“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.