John19chapter 19

Roman flogging was done with a whip of leather thongs weighted with bone or metal, and it regularly killed men outright. The purple robe and the crown of thorns were a soldiers' parody of an emperor — purple was the imperial colour and the emperor wore a laurel wreath — performed by men who found the idea of a Jewish king funny.

The pressure that decides the case is a political title. Friend of Caesar was a real honorific granted to men in imperial favour, and Pilate's patron in Rome had recently fallen; the threat that he was no friend of Caesar if he released this man was a threat to his career and possibly his life. Josephus and Philo both record earlier incidents in which Pilate mishandled Jewish sensitivities and was forced to back down.

Crucifixion's mechanics are documented and grim: a public road, a placard naming the crime, the victim's clothing as a soldier's perquisite, and death by exhaustion and suffocation over hours or days. Breaking the legs hastened it by removing the ability to push up for breath. The one physical example ever recovered — a heel bone from a first-century tomb at Giv'at ha-Mivtar near Jerusalem, still pierced by an iron nail — confirms the practice down to the hardware.

The burial is a rich man's burial done in a hurry. Nicodemus brings about seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloes, a quantity used for royalty, and Joseph of Arimathea supplies a new rock-cut tomb in a nearby garden. Both were council members, which means two men from the body that condemned him buried him.