irony.”
Evidently, Jesus intended (1) to let the false accusations fly, so the religious establishment would sink deeper into guilt before God and justly incur his judgment; and (2) the divine plan had to be fulfilled; Pilate had to condemn him to death.
Pilate asked him whether Jesus was the king of the Jews, and he answered honestly, without making a big issue of it: “You are saying so.” This is an oblique answer that says, “Yes,” but Pilate was too dull to understand it. So Jesus is playing with the ambiguity in the word king: (a) A Caesar-like king who conquers the world with the military and compels allegiance with bodily threats; (b) a heavenly king who conquers humanity’s heart with the gospel who persuades humanity to have allegiance with love. Jesus fits the second definition. He really was the king of the Jews, but in a spiritual sense, in the new kingdom that God was ushering in. This new kingdom has links to the kingdom God set up over Israel, but now it was entering a new phase, with King Jesus at its head. But the Roman governor and his accusers did not see it. Spiritual and moral blindness.
As to Jesus’s silence, let’s quote these verses. Peter summarizes Jesus’s demeanor before the authorities:
For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. 22 He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. 23 When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly. (1 Pet. 2:21-23, ESV)
Now let’s turn to the remarkable verse in Isaiah’s accurate prophecy.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth. (Is. 53:7, ESV)
However, he did make a confession before the high priests, chief priests and the elders of the people, quoting Ps. 110:1 and Dan. 7:13 (Matt. 26:64). So let’s not overinterpret the silence here.
But Pilate did “exceedingly” marvel at it, because no doubt he had heard many trials when the courtroom erupted in words.
Jesus was in fact about to become king of the whole world, at his resurrection and ascension.
The question is—historically, who was responsible for the death of Jesus? Part of the crowd, the Jewish leaders and the Romans through Pilate? The best answer is what Strauss says: it was his enemies who were responsible, and they come from all three groups (p. 682). Theologically, we are all responsible because our sins put him there.
6-15:
This scene is tragic and awful, full of injustice and bitterness and blindness against the most just man who ever lived. It was a wrong decision based on a shouting match. Pilate was weak, but the Father was behind the scenes, orchestrating the push for his Son to die. But none of this exonerates the foolish mob (or Pilate). Their hearts had been hard and filled with injustice and moral blindness. God simply allowed their hearts to drink the full cup of their preconditioned unrighteousness. In other words, they were unrighteous before the trial began and were part of the opponents. For all we know, they may have been part of the temple complex, including the families of the money-changers whose tables he had overturned.
The crowd was mixed with the people of Jerusalem and Judea in the south and the people of Galilee in the north. Generally, the southerners did not like the Galileans. This explains why some of the crowd turned against Jesus—they were likely from the south.
This leads us to the question: How many were shouting in favor of crucifixion? It was not the whole city, for the people liked Jesus, but it was enough of a crowd to shout so loudly that they prevailed or dominated the outcome.
By the way, a clever TV interpreter has noted that the name Barabbas literally means “son of the Father.” The interpreter connects the contrast between Jesus, who is the true son of the Father, and Barabbas, to the Day of Atonement. Recall that there were two goats during this most holy day: one was sacrificed, and the other was released. Evidently, the interpreter wants us to draw the inference that Jesus was sacrificed, while the scapegoat was released out into the wilderness, with the sins of the nation still on him. This interpretation is clever, and you can decide what to do with it. (I don’t emphasize it myself.)
The Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16 from a NT Perspective
If you don’t like the connection, then just realize that the guilty man (Barabbas) goes free, while the innocent one (Jesus) suffers for the guilty one. This is a perfect picture of penal substitution of the atonement.
“riot”: this riot is not known to us, but the environment around Jerusalem and Judea was tense, so it could have happened recently before Jesus arrived in the city.
“to satisfy the crowd”: Decker points out that this may be a Latin idiom: satisfacere alicui, which indicates, once again, that Mark is writing for a Roman audience.
Why did the crowd want Barabbas? Insurrectionists were viewed as Robin Hood and were popular among the people. Barabbas must have been like a folk hero of sorts. Lane says that in the eyes of the public he was a “freedom fighter” (comment on v. 11). Also, Strauss (and Wessel) speculate that since Barabbas means “son of a father,” and sometimes Rabbis were called “father” (also see Lane; cf. Matt. 23:8-9), he may have been the son of a teacher of the law or another religious leader, and this possibility would also account for his popularity.
Lane’s comment on v. 10:
It did not require any peculiar sagacity on Pilate’s part to realize that the spokesmen for the Sanhedrin were not acting out of loyalty to Rome. They clearly wanted to be rid of someone troublesome to them and they intended to use the Roman magistrate as their henchman. Seen in this light, Pilate’s reluctance to accede to the priests’ demand is understandable and inevitable. His determination to evade their scheme was undoubtedly strengthened when in the course of his examination of the accused it became clear he was anything but a political agitator.
Matt. 27:26 and v. 15 here say that Pilate did have Jesus scourged or flogged. Jesus predicted this in Mark 10:33. The whip was called a flagellum, which was made of several pieces of leather with pieces of bone and lead embedded near the ends. Two men, one on either side, flogged the victim. The Jews limited the number to forty minus one, but the Romans had no such limit on the number (Wessel and Strauss).
A medical doctor describes the scene:
The heaven whip is brought down with full force again and again across Jesus’ shoulders, back and legs. At first the heavy thongs cut through the skin only. Then, as the blows continue, they cut deeper into the subcutaneous tissues, producing first an oozing of blood from the capillaries and veins of the skin, and finally spurting arterial bleeding from the vessels in the underlying muscles .… Finally the skin of the back is hanging in long ribbons and the entire area is an unrecognizable mass of torn, bleeding tissue. (qtd. in Wessel and Strauss, pp. 967-68)
To wrap up this section, Pilate had a superior named Sejanus who had died recently. Apparently Sejanus had been anti-Jewish, and so Pilate had been treating the Jews insensitively. Now he was intending to please them by having Jesus flogged and crucified.
France writes insightfully about the awful scene, which still offers a glimmer of hope, in vv. 16-47:
Yet within this harrowing scene there are gleams of light, pointers to what the Christian reader of course already knows, that this is not the story of the final defeat of God’s Messiah, but the moment of his paradoxical victory. A few minor characters pass across the stage, each giving the reader some grounds for hope: Simon, Rufus and Alexander, the Roman centurion with his pregnant exclamation, Joseph of Arimathea, and especially the faithful women who stay around when all the men have gone, and who in the final scene of Mark’s story will have the privilege of being the first to witness the dawning of the new age. And within the story line itself there are strong hints that in these terrible events in which God’s enemies seem triumphant it is in fact the purpose of God that is being worked out.
Then France reminds us of the many quotations from Ps. 22, indicating that prophecy was being fulfilled (see vv. 31-44, below).
That link has a long table of verses from the OT and the corresponding ones from the NT. But Jesus also fulfills the types and shadows and themes of the OT, like the sacrificial system and even Israel itself, which had failed to complete its mission of being a light to the Gentiles, but now Jesus is carrying out this mission, and God is about to vindicate him.
16-20:
Praetorium: It is a Latin loanword. In this context, it is the official residence of the Roman governor. Mark explains what “palace” means in this verse, which again may show that he is writing for a Roman audience.
“cohort”: usually 600 soldiers or a manipulus, about one-third of that number. Mark is probably using the term loosely, not precisely (Strauss on v. 16). The soldiers are not the temple guard, as they were at the arrest. They are Pilate’s occupation army (France in his comments on v. 16). They are not at all friendly to Jews generally.
“Hail, King of the Jews”: this is a phrase that parodies the greeting one gives the emperor: Ave Caesar, imperator! (Strauss on vv. 17-19). The irony is that the soldiers cannot see that he was the king of not only the Jews, but also of the whole world.
Jesus had predicted the mockery or ridicule in Mark 10:34.
“reed”: some translate it as a “stick.” When they beat him on the head, as he was wearing the crown of thorns, the thorns were driven into his head, even more.
Crown of thorns: it was probably a palm leaf with spikes sticking outward (think of the crown on the Statue of Liberty), designed to mock the king of the Jews. Or it may have been the traditional plaited crown we see in the paintings.
This whole scene, yes, was animalistic, but it was also satanic. There is just something too deep and unnecessary about this abuse. Only several demons, believing that they had won the victory over the Son of God, would inspire this much cruelty. For all we know, Satan himself may be there, invisible. However, the text does not say this openly, so we should not press this invisible demonic presence too far.
To forestall any criticism that this abuse was unnecessary, please see my post
Christ’s Death on Cross = Cosmic Child Abuse?
No, God did not cause this abuse; evil humans did this. But I really like this verse, to clarify matters. Jesus had to suffer, in order to relate to humanity. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).
And these:
7 During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. 8 Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered 9 and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him (Heb. 5:7-8, NIV)
As many were astonished at you—his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance. (Is. 52:14, ESV)
The Roman soldiers had their turn in striking him. No wonder Isaiah prophesied that his appearance would be marred, beyond human semblance. Beating his head with a reed, while the thorny crown was on it, added to the disfigurement.
Jesus’s “kingship” here is seen as a joke. However, their mock homage with cheap substitutes like the purple robe and reed or stick for a scepter will be replaced and smacked down with the real enthronement in Mark 16:19 (if you accept the longer ending).
GrowApp for Mark 15:1-20
1. Barabbas the guilty one went free, while Jesus the innocent one paid the penalty. Study 2 Cor. 5:21. How does this speak of the Great Exchange?
2. What does it mean to you that Jesus suffered, taking your place and dying a criminal’s death, though innocent, just for you?
RELATED
10. Eyewitness Testimony in Mark’s Gospel
2. Church Fathers and Mark’s Gospel
2. Archaeology and the Synoptic Gospels
14. Similarities among John’s Gospel and the Synoptic Gospels
1. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels: Introduction to Series
SOURCES
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