Keith R. Jackson
February 16, 2000
NT 104, MWF 9:00am
The Death of Christ
EXAMINATION
I chose to look into Jesus death and the people who were involved in it. The first group of people who got hold of Jesus was the Roman soldiers. They were probably the most innocent in the whole thing. Granted they did perform the actual act of crucifying Christ, but it was because of the order that Pilate gave them.
As I looked into crucifixion and how it started I found that before Jesus was crucified, more than 30,000 men, in Israel alone, had already been crucified. It all started by this guy named Ormazd from Persia. He thought that the earth was sacred, so he did not want to defile the earth by killing criminals on it so he put them on a large pole and left them there to die.
After Pilate gave the order to crucify Christ the soldiers took him. The part of their wickedness was not the act of crucifying Christ, it was by what they did to Jesus before they crucified him. The scripture says in Matthew 27, that the soldiers, "gathered a full Roman cohort around Him." I looked into what a "full Roman cohort" was. It seems that a total of 600 soldiers make up a full Roman cohort. I also learned that Jewish people were given the right not to be in the Roman military. I also fount out the cohort was traveling around with the governor as a military escort. Because of that it is pretty safe to say they never heard of Jesus, other than the fact that He was being crucified because he was claiming to be some sort of king..
The soldiers knew that he claimed to be a king so they stripped him down and put a scarlet robe on him. Next ...