Again, such a law would have been no protection to the chief priests and to Judas against the operation of this Mosaic injunction. If such a rule of procedure could be justified upon any ground, it would require disinterested men acting from honorable motives, in promoting the maintenance of law and order. Officers of the law have sometimes, as pretended accomplices, acted in concert with criminals in order to secure and furnish evidence against them. But they were officers of the law, and the courts have held that their evidence was not accomplice testimony requiring corroboration. It is very clear that Judas was not such a disinterested witness, acting in the interest of public justice. He was a fugitive from the Last Supper of his Master, a talebearer within the meaning of the provision in Leviticus; and his employment by the Sanhedrin was a violation of a fundamental provision in the Mosaic Code.
The third illegality in the arrest of Jesus was that His capture was not the result of a legal mandate from a court whose intentions were to conduct a legal trial for the purpose of reaching a righteous judgment. "This arrest," says Rosadi, "effected in the night between Thursday and Friday, the last day of the life of Jesus, on Nisan 14, according to the Hebrew calendar, was the execution of an illegal and factious resolution of the Sanhedrin. There was no idea of apprehending a citizen in order to try him upon a charge which after sincere and regular judgment might be found just or unfounded; the intention was simply to seize a man and do away with him. The arrest was not a preventive measure such as might lawfully precede trial and condemnation; it was an executive act, accomplished in view of a sentence to be pronounced without legal justification."
POINT II
THE PRIVATE EXAMINATION OF JESUS BEFORE ANNAS (OR CAIAPHAS) WAS ILLEGAL
LAW
"Now the Jewish law prohibited all proceedings by night."—Dupin, "Jesus Devant Caïphe et Pilate."
"Be not a sole judge, for there is no sole judge but One."—Mishna, Pirke Aboth IV. 8.
"A principle perpetually reproduced in the Hebrew scriptures relates to the two conditions of publicity and liberty. An accused man was never subjected to private or secret examination, lest, in his perplexity, he furnish damaging testimony against himself."—Salvador, "Institutions de Moïse," pp. 365, 366.