(This verse of Blessed Theophylact is referred to the next, 19th chapter, and constitutes its beginning.)

Chapter Nineteen

Then Pilate took Jesus and ordered Him to be beaten. And the soldiers, having wove a crown of thorns, put it on His head, and clothed Him in a scarlet robe, and said, Rejoice, King of the Jews! and they smote him on the cheeks. Pilate went out again and said to them, "Behold, I bring him out to you, that you may know that I find no fault in him." Then Jesus came out wearing a crown of thorns and a scarlet robe. And Pilate said to them, Behold. Person! And when the chief priests and officers saw him, they cried out, "Crucify him!" Pilate said to them, "Take Him and crucify Him; for I find no fault in him. The Jews answered him, "We have the law, and according to our law he must die, because he made himself the Son of God." 

See to what extent the malice of the Jews is manifested. Barabbas, a notorious robber, is begged to be set free, and the Lord is betrayed. Pilate scourges Him, wishing at least to calm and tame their fury. Since he could not deliver Him from their hands with words, he scourges, hoping thereby to restrain their fury; He allows them to put a chlamys on Him and put a crown on Him, also in order to appease their anger. But the soldiers do everything to please the Jews. They heard Pilate say, "I will release the King of the Jews; therefore they mock Him as a king. For it was not by Pilate's command that they did this either, who went against Jesus by night, without the knowledge of the governor, but to please the Jews, for money. Pilate is faint-hearted and unvengeful in his attitude towards the Jews. He leads Jesus out, wanting once more to quench their rage. But they did not tame themselves with this, but shouted: "Crucify Him, crucify Him!" But Pilate, seeing that all that he did was in vain, said, "Take it and crucify it; for I find no fault in Him." And he says this, urging them to do something that is not permitted to them, so that Jesus may be released. I, he says, who have the power to crucify, find no fault; but you, who have no power to crucify, say that He is guilty. So, take Him and crucify Him. But you have no power. So this Man must be released. This is Pilate's goal. He is more merciful, but not insistent on the truth. And they, being put to shame by this, say: "According to our law He must die, because He made Himself the Son of God." See how malice does not agree with itself. Pilate had said to them before, "Take Him, and judge Him according to your law; They did not agree to this. Now they say that according to our law He must die. Formerly they had accused Him of pretending to be a King; and now, when this lie has been exposed, they accuse Him of pretending to be the Son of God. And what is the fault here? If He does the works of God, what prevents Him from being the Son of God? Look at the Divine economy. They delivered the Lord to many judgment seats, in order to defame Him and darken His glory; but this disgrace is turned on their head, for in the most accurate investigation of the matter His innocence is still more proved. How many times even Pilate declared that he found nothing in Him worthy of death.

     And when Pilate heard this word, he was more afraid, and went back into the praetorium, and said to Jesus, Where art thou from? But Jesus did not give him an answer. Pilate said to Him, "Do you not answer me? Do you not know that I have power to crucify you, and I have power to let you go? Jesus answered, "You would have no authority over me, unless it had been given to you from above; therefore greater sin is on him who delivered me to you. 

Pilate, hearing only one word that He was the Son of God, was afraid. And they have seen His divine works, but they kill Him for the very thing for which it was necessary to worship Him. He asks Him not as before: "What have You done?" - but: "Who are You? Then they accused Him as a king, so naturally He asked: What have You done? And now, when it is slandered that He pretends to be the Son of God, He asks: "Where are You from?" Jesus is silent, for He had already declared to Pilate: "For this I was born," and "My kingdom is not from here": yet Pilate did not take advantage of this in the least and did not stand for the truth, but yielded to the demand of the people. For this reason, the Lord, despising his questions as being offered in vain, does not answer anything. It turns out that Pilate has no firmness at all, but any accidental danger can shake him. He was afraid of the Jews; trembled also Jesus, as the Son of God. Let us see how he condemns himself in his own words: "I have power to crucify you, and I have power to let you go." If everything depended on you, why did you not let go of Him whom you found innocent? The Lord, casting down his arrogance, says: "You would have no power over Me if it had not been given to you from above." For I do not just die; but I am doing something mysterious, and this is predestined from above for the common salvation. And so that you, when you hear: "It is given from above," do not think that Pilate is not subject to accountability before God, he adds: "Greater sin is on him who delivered Me to you." By this he shows that Pilate is also guilty of a sin, albeit a lesser one. For because Christ is "given from above" to die, that is, it is allowed, Pilate and the Jews no longer become innocent; but their free will chose evil, and God allowed and allowed them to put it into action. Thus, because God allows malice to come into action, the wicked are not free from guilt; but because they choose and do evil, they are worthy of all condemnation.

     From that time on, Pilate sought to let Him go. And the Jews cried out, "If thou wilt let Him go, thou art no friend of Caesar." Everyone who makes himself a king is an opponent of Caesar. When Pilate heard this word, he brought Jesus out and sat down in the judgment seat, at a place called Lythostroton, or in Hebrew Gabbatha. Then it was the Friday before the Passover, and the sixth hour. 

The Lord frightened Pilate with these words and presented a clear justification about Himself: if I had not given Myself up voluntarily, and if the Father had not allowed this, then you would not have power over Me; sin is also on you, and even more on Judas, who betrayed Me, or even on the people, because they added a new disease to the sickness of My wounds, and did not remember the duty to show mercy, but found Me unrequited and helpless, and delivered Me over to the cross. I was not even ashamed that I came out of so many judgments innocent, but cried out: "Crucify, crucify!" But the Jews, since they were convicted of slander that He was pretending to be a king, did not succeed in referring to their own law (for Pilate from that time on was even more afraid and wished to let Him go, so as not to irritate God), again resorted to foreign laws, and frightened Pilate, as a fearful one. For when they saw that he feared with reverence, lest by condemning Jesus, the Son of God, he should sin, they made him fear of Caesar, and, having accused the Lord of stealing the king's power, threatened Pilate that he would offend Caesar if he let go of him who rebelled against him. And where is He caught stealing royal power? How do you prove it? porphyry? Coronet? Warriors? But is not everything poor with Him? And clothes, and food, and a house? I don't even have a home. But how little courage there was in Pilate, when he thought it dangerous for himself to leave such an accusation unexamined! He goes out, as it were, with the intention of investigating the matter, for this is the meaning of the words: "He sat down at the judgment seat"; whereas, having not made any investigation, he betrays Him, thinking thereby to bow them down. - The Evangelist Mark says that when Christ was crucified, it was the third hour (Mark 15:25), and John says that it was the "sixth" hour. How is that? Some think to solve this by saying that there is a scribe's mistake. And that this could have happened, and that the third hour was written in John, and not the sixth, as it is now, is evident from the following. The three evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, agree that from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. It is evident that our Lord was crucified before the sixth hour, before the onset of darkness, namely, about the third hour, as Mark remarked, as well as John, although the error of the scribes changed the gamut to the outline of the episimone. Thus this disagreement is resolved, and others say that Mark clearly and unquestionably marked the hour of the judgment of the Lord's crucifixion. For it is said that the judges crucified and executed, from the time in which they pronounced the sentence, because in words it received the force of punishment and death. For this reason Mark says that He was crucified at the third hour, the hour in which Pilate pronounced the sentence. And when Mark notices the time of the judgment, John wrote down the hour at which the Lord was crucified. Moreover, see how much has been done between Pilate's sentence of crucifixion and the hour in which the Lord ascended to the cross. Having released Barabbas, he scourged Jesus and resolutely handed Him over to crucifixion; for the remission of Barabbas was the condemnation of the Lord. The warriors scoff. And see how much time it would take for prolonged ridicule. Pilate brought Him out, conversed with the Jews; again he enters and judges Jesus; Again he goes out and talks with the Jews. All this could take time from the third hour to the sixth. For this reason John, who has accurately stated this, as having watched over everything, mentions the sixth hour, when Pilate delivered up completely, "to be crucified," no longer conversing with the Jews, they condemning Jesus, but pronouncing the final decision about Him. If anyone says why, after pronouncing the sentence of crucifixion about the third hour, he again wanted to let Him go? In the first place, let him know that, compelled by the crowd, he pronounced sentence; then he was troubled by his wife's sleep, for she had warned him: "Do nothing to this Righteous One" (Matt. 27:19). With all this, notice, as John put it: it was "the sixth hour." He did not say affirmatively: it was six o'clock, but as if irresolutely and not with certainty: "the sixth hour." Therefore it should not matter to us in the least that the evangelists do not seem to be in complete agreement with each other, even if we admit this disagreement. For see if they did not all say that Jesus was crucified; And what they say about the hour: one that it was the third, and the other the sixth, does this in any way harm the truth? But it has been sufficiently proved that there is not even a disagreement.