Chapter 8 of 15
Now it happened in those days that Pontius Pilate held court in the Palace of Herod during the Passover festival, and so that is where we took Jesus. I believed that we were done with him, but I could not have been more mistaken.
I assumed that Pilate would simply accept the judgment of the priests and formally condemn Jesus to death, but instead the Procurator insisted that he had to conduct a trial of his own. "The priests have found him guilty of blasphemy," he pointed out, "but your religious laws are of no concern to Rome." So a new trial of Jesus began, the second in as many days. As they had done in the council chamber, the priests shouted questions and accusations at Jesus; and as he had done in the council chamber, Jesus stared calmly back at his questioners and accusers and remained silent.
The Procurator soon became bored by the one-sided conversation; he began to pace around the room impatiently. Finally he ordered the priests to be silent and he shouted the one question that, to him, was the most important: "Do you say that you are the King of the Jews?"
Jesus shook his head sadly, as if he had been asked this question too often, and he spoke for the first time. "YOU say that I am King of the Jews," he said. Then he said no more, remaining silent even as the priests continued to harass him.
The Procurator was clearly becoming frustrated; at one point, I head him say that he wished that Herod had taken care of the matter while Jesus was still in Nazareth. I knew that Pilate spoke of Herod Antipas, son of the Herod in whose great palace we now gathered; at that time, Herod Antipas ruled as Tetrarch in Galilee, and so Jesus was one of his subjects. As it happened, I knew that Herod Antipas was visiting Jerusalem for the Passover festival; I conveyed this information to my master, who passed it along to the Procurator.
As I expected, Pilate immediately recognized that this state of events might allow the problem of Jesus to be resolved without his personal involvement. And so it came to pass that Jesus and his guards and the priests and the elders and the scribes all marched through the streets of Jerusalem until they reached the house where Herod was staying.
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©2004 Henry Charles Mishkoff