Verse 15
(15) But they cried out . . .—Better, they cried out therefore . . . They feel the sting of Pilate’s irony, therefore cry the more passionately, “Away with Him, away with Him, crucify Him.”
Shall I crucify your King?—In the order of the Greek words “your King” comes emphatically first, “Your King—shall I crucify Him?” The taunt is uttered in its bitterest form.
We have no king but Cæsar.—They are driven by Pilate’s taunt, and by their hatred of Jesus, to a denial of their own highest hopes. They who gloried in the Theocracy, and hoped for a temporal Messianic reign, which should free them from Roman bondage; they who boasted that they “were never in bondage to any man” (John 8:33); they who were “chief priests” of the Jews, confess that Cæsar is their only king. The words were doubtless meant, as those in John 19:12, to drive Pilate to comply with their wishes, under the dread of an accusation at Rome. They had this effect.
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