This week we will continue with Yeshua/Jesus in the background as the world takes center stage against Him. This week is very context heavy, from the proposed location of Golgotha, the properties of myrrh, the rights of Roman soldiers, the hours of prayer, the controversy of cross vs tree vs stake, to the importance of the titles King of the Jews and King of Israel.
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22 And they brought him to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull). 23 And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. 24 And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take. 25 And it was the third hour when they crucified him. 26 And the inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” 27 And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. 29 And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, 30 save yourself, and come down from the cross!” 31 So also the chief priests with the scribes mocked him to one another, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. 32 Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also reviled him.
Last week, when we talked about the aftermath of the hearing in Pilate’s court (which he held in Jerusalem only during the festivals because he was otherwise never actually in Jerusalem but in Caesarea Maritima) the subject of the Gospels changed for the first time. Yeshua/Jesus was no longer the main character because the action has all transferred to a few collective groups, all referred to as “they”. The soldiers, the crowds, the chief priests and scribes are all referred to as they and they are doing all the talking and all the acting. Yeshua is portrayed as merely the direct object of their actions when He is even really mentioned at all. The focus right now is on the collective world of Jewish and Gentile forces coming together as a team, to destroy the Son of Man. Yeshua will not speak again until verse 34 and no allies are mentioned until verse 40 when we discover that the women have not left His side. But right now, Mark is very much portraying Yeshua as a perceived pawn, a casualty in the victory parade of the enemy through the actions of the oppressors he is using. The author of Mark is writing this as though it is a done deal, as though Yeshua has been abandoned by the entire world and, in next week’s episode, by God Himself. This is the continuance of last week’s triumph parade, where Satan and Rome and the Jewish political establishment (which was the same as the religious establishment in ancient times) have won a tremendous victory and have tortured, mocked, and paraded Yeshua as a captive of war and are now making Him an example of what happens to anyone who crosses them. Sin and death have become the main characters of the narrative.
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have six years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids (affiliate link) and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com. If you have kids, I also have a weekly broadcast where I teach them Bible context in a way that shows them why they can trust God and how He wants to have a relationship with them through the Messiah.
All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.
22 And they brought him to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull).
We talked about the site for this last week. I think we all know that almost all of the touristy sites were chosen so long afterward that they are a combination of guesswork and nonsense and very few have substantial archaeological backing. People want to visit shrines, because it makes things more real and even when they can’t be correct. We looked at Joan Taylor’s work and her article, Golgotha: A Reconsideration of the Evidence for the Site of Jesus’s Crucifixion and Burial, which is free online and I will include it again in this week’s transcript, that cover her work. She is an expert in Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism and incredibly respected. She presents evidence that according to the very early church, Golgotha was not a place but a region outside the walls of first-century Jerusalem and as per John, the crucifixion site and the burial site were both in Golgotha but it doesn’t specify how far away. She believes that it would be more logical and “Roman” to crucify Him along the roads as a deterrent and a show of Roman power. So, the area south of the traditional site lies at the crossroads of two pilgrim trails into the city via the Genneth gate, one leading from Bethlehem and Hebron and the other from Joppa. If Yeshua were crucified in this spot, it wouldn’t have been on some secluded hill away from the roads, but would be at a major thoroughfare. As we see travelers passing by and mocking Him, it does seem unlikely that it was not at the roadside and in Hebrews, it is specifically stated that Yeshua was crucified outside the gate (Heb 13:12). So, it helps when visualizing all of this, if you see it as not “on a hill far away” (no matter how much we love that song), but at the edge of the Iron Age (Israel’s monarchy period) stone quarry that covered the region of Golgotha that intersected two main, very busy thoroughfares into the city. This wasn’t secluded, this was as public as possible. This is what the Romans would do to a man condemned for sedition, of claiming kingship without Caesar’s and the senate’s permission.
23 And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh (oinon esmyrnismenon), but he did not take it.
The only action Yeshua has taken since speaking to Pilate and then refusing to speak, is the refusal of the myrrh-infused wine. In Mark 14:25, Yeshua said that He would never touch wine again until He was in His Father’s Kingdom, and it wasn’t time yet so He refused it. But there are a number of theories about this—you know, wine was the drink of kings and at this point He was not yet a King. I believe that He officially became a King not when He rose from the dead but at the moment he overcame the enemy at His death. It was the ultimate surprise attack that the enemy never saw coming. Imagine if a king says to you, “If you can fill this cup, then you can have whatever you want.” And you look at the cup there on the table and it’s about a pint and you think, sure you can fill it. But what you don’t know is that there is a hole in the bottom of the cup, draining into a bottomless pit beneath the floor. And the moment you take the challenge, you have already lost because you cannot fill the cup, not in a thousand years. That’s what happened when Satan killed Yeshua, he poured every ounce of his power and authority into the bottomless pit of Yeshua’s innocence in an unjust act—and it wasn’t enough. Satan lost as soon as Yeshua’s physical body failed. The proof and vindication came three days later that the victory had already been won, despite no one noticing. Jonah went in to the belly of the great fish guilty, whereas Yeshua was innocent.
Let’s talk about myrrh. Myrrh, like frankincense, is a tree resin and that is how they were used in Biblical times, unless they gained the myrrh through plant injury and then the liquid was described as “tears of myrrh” because they would drip from the wounded plant. Pliny the Elder claimed that Romans loved wines perfumed with myrrh, which sounds awful to me. Sanhedrin 43a claims that a grain of frankincense in wine was given to condemned men as a narcotic by generous upper class women, but with the Roman soldiers, the only reason I could see for them giving Him a narcotic would be to ultimately draw out the torture. Crucifixion might hurt less but it would still be horrific. However, the text does not specify who gave Him the wine—the pronoun isn’t specific. “They” could be the Jewish women, or it could be the soldiers. Something that just now occurred to me is that this might have been a continuation of the triumph-ish mockery, the mention of the myrrh which upper class Romans wanted their wine to be perfumed with. Wine was known as the drink of kings and wine mixed with myrrh wasn’t so much for common folks, who instead normally drank a vinegar water mixture—which is the “sour wine” He is offered later (oxous). Honestly, it’s all guesswork, what Mark was saying here.
But Yeshua refuses the wine for unnamed reasons. And so, again, speculation abounds. Was it because He had refused to drink wine until He came into His Kingdom or, did He refuse to drink wine because He foreknew that the women would try to deaden His pain and He knew that He had to drink and experience the full cup—the cup that He kept telling His disciples that He had to drink. A drugged Messiah on the Cross might make us feel better, but it would seem to be counterproductive. No shortcuts.
24 And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take.
It was the job of four men to oversee crucifixions, and to guard the bodies until they were dead so that no one would come to free them. This would be the “they” who crucified, divided, cast lots, and took. Again, it’s like this story isn’t even about Yeshua at all but instead about the world’s response to Him. It’s really chilling. We’ve gone through fourteen chapters where it was all about Him and He has been there and present and our only focus and all of a sudden it is like there is this world without Him. And when viewed, or heard aloud as it would have been, rhetorically this is a very alarming section of Scripture—if we were not focused on His suffering it would be as though He was already gone and all hope has gone out of the world. Yeshua seems to be at the mercy of these men and in a way He is but only because He has placed Himself at their mercy, in obedience to fully drain the cup of wrath. His garments, which were famous for healing those who touched them (5:27-31 and 6:56), were now treated as cheap commodities by the soldiers who had stripped Him naked before nailing Him to the Cross. It’s like a bunch of kids playing with their father’s valuable coin collection, having no clue their value, and spending them with the ice cream man. And it isn’t that the clothing healed or was intrinsically valuable, don’t get me wrong, but they are absolutely clueless as to what they are involved in as they go about business as usual. We will cover the fulfillment of Psalm 22:18 at the end because there is so much in this section that applies to that entire Psalm.
And I don’t want you to think that this is unusual or that they saw themselves as thieves because this was an out of the ordinary event. Tacitus (Annals 6.29) mentions that it was just part of the perks of the job that the execution squad would receive whatever the victim had on them at the time, and the State kept their property, if any. In the Babylonian Talmud San 43b, there is this big long debate over who gets what belonged to the executed man. And it made me want to rip my eyeballs out with a fork. I just—I hate nitpicking and all the legal wranglings. I would have made the worst lawyer ever. It’s like, “Can we just be loving and give his stuff to his family? Okay??? But they didn’t ask me, heck, likely they would be horrified that I am teaching at all because during the Talmudic era, women were considered to be good for very little other than serving men.
I want to cover a controversy that really shouldn’t be a controversy at all. A lot of times, people will get the idea that such and such is pagan, or a certain thing is forbidden, or not expressly forbidden and therefore fair game and we get hopelessly side tracked—which is why Paul in Galatians 5 lists the fruit of the Spirit and specifically says that there is no law that stands in the way of being loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, faithful, gentle and self-controlled and he would have based this on the Sermon on the Mount. If we are counter-cultural in the ways that really matter, by saying no to sin and specifically oppression, then we do well. When we instead get involved in nitpicking and being just overly concerned with technicalities, we end up stunted and not growing at all. Ask me how I know.
Anyway, years ago there was this brouhaha about cross vs execution stake and people were really adamant that Yeshua was killed by either being nailed to an actual tree or to an upright stake and I believe that the source of the controversy centered on the “everything that the church does is pagan because I have this book with no footnotes that tells me so.” And although people are quick to not believe one group’s claims, they will read a book with unsubstantiated claims and decide it’s true—which, by the way, is a big part of the reason why kids are walking away from the faith because parents are under the misguided assumption that blindly accepting an alternate narrative “just because” is thinking critically but it isn’t. It’s no different than what they did the first time. I am actually going to be speaking at a homeschooling conference this weekend where I am going to talk about this because it is very serious. And so people were convinced that the Cross was a pagan symbol and people were wearing it around their necks and committing idolatry. Here’s the deal, we know what crucifixions looked like because they are described, in detail, in a whole lot of ancient sources, Jewish and Gentile. We also have archaeology backing up those claims—one of the most famous being the Alexamenos Graffito, carved into the wall of a boys’ dormitory in within the Imperial Palace on Palatine Hill in Rome around 200 CE. Some poor kid named Alexamenos, who was a Christian, was being mocked for worshiping a man with the head of a donkey nailed to the traditional, T-shaped Cross, because the Jews were accused of worshiping a donkey god. A great book on this is Hengel’s Crucifixion: In the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross. (<–Affiliate link)It’s a masterpiece, written in 1977 and no one is revising it because it is just an amazing piece of scholarship.
25 And it was the third hour when they crucified him.
I want to talk about the third, sixth, ninth and twelfth hours. I actually did a Context for Kids broadcast on it that I will link in the transcript because I took more time with them than I will with you. Don’t worry, it’s at the beginning so you don’t have to trudge through the whole thing. But, in a time without clocks, there was a certain period of daylight hours that are longer in the winter and shorter in the summer, right? Well, however long that time period was, it got divided into twelve sections. Noon, the 6th hour, wasn’t at 12:00am, it was whenever the sun was at it’s highest in the sky, directly overheard. Around now, each of their hours would be about an hour and a half and in the coldest part of winter, each hour would be about fifty minutes long. At the third hour in the Temple, the priests would open up the Temple and perform the first Tamid offering of the day, aka the continual burnt offering because they offered it twice a day, every single day of the year and when the Shacharit prayer service was offered. This was when Yeshua was nailed to the Cross. And gosh, this is such a disconnect. Things are going on over at the Temple to the East like it’s just a normal festival day—again, this would have read as utterly surreal. As the first whole burnt offering of the day is slaughtered, Yeshua is crucified.
And I want to share with you one of the prayers they were offering up, “Speedily cause the offspring of your servant David to flourish, and let him be exalted by your saving power, for we wait all day long for your salvation. Blessed are you, O Lord, who causes salvation to flourish.” Ironic that as the priests prayed this, their leadership was destroying the very offspring they were praying for.
You know, crucifixion was so horrifying and shameful that you couldn’t crucify a Roman citizen. The body of a Roman citizen was considered to be too sacred for crucifixion. We also know from historical documents that the victim was either tied or nailed, John claims that Yeshua was nailed and unless the person was like really someone Rome wanted to make a spectacle of, the Cross was only seven feet tall—meaning that animals could and did come by the harass them—or worse. Anyway, Mark is the only Gospel writer to make note of this happening at the third hour but remember the story he is telling us—Yeshua is the rewriting of Israel’s Passover history; He is the leader of the Greater Exodus. And not only that, but He is that continual offering, the morning and the evening whole offering that remains before Yahweh for eternity. Each Gospel writer gives a slightly different version of the Passover story based on what they are trying to show us and what facets of it they are needing to emphasize to give us the fullest picture possible.
26 And the inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.”
This is the fifth mention of the phrase, “King of the Jews,” the first three were from Pilate, and the fourth when the soldiers were carrying out the mock triumph. This would have been a wooden board, whitened with chalk and the charges written over that in ink. And the title, of course, is Roman and not Jewish. And this was Herod the Great’s title, a title withheld from his sons, actually who were just tetrarchs and ethnarchs—but I imagine this was a jab at the Jews, mocking them because they detested Herod and with good reason and they also hated his sons, and again, with just cause. They were looking for a Davidic Messiah who would conquer the Romans, not to have the title associated with a crucified man. Rome was, I believe, showing the Jewish leadership what they thought of them. Simon bar Giora, who you can read about in Josephus’s Wars of the Jews, was one of the ruthless leaders of the Revolt against Rome in the years leading up to the destruction of the Temple and much of Jerusalem. He was captured, forced to walk in the triumph of Titus, was judged to be a rebel and a traitor, and was executed in Rome. He was actually thrown down from a great height and had been mockingly labeled the King of the Jews as well. Only, just saying, he deserved what he got, all of those leaders did, for what they did to the innocent citizens of Jerusalem. They would have been better off ruled by the Romans!
27 And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left.
First of all, this would have been read in one sitting—it would have been like going to a movie for these folks. It takes about two hours to read this. They would have been hanging on every word and so all of it would be fresh in their memory and when they heard that the two robbers were on his right and left, they would have gasped—because they would be remembering the request of John and James back in chapter ten when they asked to be able to sit at his right and left when He would come into His Kingdom—when they were obviously still thinking He was going to be that Davidic Messiah they wanted. So here, instead of James and John, two robbers were judged more worthy to be there at the inauguration of His Kingdom. The word for robbers here is lestes, and that is the word used for the social bandit, Robin Hood types who were harassing the wealthy in those days and all the way up to the First Revolt of 66-70 CE. Truth be told, with the timing, they were quite probably associates of Barabbas who hadn’t been popular enough to have anyone hollering for their release. Lestes is also the word used against the chief priests when Yeshua clears out the sellers and money changers. Lestes were quite popular with the disgruntled and oppressed population, but they were still nothing but criminals.
29 And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days,
And we have another group of “they” and this time it is the people walking by on the two roads heading into Jerusalem from Bethlehem and Joppa, coming in for the day’s festivities. The word for “derided” is blasphemo, which is interesting because that was the formal charge from the high priests’ informal hearing when all was said and done, that He deserved death for the sin of blasphemy. But, here’s the deal, Yeshua was convicted of blasphemy not for the charges of Temple desecration, because they couldn’t make that stick, but because He had dared to tell the High Priest that they would see Him “coming in the clouds” which was judgment language. To stand in judgment of Israel’s leaders, in those days, was just as tantamount to blasphemy as speaking against the Temple. These people knew who He was, and were aware of the original charges, so this wasn’t just speculation on their parts. I honestly doubt that the chief priests could have arrested Him in the first place if the gossip wasn’t already over town. Of course, we don’t know who started it because that was spoken privately to His followers back in chapter 13—so when Judas sold Him over to the chief priests, did he share this with them? And, I know what was said in John chapter 2 but Mark was the very first Gospel, more of a theological biography by a long shot, and John is a very esoteric, heavily theological document and has to be read as such. They are entirely different genres of literature. What they do is tell the truth but in different ways—which was exactly how they communicated in those days. When telling the stories of Yeshua, who was too complex for a basic modern history and too theological for a straight up Greco-Roman biography, and too real, too tangible and present, for a no holds barred midrashic treatise, they needed to be creative in terms that the original audience could grasp and appreciate. Remember, it was written for our benefit but it was written to them from within their specific cultural milieu. All that is to say is that I am not going to take what John said into this because Mark’s audience would be unaware of it.
So, somehow they know about the original charges or at least the original claims. In John, all that was claimed is that Yeshua said He would raise up the Temple in three days, not that He would destroy it—it was more like I dare for them to destroy the Temple but of course, He was talking about His Body and they believed that He was claiming to be able to rebuild a fallen Temple in three days. So, even if we do consider John, it isn’t the same thing at all. Someone has been feeding the crowd with insider information, entirely out of context. Which, of course, isn’t that big of a transgression when you are already crucifying a man whose only crime seems to be infuriating the Jerusalem elites. It would not be unheard of for those who were seeking His arrest to have been seeding the festival attendees with rumors all along the roads into town.
One more thing, this is our third incident of group mocking—the first was at the High Priest’s home, the second was the work of Pilate’s soldiers, and now the people passing by are heaping abuse onto Him as He is dying, reminiscent of Psalm 22: 7 “All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads” and 109:25, “I am an object of scorn to my accusers; when they see me, they wag their heads.” And although it might seem horrifically barbaric that families headed to the Passover festival, mocking someone who is suffering so horribly but we aren’t that far removed from it all. It is very easy to create a hardened populace and we already enjoy watching videos of people being hurt. People who are used to violence and especially within the context of an honor/shame society where a shamed person becomes less than human in the eyes of the crowd and therefore deserving of abuse. Yeshua had gone from the top of the heap, potential Messianic Savior, hopeful destroyer of Rome, miracle worker and prophet, to the lowest of the low and literally overnight. That’s how that kind of society worked and it was incredibly fickle. It’s like how, if a child molestation claim is made—unless it is against your pastor and the elder board covers it up and destroys the family of the child *cough*-it automatically gets believed and you become a monster in the eyes of everyone overnight.
30 save yourself, and come down from the cross!”
The implication is clear, “If you are the Messiah who was going to save all of us from the Romans then it should be easy for you to save yourself from them! Where are all these miracles now?” People coming via these roads were Judeans, not Galileans. They might have heard about the miracles and the exorcisms and the miraculous feedings and even raising that girl from the dead but talk is cheap and they were very much used to the grandiose claims of Messianic claimants that generally just got a whole lot of other folks crucified. Even Augustus was (dubiously) credited with working miracles and Yeshua was not the only miracle worker in those times—Honi the Circle Maker having lived about a hundred years before. (Granted, Honi couldn’t do what Yeshua could so I am not equating them.) And it’s often just a whole lot of fun to beat on someone who was once much higher up on the pecking order than yourself. I see it among believers so often who do not understand that it is very much a self-exalting exercise, which Yeshua warned us against. Just putting it in terms of recent events, I am reminded of what happened to Johnny Depp back in 2016. An accusation was made publicly that he was an abuser and, other than the films he had already wrapped on, he went for like six years with almost no work at all. People were thrilled to take him down and feel better than him. Over the last two months, because of the defamation trial, a lot of the people who were destroying him are now gleefully destroying his accuser. Celebrity culture (and High School, for that matter) is extraordinarily honor/shame based and people, shamefully, love watching a bloodbath as long as it is someone else’s blood.
31 So also the chief priests with the scribes mocked him to one another, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself.
Another reason I agree with Joan Taylor that Golgotha was at the convergence of these two roads is because if this Iron Age rock quarry was indeed used as an execution site, all these people would need to have a way to approach it that closely without becoming ritually unclean because Golgotha would have been considered extremely unclean. And the priests wouldn’t have come close and especially with all hands on deck and everyone expected to be on duty for the festivals—not that the chief priests would have been probably performing sacrifices, but they were Temple officials. They would not take any chance of coming in contact with death. The scribes mentioned would have been those specifically associated with the Temple, these weren’t just average scribes who wrote out marriage contracts and divorces and bills of sale who are yucking it up with the Judean elites, in this fourth mocking of Yeshua and it has come full circle because these chief priests were also the first group to mock Him. No, these were the scribes of the chief priests. Who, by the way, had no business even being outside the city except to make sure that the people passing by knew exactly why He was up there, or at least what they wanted them to know. This was a propaganda tour designed to justify what had been done and to fill Jerusalem with rumors, gossip, and slander all to foment ill will against Him with the Judeans, which would hopefully also spread to the Galileans who would not be terribly ashamed to have ever been associated with Him. That’s how shaming works, by making people so embarrassed about a person that they just want to forget them. That Christianity even exists today is more than a miracle—no one had any reason to want to even mention His Name, much less preach about Him. Not unless something actually happened at that empty tomb.
But hey, it’s easy to skip over the irony here. What did they say about Him, “He saved others; he cannot save himself.” So, they are confessing and acknowledging that He did save others and more than that, it is a prophetic statement that He indeed cannot save Himself because if He does then He cannot save others. They don’t get it, but they get it. And can I say that with all the miracles He has been working, they might be a bit more than relieved that His powers don’t seem to work around them because if He was really the sort of Messiah they all wanted, they would be doomed.
32 Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also reviled him.
So, in the last verse they acknowledged His miracles but now they are saying that they don’t matter because if He doesn’t do something for them all to see right now, that they were meaningless. I am going to state that another way, if He doesn’t come down off the cross to entertain them right now then the works that God did through Him are irrelevant. How is this any different than Mark 8:11-13, directly after the feeding of the four thousand?
The Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven to test him. And he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, “Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign will be given to this generation.” And he left them, got into the boat again, and went to the other side.
As it was in Mark 8, no sign will be performed for them. There is no great mystery here. If someone wants to believe a thing, no matter how ridiculous, no proof is enough to sway them away. And conversely, if someone doesn’t want to believe something, no matter how credible, no proof is enough to overcome it. I have had things I have taught that were neck deep in archaeological documentation from experts in the ancient world and especially in Babylonian religion and have presented them to people who are so bought in to the propaganda from Alexander Hislop, Lew White, and so many others who have just regurgitated the false claims, and have challenged people to provide evidence, in context, and they can’t because there is none and they call me all sorts of names and try to undermine my character and misrepresent my motivations because, on some level, they need to believe it. I am, of course, not comparing that with what Yeshua endured and the challenges they threw at Him.
But what they call Him here is very interesting. King of the Jews is a Roman title, given to those few people whom the Roman Senate granted the right to rule as King of Judea—like Herod the Great and Herod Agrippa. But they are using Christos, the Greek translation of Maschiach, Messiah, and calling Him the King of Israel. And this is important because now He has been given the proper title by both Gentiles and Jews. They might have even used Maschiach, it was a common Hebrew word that even those who spoke Aramaic would understand. And the word for believe is pisteuo, which means not just to believe but to trust. In other words, if you come down, then we will trust you as the Messiah, the heir of David, the King of Israel.
The fifth mocking will come from the lestes, the two social bandits crucified alongside Him. They were quite possibly even allied with Barabbas but not as popular. They would have been incredibly opposed to the idea of a Messiah who embraced the Gentiles and who was non-violent and preached forgiveness, turning the other cheek, etc. These guys would not be Sermon on the Mount supporters because they lived by the sword and would be dying by it. Their hope, and the reason they did what they did was because they wanted violent revolution, they wanted the Davidic violent Messiah of everyone’s national dreams. And in mocking Yeshua, they become the bedfellows of Rome, the Jerusalem elites, and the Temple power players. Yeshua is absolutely abandoned now—as far as we know at this moment in the narrative. Everyone except for the Romans wanted a “real” Messiah who would slaughter the Romans, not just another Messianic wannabe who would be killed by the Romans. They were all glad to be rid of Him now that it was clear that He was never going to be what they wanted, if it had gone on any longer, the streets might be lined with the hanging bodies of His crucified followers and anyone else unlucky enough to get caught up in Roman anger.
