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At this point, Jesus is taken before Pilate. The political charge works and stirs the emotions of the crowd in urging Pilate to release the insurrectionist Barabbas instead of Jesus. Jesus is sentenced and crucified—a figure no more important to world history, so far as anyone can tell, than Barabbas or the other troublemakers who keep reproducing themselves in Palestine.

The legal analysts would describe Jesus' fate as the result of his poor defense strategy. And they would be right, except for one overlooked possibility: that Jesus had spoken the truth about being Messiah, the kind that would judge from the right hand of the Father. Three short days later that truth set Jesus free; God literally raised Jesus from the dead. What had been a very bad Friday suddenly looked like Good Friday. Or as one exceptional legal analyst by the name of Paul saw it, Jesus "was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead" (Rom. 1:4). What better defense could there be?

Darrell L. Bock is research professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary and associate pastor at Trinity Fellowship Church. He lives with his family in Dallas, Texas.

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April 6 1998, Vol. 42, No. 4