Reflections on the Trials of Jesus vision in Mishnaic tractate Sanhedrin, that that body could only meet as a
court in the hours of daylight (:). Appeal to the Mishnah will hardly help,
however. For the same passage also lays down that a capital trial could not
be held on the day preceding a Sabbath or a festival day. Even disregarding
the insoluble question of whether the Mishnah preserves any veridical con-
ception of how justice was exercised before the destruction of the Temple,
the notion that an arrest, an examination in the house of a high priest, per-
haps also a formal meeting of ‘‘the Sanhedrin,’’ the production of a prisoner
before the Romanpraefectus, popular demands for execution, and the cruci-
fixion itself could all have taken place on the night of Passover and on the
following morning must give rise to serious questions. It is time to turn to
John’s account.
JohnAs is well known, the overall structure of John’s narrative differs fundamen-
tally from that which is common to the Synoptics, and those details which
do reappear in John mainly do so in a quite different narrative context.
It was mentioned before that the preceding narrative of the Last Supper
explicitly locates the event before Passover (:), and the lengthy account of
it is consistent in betraying no trace of its having been a paschal meal (:–
:). This location in time is to be fundamental to the logic of the story,
as we shall see. Further differences also appear immediately. For the armed
band which Judas leads out to arrest Jesus in the garden beyond the Kedron
valley is composed of thespeiraand attendants of (or sent by) the high priests
and the Pharisees (:).Speirais the normal Greek translation ofcohors,and
the impression that this is intended to be understood as a Roman detachment
is confirmed by the reference a little later to its commander as thechiliarchos,
the normal Greek fortribunus(cf. thechiliarchosof thespeiraof Acts :, who
turns out to be the Roman officer Claudius Lysias). No explanation is given
by John of this Roman involvement, and indeed no comment is made on it
at all. The combined Roman-Jewish group brings Jesus first to (the house of )
Annas, a person not mentioned in any other Gospel in this context, but care-
fully identified here: ‘‘he was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was high
priest of that year’’ (:). John further identifies Caiaphas by saying that it
was he who advised the Jews that it was advantageous for one man to die
on behalf of the people (:), explicitly referring back to :–, where
the advice had been recorded in the context of a council (synedrion) of high
priests and Pharisees, and Caiaphas had already been identified as ‘‘the high
priest of that year.’’ If John meant to imply that the high priesthood changed