From the early Church Fathers to now.
11 Patristic witnesses · 2 Medieval witnesses · 2 Orthodox witnesses
“(Hom. lxxxiv. 2) But how can ye prove this? By His purple, His diadem, His chariot, His guards? Did He not walk about with His twelve disciples only, and every thing mean about Him, food, dress, and habitation?”
“(Hom. lxxxiv. 2) He went out to examine into the matter: his sitting down on the judgment seat shews this.”
“(Hom. lxxxiv) Pilate, despairing of moving them, did not examine Him, as he intended, but delivered Him up. And he saith unto the Jews, Behold your King!”
“(Hom. lxxxiv. 2) A speech that should have softened their rage; but they were afraid of letting Him go, lest He might draw away the multitude again. For the love of rule is a heavy crime, and sufficient to condemn a man. They cried out, Away with Him, away with Him. And they resolved upon the most disgraceful kind of death, Crucify Him, in order to prevent all memorial of Him afterwards.”
“(Hom. lxxxiv. 2) They voluntarily brought themselves under punishment, and God gave them up to it. With one accord they denied the kingdom of God, and God suffered them to fall into their own condemnation; for they rejected the kingdom of Christ, and called down upon their own heads that of Cæsar.”
“(Tr. cxvi) The Jews thought they could alarm Pilate more by the mention of Cæsar, than by telling him of their law, as they had done above; We have a law, and by that law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God. So it follows, But the Jews cried out, saying, If thou let this Man go, thou art not Cæsar’s friend; whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Cæsar.”
“(Tr. cxvi) Pilate was before afraid not of violating their law by sparing Him, but of killing the Son of God, in killing Him. But he could not treat his master Cæsar with the same contempt with which he treated the law of a foreign nation: When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus forth, and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called the Pavement, but in the Hebrew, Gabbatha.”
“(Tract. cxvii) Why then doth Mark say, And it was the third hour, and they crucified Him? (Mark 15:25) Because on the third hour our Lord was crucified by the tongues of the Jews, on the sixth by the hands of the soldiers. So that we must understand that the fifth hour was passed, and the sixth began, when Pilate sat down on the judgment seat, (about the sixth hour, John says,) and that the crucifixion, and all that took place in connexion with it, filled up the rest of the hour, from which time up to the ninth hour there was darkness, according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But since the Jews tried to transfer the guilt of putting Christ to death from themselves to the Romans, i. e. to Pilate and his soldiers, Mark, omitting to mention the hour at which He was crucified by the soldiers, has expressly recorded the third hour; in order that it might be evident that not only the soldiers who crucified Jesus on the sixth hour, but the Jews who cried out for His death at the third, were His crucifiers. There is another way of solving this difficulty, viz. that the sixth hour here does not mean the sixth hour of the day; as John does not say, It was about the sixth hour of the day, but, It was the preparation of the passover, and about the sixth hour. Parasceve means in Latin, præparatio. For Christ our passover, as saith the Apostle, is sacrificed for us. The preparation for which passover, counting from the ninth hour of the night, which seems to have been the hour at which the chief priests pronounced upon our Lord’s sacrifice, saying, He is guilty of death, between it and the third hour of the day, when He was crucified, according to Mark, is an interval of six hours, three of the night and three of the day.”
“(Tr. cxvi. 8) Pilate still tries to overcome their apprehensions on Cæsar’s account; Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your King? He tries to shame them into doing what he had not been able to soften them into by putting Christ to shame.”
“(Tr. cxvi) But Pilate is at last overcome by fear: Then delivered he Him therefore unto them to be crucified. For it would be taking part openly against Cæsar, if when the Jews declared that they had no king but Cæsar, he wished to put another king over them, as he would appear to do if he let go unpunished a Man whom they had delivered to him for punishment on this very ground. It is not however, delivered Him unto them to crucify Him, but, to be crucified, i. e. by the sentence and authority of the governor. The Evangelist says, delivered unto them, to shew that they were implicated in the guilt from which they tried to escape. For Pilate would not have done this except to please them.”
“Lithostraton, i. e. laid with stone; the word signifies pavement. It was an elevated place.”
“Parasceve, i. e. preparation. This was a name for the sixth day, the day before the Sabbath, on which they prepared what was necessary for the Sabbath; as we read, On the sixth day they gathered twice as much bread. (Exod. 16:22) As man was made on the sixth day, and God rested on the seventh; so Christ suffered on the sixth day, and rested in the grave on the seventh.”
“Some suppose it to be a fault of the transcriber, who for the letter y, three, puts, six.”
“As if to say, See the kind of Man whom ye suspect of aspiring to the throne, a humble person, who cannot have any such design.”
“The tribunal is the seat of the judge, as the throne is the seat of the king, and the chair the seat of the doctor.”
The reader meets the sources first; chronology and attribution do the work. Provenance is shown on every quotation — solid for hosted public domain, dashed for link-out.