[Footnote 5:  John xix. 12, 15.  Cf.  Luke xxiii. 2.  In order to appreciate the exactitude of the description of this scene in the evangelists, see Philo, Leg. ad Caium, Sec. 38.]

[Footnote 6:  See ante, p. 351.]

[Footnote 7:  Matt. xxvii. 24, 25.]

Were these words really uttered?  We may doubt it.  But they are the expression of a profound historical truth.  Considering the attitude which the Romans had taken in Judea, Pilate could scarcely have acted otherwise.  How many sentences of death dictated by religious intolerance have been extorted from the civil power!  The king of Spain, who, in order to please a fanatical clergy, delivered hundreds of his subjects to the stake, was more blameable than Pilate, for he represented a more absolute power than that of the Romans at Jerusalem.  When the civil power becomes persecuting or meddlesome at the solicitation of the priesthood, it proves its weakness.  But let the government that is without sin in this respect throw the first stone at Pilate.  The “secular arm,” behind which clerical cruelty shelters itself, is not the culprit.  No one has a right to say that he has a horror of blood when he causes it to be shed by his servants.

It was, then, neither Tiberius nor Pilate who condemned Jesus.  It was the old Jewish party; it was the Mosaic Law.  According to our modern ideas, there is no transmission of moral demerit from father to son; no one is accountable to human or divine justice except for that which he himself has done.  Consequently, every Jew who suffers to-day for the murder of Jesus has a right to complain, for he might have acted as did Simon the Cyrenean; at any rate, he might not have been with those who cried “Crucify him!” But nations, like individuals, have their responsibilities, and if ever crime was the crime of a nation, it was the death of Jesus.  This death was “legal” in the sense that it was primarily caused by a law which was the very soul of the nation.  The Mosaic law, in its modern, but still in its accepted form, pronounced the penalty of death against all attempts to change the established worship.  Now, there is no doubt that Jesus attacked this worship, and aspired to destroy it.  The Jews expressed this to Pilate with a truthful simplicity:  “We have a law, and by our law he ought to die; because he has made himself the Son of God."[1] The law was detestable, but it was the law of ancient ferocity; and the hero who offered himself in order to abrogate it, had first of all to endure its penalty.

[Footnote 1:  John xix. 7.]