A key idea of Gospel studies is that each author told the story of Jesus in order to emphasize different things about who Jesus was (or is). One way to put it is that the Gospels are works of rhetoric; they don’t just tell a story, they also make an argument.

A great place to see this at work is in the different accounts of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. Here I’ll deal with just Mark and Luke, though all four Gospels are different. Most scholars think Mark was written first, and that Matthew and Luke both copied Mark’s story as the basis for their own––so when we see differences in their stories, Matthew and Luke probably changed Mark for some particular reason.

First, Mark’s account (Mk 15:2-15):

Pilate asked [Jesus], “Are you the king of the Jews?” He answered, “You say so.” Then the chief priests accused him of many things, so Pilate asked him again, “Aren’t you going to answer anything? Do you hear all the things they’re accusing you of?” But Jesus no longer answered anything, to Pilate’s amazement.

At feast-time, [Pilate] typically set free for them one prisoner that they requested, so the crowd came up to him and began to ask him to do what he usually did for them. Pilate, knowing that the chief priests had handed [Jesus] over because of their jealousy of him, answered [the crowd], “Do you want me to set free for you the “King of the Jews”? Now, there was a man named Barabbas, who had been imprisoned with some men who had committed murder during a revolt. So the chief priests stirred up the crowd for him to set free Barabbas for them.

Then Pilate again answered them, “Then what do you want me to do with the one you call the “King of the Jews”? And they again cried out, “Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “But what wrong has he committed?” But they cried out even more, “Crucify him!” So Pilate, wanting to satisfy the crowd, set free Barabbas for them, and he handed over Jesus to be flogged and crucified.

Now, compare the same story in Luke (Lk 23:2-25):

They began to accuse [Jesus], saying, “We found this man stirring up our nation, and stopping people from paying taxes to Caesar, and saying that he is an anointed king.”

So Pilate asked [Jesus], “Are you the king of the Jews?” He answered, “You say so.” Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, “I find no charge against this man” But they persisted and said, “He’s been stirring up the people, teaching through all of Judea, beginning in Galilee and coming all the way here.” When Pilate heard this, he asked if the man was a Galilean. When he found out that [Jesus] was from the jurisdiction of Herod, he sent him before Herod, who was in Jerusalem in those days.

When Herod saw Jesus he was very pleased, because he had wanted to see him for some time: he had heard about [Jesus] and hoped to see some sign done by him. [Herod] questioned him at some length, but [Jesus] didn’t answer him anything. The chief priests and the scribes stood there accusing him vehemently; meanwhile Herod, along with his soldiers, belittled him and mocked him, wrapping a purple cloak around him and sending him back to Pilate. That day, Herod and Pilate became friends, while previously they had been enemies.

Pilate called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people and said to them, “You brought me this man as one who was stirring up the people, but I have examined him right in front of you, and I haven’t found any charge against this man such as you have accused him of. And neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us, and look––nothing deserving death has been done by him. I will discipline him and set him free.”

But they cried out together, “Take this one! Set free Barabbas for us!” ([Barabbas] had been thrown into jail because of a certain revolt that had happened in the city and because of a murder.) But again Pilate spoke to them, wanting to set free Jesus. But they cried out, saying, “Cruficy! Crucify him!”

Then a third time he said to them, “But what wrong has he committed? I haven’t found any capital charge against him. So then, I’ll discipline him and set him free.”

But they insisted with loud voices asking for him to be crucified, and their voices prevailed. So Pilate passed judgment that their request be carried out. He set free the man they asked for, who had been thrown into jail because of revolt and murder, but Jesus he handed over to their will.

A couple of parts of the story are almost identical, but Luke has obviously made the story a lot longer with the trial before Herod and with Pilate speaking more to the crowd.

But Luke has also lost something: in Mark, the whole episode with Barabbas is really just a sly attempt by Pilate to embarrass the chief priests (Mk 15:9-10) by getting the crowd to request that Jesus be released while the priests are trying to have him killed. Jesus becomes a pawn in their political game, as the chief priests stir up the crowd to thwart Pilate’s move. Pilate briefly questions whether Jesus has done anything wrong, but he quickly gives in once they shout for crucifixion.

WHY THE DIFFERENCES?

Luke isn’t really interested in this whole exchange, at least not as a battle of wits between Pilate and the chief priests, and in fact he leaves out the explanation of why Pilate would release a prisoner to the crowd in the first place (compare Mk 15:6). Instead, Luke has Pilate declare Jesus’ innocence not just once (as in Mark), but three times.

It’s not that Pilate is being portrayed as a good guy here in Luke, even though he seems to lobby on Jesus’ behalf. If we look at the rest of Luke 23, we see that Jesus’ innocence is enormously important to Luke. Not only does Pilate insist three times that Jesus has done nothing wrong (Lk 23:4, 14, 22), but he also points out that Herod has found no charge against Jesus (Lk 23:15). Then in 23:41 we have one of the criminals on the cross declaring that Jesus has done nothing wrong (a passage that isn’t in Matthew or Mark), and in 23:47 the centurion by the cross declares, “Indeed this man was innocent” (where both Matthew and Luke have the centurion say that Jesus is the son of God).

This amounts to six proclamations of Jesus’ innocence in the span of 46 verses, which seems to be Luke’s way of hammering home a key point. Mark surely agrees that Jesus is innocent, but Luke wants to make it exceedingly clear. Pilate, meanwhile, doesn’t actually come off so well in Luke. While Mark portrays Pilate as not caring much whether Jesus dies or not, Luke makes him adamant that Jesus doesn’t deserve the punishment, which implies that Pilate is just too weak to stand up to the crowd.

We can’t know for sure exactly why Luke put so much emphasis on Jesus’ innocence, but one theory is that Luke wrote for Christians who wanted to defend the legitimacy of their religion in the eyes of sophisticated urban people, much as many Christian apologists do today. The Christian Gospel obviously included the story of Jesus’ death on the cross, which we might compare to being hanged, drawn, and quartered in more recent days. The point is that crucifixion wasn’t just painful, it was above all shameful; Roman skeptics wouldn’t have had a lot of sympathy for someone Rome had executed. So if Jesus was going to die a shameful death, it needed to be completely undeserved, a point Luke makes more clearly than Mark did.

Interestingly, Luke does the exact same thing with Paul in the last few chapters of Acts, where Paul is repeatedly proclaimed innocent even though he stays in prison and eventually (though not reported in Acts) gets executed in Rome. Paul created the same problem as Jesus: Christians were reading his letters, yet he was known to have been executed by Caesar; Luke’s two stories defend both Jesus and Paul in the same way.

SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

It would be nice if we could know exactly how things went down during Jesus’ trial, but a careful reading of each of the Gospels suggests that we can’t just harmonize the different texts, assume they “mean” the same thing, and conclude that we’ve recovered what really happened. The reason is, whether Pilate declared Jesus innocent three times or one time or never at all, Mark and Luke also tell their stories in ways that suggest why Pilate did what he did, and their suggested motives differ. In Mark, Pilate comes across as fickle and uncaring, while in Luke he comes across as an earnest weakling. The only way to combine these two characterizations is to destroy both of them.

These dramatic portrayals can’t just be dismissed. Just like a movie gives totally different ideas about a character by what kind of music or lighting it uses, a story tells us things about characters by its portrayal–things that can’t be set aside for the sake of establishing the blunt “facts” of history. If I had to choose, I’d say the account in Mark is closer to history, but in reality I don’t know whether either Gospel reflects history accurately. The stories seem intended not so much to describe what happened to Jesus, but rather to explain who Jesus was and why he matters.