[Footnote 1:  Matt. xvi. 57; Mark xiv. 53; Luke xxii. 66.]

[Footnote 2:  Matt. xxiii. 16, and following.]

[Footnote 3:  Matt. xxvi. 64; Mark xiv. 62; Luke xxii. 69.  John knows nothing of this scene.]

[Footnote 4:  Levit. xxiv. 14, and following; Deut. xiii. 1, and following.]

[Footnote 5:  Luke xxiii. 50, 51.]

The Sanhedrim had not the right to execute a sentence of death.[1] But in the confusion of powers which then reigned in Judea, Jesus was, from that moment, none the less condemned.  He remained the rest of the night exposed to the ill-treatment of an infamous pack of servants, who spared him no indignity.[2]

[Footnote 1:  John xviii. 31; Jos., Ant., XX. ix. 1.]

[Footnote 2:  Matt. xxvi. 67, 68; Mark xiv. 65; Luke xxii. 63-65.]

In the morning the chief priests and the elders again assembled.[1] The point was, to get Pilate to ratify the condemnation pronounced by the Sanhedrim, which, since the occupation of the Romans, was no longer sufficient.  The procurator was not invested, like the imperial legate, with the disposal of life and death.  But Jesus was not a Roman citizen; it only required the authorization of the governor in order that the sentence pronounced against him should take its course.  As always happens, when a political people subjects a nation in which the civil and the religious laws are confounded, the Romans had been brought to give to the Jewish law a sort of official support.  The Roman law did not apply to Jews.  The latter remained under the canonical law which we find recorded in the Talmud, just as the Arabs in Algeria are still governed by the code of Islamism.  Although neutral in religion, the Romans thus very often sanctioned penalties inflicted for religious faults.  The situation was nearly that of the sacred cities of India under the English dominion, or rather that which would be the state of Damascus if Syria were conquered by a European nation.  Josephus asserts, though this may be doubted, that if a Roman trespassed beyond the pillars which bore inscriptions forbidding pagans to advance, the Romans themselves would have delivered him to the Jews to be put to death.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Matt. xxvii. 1; Mark xv. 1; Luke xxii. 66, xxiii. 1; John xviii 28.]

[Footnote 2:  Jos., Ant., XV. xi. 5; B.J., VI. ii. 4.]

The agents of the priests therefore bound Jesus and led him to the judgment-hall, which was the former palace of Herod,[1] adjoining the Tower of Antonia.[2] It was the morning of the day on which the Paschal lamb was to be eaten (Friday the 14th of Nisan, our 3d of April).  The Jews would have been defiled by entering the judgment-hall, and would not have been able to share in the sacred feast.  They therefore remained without.[3] Pilate being informed of their presence, ascended the bima[4] or tribunal, situated in the open air,[5] at the place named Gabbatha, or in Greek, Lithostrotos, on account of the pavement which covered the ground.