“Why?”

“Jesus had committed a serious crime against the Temple. It was the responsibility of the Jewish authorities to arrest and punish him. During my time here I have found it necessary to put down trouble by spilling Jewish blood on more than one occasion. Whenever I have, the chief priests have always complained to Vitellius or Rome, claiming that I abused my power. Tiberius, for reasons I have never understood, insists on our coddling these miserable people, even to the point where they are exempt from military duty. I suspected that if I moved against Jesus in that crowd, composed of many Galileans as uncouth as himself, a riot might follow, blood would be spilled, and the priests would complain to Tiberius once again. Arresting Jesus under those circumstances was not worth the price to me, and because he had desecrated their precious Temple I was certain that the Jews would be forced to punish him on their own. Thus I would be rid of a dangerous man who threatened the peace of my province without so much as lifting a finger.”

“Very clever,” I said. “But I understand that these people do not have the right to execute any criminal they find guilty of a capital offense, such as defiling their Temple, without your permission.”

The procurator placed his hands together, spread his fingers, and tapped one set against the other. “So long as their own courts found the man guilty and condemned him to death, the responsibility would be entirely theirs. I would then grant sanction to their verdict, as I customarily do, and they could take him out and stone him to death or whatever else they wanted to do with him.”

“But according to Caiaphas, you finally did get involved. He said that he requested your assistance to arrest Jesus and you supplied him with soldiers.”

“Caiaphas came here, late at night, rousing both me and my wife from our sleep. He sat there, where you are sitting now, in a state of great agitation. He pleaded for my help as he had never done before, saying that he knew where Jesus could be taken, away from the crowds, but his Temple guards were afraid to arrest him, just as they had been in the courtyard.”

“Afraid? Of Jesus?” I forced a halfhearted smile.

“I, too, laughed at him,” Pilate recalled, “but Caiaphas said that his men feared that Jesus might work a miracle and destroy them, for if he could make a dead man come alive, they believed he could certainly make one who was alive fall dead. He begged me to lend him a few of my troops, for he was certain that if my soldiers were present his men would have the courage to fulfill their duties. At first I refused, telling him that false prophets were his business, but finally I agreed since it would still be his responsibility for the actual arrest and trial and execution. I even promised to grant him my sanction, early on the following morning, to what he assured me would be a verdict of guilty by the Sanhedrin, punishable by death, so that they could do away with Jesus before their Passover and Sabbath began at sundown. Then I returned to bed.”