Hardly had the Procurator climbed the stairs to his apartment and ordered his long delayed breakfast to be brought in, when a soldier assigned to the Praetorium reported to him.

“Sir, the Galilean whom you sent to the Tetrarch Herod has been returned to you,” he announced. “The High Priest and his Temple associates, together with a throng of excited Jews, are down there awaiting your return to the Praetorium to resume trial of the prisoner.”

“By great Jove!” The Procurator’s scowl was heavy. Why had Herod sent him back? Surely the bumbling Tetrarch hadn’t been clever enough to comprehend Pilate’s scheme to evade responsibility.

He did not question the soldier, however, and a few moments later he mounted the tribunal again and sat down upon the curule. From the pavement before the Praetorium the captain of the Temple guards and his detachment, forming a square about the Galilean, advanced to the tribunal. Jesus, Pilate saw, was wearing a bedraggled, purple-bordered robe. One of the soldiers was carrying the folded brown homespun robe which the prisoner had been wearing before.

Pilate, color mounting, pointed to Jesus and glared at the officer. “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded. “Why is he wearing this emblem of authority? Speak up! Who is responsible for this mockery?”

“Not I, sir,” the captain hastened to declare. “The Tetrarch ordered one of his old robes to be placed upon the prisoner; he said he appreciated the Procurator’s raillery in calling the man the King of the Jews, and he ordered him arrayed in the purple in order to further your joking, sir.”

“Didn’t he examine the prisoner?”

“He questioned him, sir, and sought to have him work some tricks of magic, but the prisoner made no reply.”

Once again Pilate descended from the tribunal and went out upon the pavement before the Praetorium. At first sight of him the mob began to raise a clamor. “Bar Abbas!” a man toward the rear of the multitude screamed. “Bar Abbas! Give us Bar Abbas!” Others joined in the uproar. Pilate seemed not to understand them. “They want to see the revolutionaries’ leader,” he said to the soldier who had accompanied him. “They will see him as the condemned men start for the Hill of the Skull. But not until I have disposed of this Galilean. There is already too much commotion. Go into the courtyard, and tell the centurions not to start to the execution ground until I give the order.” He turned back to face Caiaphas and the priests and behind them the motley crowd. “You brought me this man and charged that he was a revolutionary, that he sought to overthrow the rule of Rome in this province, but I found no guilt in him, and when I sent him to the Tetrarch Herod, ruler of Galilee, he, too, found nothing worthy of death. So I shall discharge him. And now, disperse and let us have no more of this tumult.”

“No! No! O Procurator, crucify him! Bar Abbas! Bar Abbas!”

“Crucify the King of the Jews!” Pilate looked toward the High Priest as he said it, as though he were jesting, but he could not effectively conceal the scorn in his voice and on his face. “I must let him go free!”

His words provoked another storm of shouted entreaties and demands. “Bar Abbas! Bar Abbas! Give us Bar Abbas!”

“When I have disposed of this Jesus of Galilee, you shall get to see that revolutionary”—he smiled glumly—“as Bar Abbas goes to the cross.”

“The Passover release! It’s the long-established custom, O Procurator. Give us the Passover release!”

Pilate stared in surprise at the crowd shouting below him. Could it be, then, as he had first suspected, that this throng hated the Temple priests and especially Caiaphas and wanted the release of the Galilean? But he had found Jesus not guilty and technically had already released him. If, however, he should find him guilty of some minor crime, such as causing a great disturbance and commotion among the people, for example, and punish him for that, then he might logically release him as the Passover recipient of the Procurator’s pardon. At the same time he would dull considerably any report concerning this case that might find its way to Rome.

“I find no serious fault in this Galilean,” he declared, as he held up his hand to signal for silence, “but because of his indiscretions and his provocation of tumults and unrest and much bickering among the people, I shall have him scourged before I release him.”

He returned to the tribunal and gave the formal order for the scourging of Jesus. Then once again he climbed the stone stairway to his apartment and called for his breakfast. His food was placed on a small table by the window, for already the morning sun was warm and out beyond the smoldering Vale of Hinnom dark, thickening clouds had begun to form. But the Procurator was not permitted to relax calmly over his morning meal. The din below not only continued, but the shoutings grew increasingly loud. After awhile, Pilate pushed back his plate and stood up.

“I’ll abide this no longer!” he shouted to his orderly standing near the doorway. “The obstinate, cantankerous provincials! They’ll end this disgraceful tumult, or I’ll have the Antonia garrison on them with their swords!” He caught up his toga and started once more for the Praetorium.

“Bring out to the pavement the robber Bar Abbas and the Galilean miracle worker,” he commanded, when he arrived in his tribunal chamber.

“Bar Abbas! Bar Abbas! Bring forth Bar Abbas, O Procurator!” the multitude began to shout, as Pilate appeared on the mosaic in front of the Praetorium. “The Passover release! Give us Bar Abbas!” The Procurator, studying the vociferous throng, saw that the cries for the release of the robber chieftain seemed to be coming from a group of wild-eyed, fanatical-looking rough fellows bunched behind the High Priest and his clique. The thought came to him that they might be Zealots, even some of the escaped members of the Bar Abbas band broken up a week before by the Centurion Cornelius. But the supporters of the Galilean mystic, he reasoned, would outnumber these men screaming for the release of Bar Abbas.

The multitude calmed perceptibly as the scourged revolutionary appeared on the pavement before them and then, recovered somewhat from the shock the man’s sad state had caused, burst into a new clamoring for his release. Bar Abbas stared stonily ahead, as if indifferent to the screams and yelling of the people, no doubt still half dazed from the ordeal from which he had that moment been delivered. Although his coarse robe had been returned to him after the scourging and was thrown loosely about his shoulders, the milling crowd saw at once that the leather-thonged whip had stripped and torn the flesh of his shoulders and back; already the robe was reddening into a gory, clinging covering like that which a butcher might have worn to carry on his shoulder a freshly slaughtered lamb.

But Jesus, when he was led forth from the courtyard to the pavement before the Praetorium to stand near the robber chieftain, made an even more pitiable figure. The purple robe he had been wearing when he was brought back from Herod’s judgment hall was once again about his sagging shoulders, and it was soaked with blood. His long hair was matted with drying blood where it curled above his flayed and bruised shoulders, and his naked upper arms were crisscrossed with bleeding cuts and great reddened welts. But more shocking than the lacerations and the bleeding flesh, the blood-soaked purple robe, the mercilessly flayed, drooping shoulders burdened beyond human strength to endure, was the evidence he wore upon his head of a sadism past comprehending. Pressed down hard against his skull, so that the sharp points in some places actually had pierced the skin of his forehead and temples, was a circlet hastily fashioned from a long thin branch torn from a rhamnus thorn.

Pilate noticed it immediately. “Why the victor’s wreath?” he asked the soldier guarding the Galilean.

“It’s not a victor’s wreath,” he answered. “Sir, it’s the royal crown of the King of the Jews.” He ventured a smile. “The soldiers made it from a shrub growing near the scourging post and crowned him with it.”

“Indeed, the crown goes well with the Tetrarch’s purple.” Pilate smiled humorlessly. Then he held up his hand to command silence. “It must be well known to you that each year at the Feast of the Passover it is the custom of the Procurator to release a prisoner. Here before you are the revolutionary and murderer and robber, one Bar Abbas, who has been sentenced to the cross, and the prisoner brought by the High Priest, one Jesus of Galilee”—he paused and looking directly at the group of Temple priests, smiled appreciatively—“the King of the Jews....”

“We have no king!” shouted Joseph Caiaphas, and a chorus of angry voices supported him, “no king except Tiberius. This man is not our king; he is a blasphemer, an enemy of Israel’s God; he stirs up the people; he declares himself to be king in Israel; he calls himself the Son of God!” He paused, as if fearful at having uttered the ineffable name.

“Crucify him! Crucify him!” The mob renewed its angry demanding. “He claims to be the Son of God, the blasphemer! Crucify him!”

But Pilate paid them little heed. Turning his back upon the High Priest and the clamoring throng on the esplanade below, he withdrew into the Praetorium. “Bring him inside,” he said, motioning with his head as he looked back. And then he spoke to the soldier guarding Bar Abbas. “And remove that one from the sight of the multitude. But presently I shall call for him again.”

The Procurator had hardly mounted the tribunal when a soldier entered the chamber from the courtyard and handed a tablet to one of the attendants. The two whispered, heads together, for a moment. Then the attendant strode quickly to the tribunal, saluted, and presented Pilate the wax tablet. “A message, sir, from the Procurator’s wife,” he explained. “The messenger reported it was urgent.”

Hastily Pilate scanned the tablet. He scowled, then beckoned to the man. “Fetch me the soldier who brought this tablet.”

In another moment the soldier was standing stiffly before the tribunal. “Soldier,” Pilate inquired, “did you bring this message from the hand of the Lady Claudia?”

“No, sir,” he answered. “It was handed to me in the courtyard over there.”

“By whom?”

“The Centurion Longinus, sir; he had just come, I understood, from the Palace of the Herods.”

A quick frown darkened the Procurator’s countenance. “And where is the Centurion Longinus now?”

“Sir, I think he went up to his apartment in the fortress.”

Pilate nodded and waved the man aside; his face was heavy as once again he read his wife’s message:

Hear me, Pilate:

Take no responsibility for that righteous man’s blood, for in the night I had a frightful dream concerning him.