The Jews Who Brought Jesus To The Romans

When discussing the moral legitimacy of capital punishment, far too many people treat execution as if the method is a less relevant part of the issue than the crime that it would be assigned to, when it is actually just as important as identifying which crimes merit execution in many cases--and even more important in others.  Even if someone has committed multiple capital crimes in particularly vicious ways, to use an illicit method is inherently unjust, regardless of the severity of the offense being punished.  The fixed boundaries of Biblical justice make it clear which methods are illicit within the Christian worldview.

Despite the utter unbiblicality of an execution process like Roman crucifixion, some will not only trivialize the fact that certain Jews conspired to specifically give Jesus to the Romans--realizing that crucifixion was the standard Roman method of capital punishment for non-citizens and that crucifixion completely contradicts Mosaic Law--but also pretend like Jewish law itself allowed for some form of crucifixion.  Many tenets of Mosaic Law were violated by the Jews who tried Jesus, from the condemnation of perjury to the demand for consistent witnesses, but one of the gravest violations was the fact that the Jews in question brought Jesus to the Romans in hopes that they might crucify him.

Deuteronomy 21:22-23 and 25:1-3 condemn anything that comes near Roman crucifixion on their own, with the former passage permitting only the temporary hanging of a corpse of an executed criminal and the latter both separating capital and other forms of corporal punishment and classifying more than a mere 40 lashes as unjust.  Beyond this, the fact that the only methods of execution specifically assigned in Mosaic Law stop far short of even a less degrading and prolonged form of crucifixion--stoning and burning being two examples--means that there is absolutely no way for a Biblically righteous person to ever tolerate or endorse such an execution method.

Due to even any single one of these aspects of Mosaic Law, the demand for capital punishment in Biblical law does not mean that the Jews were permitted to flay or crucify people who committed one of the very specific acts that qualifies for capital punishment in the Torah.  On the contrary, to kill anyone at all in such a manner would almost always make the executioner(s) worse than the criminal in question (unless he or she had literally tortured someone in the same ways, in which case both would be deplorable).  To even hand someone over to be crucified, regardless of their guilt or innocence of the charges against them, would be a total injustice.

The ultimate innocence of Jesus is almost always emphasized to the point of completely ignoring that Rome's form of crucifixion is one of the most unjust tortures the historical record speaks of humans inflicting on each other.  Gassing humans in showers, shooting students at a school, and killing others via suicide bombings are wholly incomparable to Roman crucifixion in terms of suffering, and yet Christians are often far more likely to exaggerate the wickedness of far less sadistic and unjust forms of killing than they are to even imply that Roman crucifixion was evil in every case, not only in the case of Jesus' execution!

This mindset directly affects how many Christians approach the gospel narratives, including the particular reasons they will say the Jews and Romans involved in Jesus' death were monstrous.  There is far more to the matter than the divine nature of Christ and his innocence.  The specific Pharisees who were content with having Jesus crucified not only conspired against their own Messiah, but they also completely violated the most important aspects of government-imposed justice revealed by Yahweh.