John 18:28 Commentary and Bible Study

John passes over Jesus’ hearing before Caiaphas – the search for false witnesses. It was a dawn hearing, the ultimate judgement upon him. Pilate would have been up at dawn; that was the Roman way. He was ready for business and there is brought to him one for trial. What he does not realise yet is that the chief priests have tried Christ and they have sentenced him to death, but they did not have the power to implement the sentence – only the Roman authority could give the death sentence – so they want Pilate to be involved. We have already judged him, they said to themselves, we just want the procurator, the governor to pronounce sentence of death. So they bring him and Pilate stands probably on a gallery, a balcony, on the front of Fort Antonia.The chief priests, the high priest, the scribes, the Pharisees, they didn’t enter in because it would have defiled them. Why, to go into the Fortress Antonia, into Pilate’s courtyard among all those pagans, those Romans! There would be idols there, there would be food sacrificed to idols, there would be all sorts of things which they would be defiled by under the detailed laws of the ancient Jewish religion. And they didn’t want to be defiled because, although the Passover had been eaten the previous night, they wanted to eat the Passover, which probably means that, although the Passover was the previous night, it’s still the Passover feast, and portions of the sacrifices would still be eaten right to the end, and they didn’t want to defile themselves in a religious sense.