Mark15chapter 15

The Jewish council could not execute; Rome kept capital power in the governor's hands. So the charge presented to Pilate is political — king of the Jews — because that is a charge a Roman official must act on.

The mockery happens inside the praetorium, and Mark says the whole cohort was called together. A cohort on paper was around six hundred men. The purple cloak and the twisted thorn crown are a soldiers' parody of an emperor's triumph, complete with a mock salute.

Mark names Simon of Cyrene as the father of Alexander and Rufus. He gives those names because his readers evidently knew them — a Rufus is greeted in Paul's letter to the Roman church — which means the man pressed into carrying the crossbeam had sons sitting in the congregation Mark wrote for. Roman soldiers had the legal right to compel a provincial to carry a load, and they used it here.

Crucifixion normally took a long time, which is why Pilate is surprised at the quick death and checks with the centurion. The victim was fixed with iron nails through the wrists and feet — a heel bone with a nail still through it, from a crucified man of this period, was found near Jerusalem in 1968 — and death came by exhaustion and suffocation, sometimes over days. The execution squad divided the clothing among themselves as a matter of course.

Mark marks the hours in the Roman-influenced reckoning of the day: the third hour when he was crucified, darkness from the sixth to the ninth, and death at the ninth.