Matthew 27:2

2. And when they had bound him Doubtless while the keepers of our Lord had been waiting for the morning they had relaxed the severity of his bonds. They now rebind him, and lead him forth. The entire Sanhedrim present seem to have gone in a body with their prisoner to the palace of Pilate. Pontius Pilate the governor Pilate was at this time procurator of Judea, an office rather of a pecuniary nature, yet, in the irregularities of the times, extended over every department of government. He was the sixth governor of Palestine after the cessation of the royalty. He was noted for his severity, cruelty, and despotic will. On one occasion, contrary to the practice of the Roman governors, who respected as far as possible the religious peculiarities of subject provinces, he introduced the Roman standards into the city with the images of the emperor upon them, esteemed idolatrous by the Jews. When the Jews remonstrated he threatened to massacre them. Upon this they threw themselves unanimously on the ground, protesting that they would rather die than consent to the profanation; upon which the Roman governor relented. On another occasion, when the Jews seditiously opposed his expending the sacred money upon the city water-works, he sent a body of soldiers with concealed arms to fall upon them unawares, who committed a much greater massacre than he intended. Saint Luke refers to a massacre by him, committed at a passover, when he mingled the blood of certain Galileans with the sacrifices they were performing. A similar cruelty in the massacre of certain Samaritans, after they had submitted, proved the ruin of Pilate. The Samaritan senate sent a complaint of his cruelty to Vitellius, president of Syria, by whom Pilate was ordered to Rome, to answer to the charge before the emperor Tiberius. Before he arrived Tiberius died; but Pilate was banished by his successor Caligula to Vienne in Gaul, where, in mortification for his disgrace, he committed suicide.

In his conduct at the trial of our Saviour, Pilate appears like a true Roman politician. He is on the side of justice, in regard to which his perceptions are acute and his procedures exact and just, so far as no passion or self-interest of his own interfered. He is versatile and inventive of expedients to rescue Jesus from an unjust death, until the Jews make him feel that such a course endangers his standing as Cesar’s friend. He examines Jesus, and pronounces him innocent; he expostulates with the Jews; he endeavours to release him instead of Barabbas; he sends him to Herod; he presents him as an object of sympathy, to move the Jews to pity; he proposes to chastise and set him free, and finally, he washes his hands in token of irresponsibility of Jesus’s death. It was only to save himself from the danger of what he finally suffered, an arraignment before Cesar for maladministration, that he yielded the point. But to save his own life or interests, the life of a single man or of any number of men would have been readily sacrificed.