Jesus was first taken to Caiaphas, the High priest, who was the first interrogator to question Him. The
next string of events in the movie follow in chronological order, as they appear in the Gospels. The High
Priest had Jesus brought before him in his palace where the scribes and the temple elders were assembled,
awaiting His arrival. At the same time false witnesses were being sought to bring allegations against Jesus,
to charge Him with blasphemy so they could justify themselves in putting Him to death. However, they were
not permitted to put anyone to death, so, they sought a plan to have the Romans put Him to death for them.
Jesus remained silent before them all, as depicted in the movie and broke His silence only when the High
Priest asked Him if He were the Son of God. “And the high priest arose, and said unto him, Answerest thou
nothing? what is it which these witness against thee? 63  But Jesus held his peace. And the high priest an-
swered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the
Son of God. 64 Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the
Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. 65 Then the high priest
rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now
ye have heard his blasphemy. 66  What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death” (Matthew
26: 62-66). Upon this pronouncement, an unrelenting crowd of mockers besieges Him, many slapping Him in
a cruel game, inviting Him to prophesy and tell them who had hit Him. Others drenched His battered and
bruised face with spit and continued their brutal mockery (Mark 14:65). Again, the movie version played
down the number of people who treated the Son of God so disgustingly. As Peter was passing through the
crowd of inquisitors, within the hall where Jesus was being interrogated, he was approached by a young
maiden who asked if he wasn’t one of the men who traveled with Jesus. He denied it. Then, a second maiden
asked the same question and he again denied it. Shortly after, others approached him and asked the same
question. They added, not being put off, “Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech (his Aramaic
Hebrew accent) bewrayeth thee” (Matthew 26:73); Mark also records, “Surely thou art one of them: for thou
art a Galilæan, and thy speech (his Aramaic accent) agreeth thereto” (Mark 14:70). In denying it, just as the
words were falling from his lips, he heard the crow of a rooster. He saw, as Jesus focused His eye upon him,
remembering the dialogue he had had with the Lord, about how he would defend, though all else abandoned
Him, unto the death (Matthew 26:33-35). Then, Jesus had informed him that he would deny Him three times
before the rooster’s crow. He was crushed inside when the cock crowed, he was heartbroken and reduced to
shame and bitter tears (Matthew 26: 75). The movie does not depict the scenes that focus on Peter and the
three sets of questioners, nor, do we hear the crow of the cock, but, obviously Peter did and fell into deep
remorse and weeping. All the while, the savage beatings and sport goes on around Jesus in the palace of
Caiaphas. Once they all agree He is worthy of death, they hustle Him off to Pilate, the Roman Governor over
Judæa. In all this the movie is accurate.

     Also, very well done is the interplay between Pilate, the Jews and Jesus. Pilate was a man who was on
the delicate side of the Emperor in Rome. The clashes and unrest among the Zealots, who opposed and
resisted Roman rule, often in armed conflict made his position tenuous and his rule anything but easy.
When Jesus was brought to him, the Jews hoping to have him found guilty of crimes that would result in
execution, Pilate tried everything he could to evade any involvement in a purely Jewish religious matter,
heresy. But Caiaphas had also sent along his own false witnesses to bear testimony against Jesus, the best
that money could buy. They testified that Jesus claimed to be a king and since there was no king but Cæsar,
Jesus was guilty of sedition against Rome. If this wasn’t enough to unsettle his stomach and his nerves, his
wife had had a dream about Jesus and had warned him to have nothing to do with Him. “When he was set
down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I
have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him” (Matthew 27:19). Wanting nothing to do
with passing judgment upon Jesus, Pilate sent Him to Herod. Herod questioned Jesus and found Him guilty
of nothing. Since the Jews were vehement that something be done to silence Him, Herod sent Jesus back to
Pilate. Pilate found no fault in Jesus and sought to let Him go. There was a custom that was addressed each
year, at particular feast, to pacify the rebels among the Jewish people. A political prisoner would be released,
to show good faith. Pilate offered them a choice between Barabbas, a thief, a murderer and a Zealot guilty of
sedition, or, Jesus Who is called the Christ. They chose Barabbas. Pilate asked what He should do with
Jesus. As one man, they screamed out, “Crucify, crucify.” Pilate found himself in a really tight spot, proverb-
ially, “between a rock and a hard place.” He was pressed in from every side. He was bound by duty to hear
testimony because there was a claim that Roman law had been breeched, the fear of further unrest among the
Jews if he didn’t accommodate them and the warning from God in his wife’s dream. In a lame attempt to dis-
tance himself from any guilt, he tells the Jews to see to this problem themselves and literally tries to “wash
his hands of the whole matter”. “When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was
made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this
just person: see ye to it. 25 Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children”
(Matthew 27:24-25). In that he gave in to their insistent cries for blood, he sealed his own guilt. “And he said
unto them the third time, Why, what evil hath he done? I have found no cause of death in him: I will there-
fore chastise him, and let him go. 23 And they were instant with loud voices, requiring that he might be cru-
cified. And the voices of them and of the chief priests prevailed. 24 And Pilate gave sentence that it should
be as they required. 25 And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast into prison,
whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will. All of this tension is very faithfully reported
and effectively portrayed in the movie. And adding that final verse, the response of the people, is not anti-
Semitism. It’s good journalism. His blood is on everyone’s hands because of sin, even Pilate’s. According to
one source, the name, Pilate, appropriately, means hard pressed. According to tradition, Pilate never got
over this whole ordeal and eventually, took his own life.

     Pilate, bound by the will of the people and convinced that he had divorced himself from the whole issue,
had Barabbas released and Jesus scourged. Jesus was turned over to the whole Prætorian contingent of the
Roman army, from whom the abuse continued, as did the mockery and vilification. As the movie depicted,
they placed a purple robe upon His bruised and bloodied shoulders, and pressed a crown upon His blood-
soaked head, woven of long thorn briars which cut savagely into His brow. They continued to mock Him in
feigned worship, bowing and taunting Him with, “Hail, King of the Jews.” They beat Him with reeds and
spat upon Him. The image in both the movie and in the Scripture is exceptionally vivid. No wonder Isaiah the
prophet wrote, “As many were astonied at thee; his visage (His face) was so marred more than any man, and
his form (due to the scourging) more than the sons of men” (Isaiah 52:14). He was beaten raw, maltreated in
the worst way and scourged nearly to death. Again, Isaiah reminds, “He is despised and rejected of men; a
man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and
we esteemed him not” (Isaiah 53:3). The hymnist, Philip P. Bliss, wrote, 

     The movie shows, with a great deal of effort, how brutal and dehumanizing the practice of scourging and
Roman punishment really were. None of this was exaggerated in the least. If anything, it was underdone. As
cruel and horrendous as the images on the screen were, scourging was, in many ways as bad as the cruci-
fixion itself. At intervals, those condemned were offered a narcotic to help deaden the pain during crucifix-
ion. A pole or branch of hyssop would be raised with a rag soaked in a mixture of gall and sour wine, a nar-
cotic that would lessen the pain and protract the time the person hung on the cross by days. This was not a
beneficent act of mercy, but a way of prolonging the misery. No such consideration was afforded during
scourging. As the film clearly shows, the Romans handling the scourging apparatus took great inhuman
pleasure in his ability to inflict pain and suffering. A Roman citizen, though a criminal, would be granted
certain rights. If he were sentenced to be scourged, he was not beaten mercilessly, but, would receive “forty
lashes, save one.” If the scourge master had miscounted and given the Roman forty-one lashes, he would
have to receive the beating himself. So, It was customary to give thirty-nine. However, those who were the
conquered nations dominated by Rome, though part of the empire, were not Roman citizens and received no
such consideration. With these, the torturers and tormenters did as they pleased and they really put muscle
into it. Many times the person being scourged didn’t live long enough to be crucified, the victim becoming
disemboweled with the whip. This was no ordinary whip, but was the forerunner of the Roman “cat of nine
tails.” Usually, it was made of several leather thongs, woven together and secured to a wooden rod handle.
Each braided set of leather thongs had secured into them pieces of sharpened bone, or metal or jagged
ceramic pieces, which would cut deeply into the flesh, as the cords enwrapped the victim’s back, sides, arms
and legs, ripping into and tearing away some of the flesh. These were hardened and evil men who were good
at their work and morbidly proud of it. In the film, the Centurion came riding up on his horse and commanded
the men inflicting the beating upon Jesus to hold back so there would be something left of Him to crucify.
Such intervention, on the Part of a Roman Centurion could have really happened to keep the men at the whip
from beating the one under their subjection to death. This scenario is not inconsistent with history and
custom concerning capital punishment.