What else could I have done? 3

Part 3 - Pilate

Look, to be perfectly honest with you, the sooner I get back to Rome the better. The noise and the smell of all these people travelling in for… what is it they call it?... Passover, that’s it, I tell you, it’s more than a man can take. And as for the wife… hardly any decent shops, and now she’s started having nightmares. I can’t think who I must’ve upset to end up in this gods-forsaken backwater.

So, this morning the crowd from the Temple brought in this chap – looked a bit of a mess to be honest – and accused him of subversion and sedition, claiming to be a king. When I found out he was a northerner, well, I sent him to Herod, who looks after that neck of the woods, but he got bored with him and sent him back. (Laughs) They’d dressed him up in a robe, so he looked a little more like a king.

Well, it was obviously a put-up job – I couldn’t find a scrap of evidence to convict him and sentence him to death, so I suggested as a compromise that we give him a good sound thrashing and let him go. But they were having none of it, and asked me to release some bandit called Barabbas instead of this Jesus. Well if I’m honest I’d rather have a crazy preacher loose than a mass murderer, so I suggested again that I release Jesus but they’re still having none of it, and things started to turn a bit ugly.

Well to be honest I was starting to get one of my heads and the last thing I wanted was a full-scale riot on my hands. So I washed my hands of the whole affair and let them do what they wanted with this Jesus… But what else could I have done?

(c) John Simms 2010