of the high priest or the councillors (Mt. ) blind folded Him, spat in His face, and rained blows upon Him,* asking Him with jeers to propliesy who struck Him. St. Luke (22"^"^^) more accu- rately places this horseplay during the nocturnal interval between His arrest and the assembling of the Council in the morning, when no responsible parties were present to prevent vulgar indignities being heaped on the defenceless prisoner. St. Luke also narrates (23") that Herod and his troops treated their prisoner with rough ridicule as a soi-disant king ; and, when the incident of the Herod interview is accepted as historical, there is no reason to doubt that sucli violence may have been inflicted, unless Luke is held to have trans- ferred to Herod tlie mockery which the earlier tradition (Mk ISiS'^o, Mt 27'^'-") ascribes to Pilate.
This second mockery consisted in the troops arraying Jesus in a scarlet military mantle, spitting on Him (in caricature of the kiss of homage), crowning Him with tiiorns, putting a reed in His hand, and paying mock deference to Him.t Then, beating Him unmercifully, they stripped Him of this finery, and reclothed Him in His own garments. ' In our time, Avhen a man has been sentenced to death, we do not think it right to add to his sutt'erings by preliminary torture ; but it was not so in former days ; if bystanders, in tlieir indignation, added to what had been sentenced by the judge, all this was looked upon as no more than giving the criminal his deserts ; and this volunteered addition to the judge's sentence was no doubt the severest part of the penalty.'! The rough treatment of Jesus, iiowever, by the soldiers of Pilate took place witiiin the barracks. As it was aimed at the nation through the person of Jesus, it was not politic to conduct it in the open ail".
The mockery of Jesus was thus twofold. That inflicted by the Jews was meant for Jesus the prophet ; that of the Roman soldiers, as of Herod's Syrian troops, was occasioned by His pretensions to be a king. He was ill-treated, as He was con- demned and crucified, for being a royal pretender. There is no reason to suppo.se that tlie second mockery is an unhistorical echo of the former, or that even the former is (Brandt, Evangel, gesch. p. 69 f. ) constructed elaborately out of Old Testa- ment suggestions. But a more real problem has been raised, in recent years, with regard to the meaning of the mockery. Several scholars § have attempted to find, in the details of this incident, allusions to tiie mock coronation which preceded the grotesque Saturnalia of the Sacfean festival in ancient Babylonia, — celebrated throughout Asia
* Professor Burkitt {The Gospel History and its Transmission, pp. 51-53) holds that n; ia-nv i Txio-x? o-i (Mt 266**) jg a secondary addition of the Evangelist, and that the real meaning of Mk 14*'** is that the face of Jesus was covered because He was form- ally condemned (Est 7S). But, in this event, the blindfolding would immediately follow the condemnation, whereas the spit- ting intervenes, showing that horseplay had begun. Besides, Luke's version corroborates the Markan view as reproduced in Matthew, and probably is one of his harmonizing touches, which smooth out details in Mark and Matthew into a graphic and intelligible picture. Wellhausen omits the blindfolding in Mk 1465 (with D and Syrsi"), which, in his view of the context (see above), implies that the prophesying of Jesus was to be about the destruction of the Temple.
t A similar grim jest was practised by the Mediterranean pirates upon any Roman citizen whom they captured. Plutarch (Vita Pomp, xxiv.) describes how they affected to be struck with terror, dropped on their knees before him, threw a toga round him, and finally made away with him.
t Salmon, The Human Element in the Gospels (p. 506). The soldiers were probably seizing the opportunity to vent their contempt for the Jews, quite as much as to express personal animosity towards Jesus.
§ J. G.'Frazer, Golden Bought, ii. 24f.,253f., iii. 150 f. Wend- land, in his paper on Jesus as a Saturnalian king (Hermes, 1898, pp. 175-179), thinks that the Roman troops ridiculed Him in the farcical garb of Saturn ; but the late Acta of Dasius the martyr are too unreliable to serve as evidence for this period, even had the Romans been tolerant of human sacrifices.
TKiAL OF JESUS
TKIAL OF JESUS
757
Minor in connexion with the worship of the Persian goddess Anaitis, — where, in the course of other orgies, ' a condemned prisoner was arrayed in royal attire, only in the end to be stript of his borrowed finery, scourged, and hanged or cruci- fied.' Another theory (advocated by Reicli in his essay on Der Konig mit dc.r Dornerkronc, 1905) casts back to the popular buffoonery wliich accom- panied the mimes, e.g. at Alexandria (cf. Philo, in Flacc. 5-6, quoted by Grotius in this connexion), while Mr. W. K. Paton (in ZNTW, 1901, 339-341) further points out that the trait of a triple cruci- fixion reflects the Persian custom of crucifying a pretender or usurper upon tliree crosses. It is, of course, quite possible that two robbers were cruci- Hed with Jesus simjjly because no more happened to be in prison at the moment ; but, in view of this custom, it seems not unlikely that the number of victims, like the mock homage paid previously to one of them, may have been determined by some liazy notion of imitating a pagan bit of ritual. Tlie un-Jewish character of these accompaniments of the crucifixion would certainly lend additional relish to the soldiers' contemptuous pleasure in crucifying a caricature of a Jewish monarch.* But, wliile the possibility of this may be granted, it is impossible to regard the Gosj^el accounts as legendary products of any such pagan custom. For one thing, Jesus was not cruciHed on three crosses, nor was His death taken as an ottering. Again, Dr. Frazer's identification of Purim with Sacfea is too precarious! to support firmly the inference that Jesus perished as a Haman at tliis Jewish festival ; nor did it require any coarse pagan rite to stimulate military liorseplay among soldiers, even although they may have been, like Herod's Syrian troops, familiar with such customs, or had been, like Pilate's Roman legions, stationed at one time on the Euphrates where the rites in (Question may have survived. It is extremely un- likely that sucli a confusion of Sacsea with the Jewish festivals should have arisen, or that any reminiscence of the Alexandrian outburst should have prompted the records of the horseplay at Jerusalem. J See, further, art. Mockery.