So they bound Jesus, led him away and handed him over to Pilate.
“Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate.
“You have said so,” Jesus replied.
He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.
“Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate.
“You have said so,” Jesus replied.
He had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.
All the rest are later additions.
I am learning this from a French article of Jean Magne, Jésus devant Pilate. In future I will post his arguments to think so.
But already from now I can realize a thing. Why was so important an official recognition of Jesus in all the Passion accounts? If you observe well the episode, what Pilate is doing is simply to secure himself (and the reader) that the victim is the king “of the Jews” (possessive genitive).
I had argued somewhere in this forum that the same function was given later to Judas Iskarioth, since he, only as Jew from the tribe of Judah, could be able to recognize Jesus in the middle of the night.
This talks precisely in support of the Magne's thesis that the goal of the Earliest Gospel was “to judaize”/to lower as the Jewish Messiah a Christ from another cult, one where the Jewish God was hated and despised as the evil demiurge.
Since Magne is so focused on the story of the Serpent in Genesis, I wonder if the Pilate's question ““Are you the king of the Jews?” resembles someway the same question put by the creator to Adam:
"Then the Lord God called to the man, and said to him, 'Where are you?'"
The context of this verse is immediately after Adam had sinned. Just as the question of Pilate precedes the execution of Jesus as worth of death to be proclaimed Messiah, so in the same way the question of the Creator God addressed to Adam precedes the punition of the sinner Adam and the celestial crucifixion of the Serpent on the same tree of knowledge.
Note that Jesus is emptied of any his power before Pilate, just as Adam is naked in the eyes of himself and of the Creator, after the his sin.
So just as the Creator crucified the Serpent but really punished only Adam, so the allegory of the demiurge, Pilate, crucified the alien Christ but really punished only the mere man Jesus.