Pilate Delivered Jesus to Them: Mark 15.15 in Ancient Versions and in Anti-Jewish Narratives

What is it about?

Ancient versions of the Passion narrative in the Gospel of Mark carried out minute modifications of the text which transferred the blame for murdering Jesus from Pilate's Roman soldiers to the Jews. There is, however, an interesting pattern: in the Syriac and Ethiopic traditions the modified versions became dominant, while they remained marginal in the Greek, Latin, and Coptic traditions. The evidence suggests that translators and readers, who lived on the Eastern fringes or outside of the territory of the Roman empire, were more inclined to accept the idea that Jesus had been executed by the Jewish mob (and not by the Roman soldiers) than those translators and readers who lived in the core territories of the empire, such as North Africa, Italy, Greece, or Egypt, where crucifixion as a Roman punitive practice was presumably well-known. The obliteration of historical memories about crucifixion as a Roman method of execution in late antiquity contributed to the formation of one of the most devastating anti-Jewish narratives of the ensuing centuries.

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