The multitude calmed perceptibly as the scourged revolutionary appeared on the pavement before them and then, recovered somewhat from the shock the man’s sad state had caused, burst into a new clamoring for his release. Bar Abbas stared stonily ahead, as if indifferent to the screams and yelling of the people, no doubt still half dazed from the ordeal from which he had that moment been delivered. Although his coarse robe had been returned to him after the scourging and was thrown loosely about his shoulders, the milling crowd saw at once that the leather-thonged whip had stripped and torn the flesh of his shoulders and back; already the robe was reddening into a gory, clinging covering like that which a butcher might have worn to carry on his shoulder a freshly slaughtered lamb.
But Jesus, when he was led forth from the courtyard to the pavement before the Praetorium to stand near the robber chieftain, made an even more pitiable figure. The purple robe he had been wearing when he was brought back from Herod’s judgment hall was once again about his sagging shoulders, and it was soaked with blood. His long hair was matted with drying blood where it curled above his flayed and bruised shoulders, and his naked upper arms were crisscrossed with bleeding cuts and great reddened welts. But more shocking than the lacerations and the bleeding flesh, the blood-soaked purple robe, the mercilessly flayed, drooping shoulders burdened beyond human strength to endure, was the evidence he wore upon his head of a sadism past comprehending. Pressed down hard against his skull, so that the sharp points in some places actually had pierced the skin of his forehead and temples, was a circlet hastily fashioned from a long thin branch torn from a rhamnus thorn.
Pilate noticed it immediately. “Why the victor’s wreath?” he asked the soldier guarding the Galilean.
“It’s not a victor’s wreath,” he answered. “Sir, it’s the royal crown of the King of the Jews.” He ventured a smile. “The soldiers made it from a shrub growing near the scourging post and crowned him with it.”
“Indeed, the crown goes well with the Tetrarch’s purple.” Pilate smiled humorlessly. Then he held up his hand to command silence. “It must be well known to you that each year at the Feast of the Passover it is the custom of the Procurator to release a prisoner. Here before you are the revolutionary and murderer and robber, one Bar Abbas, who has been sentenced to the cross, and the prisoner brought by the High Priest, one Jesus of Galilee”—he paused and looking directly at the group of Temple priests, smiled appreciatively—“the King of the Jews....”
“We have no king!” shouted Joseph Caiaphas, and a chorus of angry voices supported him, “no king except Tiberius. This man is not our king; he is a blasphemer, an enemy of Israel’s God; he stirs up the people; he declares himself to be king in Israel; he calls himself the Son of God!” He paused, as if fearful at having uttered the ineffable name.
“Crucify him! Crucify him!” The mob renewed its angry demanding. “He claims to be the Son of God, the blasphemer! Crucify him!”
But Pilate paid them little heed. Turning his back upon the High Priest and the clamoring throng on the esplanade below, he withdrew into the Praetorium. “Bring him inside,” he said, motioning with his head as he looked back. And then he spoke to the soldier guarding Bar Abbas. “And remove that one from the sight of the multitude. But presently I shall call for him again.”
The Procurator had hardly mounted the tribunal when a soldier entered the chamber from the courtyard and handed a tablet to one of the attendants. The two whispered, heads together, for a moment. Then the attendant strode quickly to the tribunal, saluted, and presented Pilate the wax tablet. “A message, sir, from the Procurator’s wife,” he explained. “The messenger reported it was urgent.”
Hastily Pilate scanned the tablet. He scowled, then beckoned to the man. “Fetch me the soldier who brought this tablet.”