The Witnesses Could Not Agree

They take Jesus to the high priest, and the whole council gathers in the middle of the night: chief priests, elders, scribes, everybody who mattered. What follows has the furniture of a trial. It does not have the substance of one.

Before Mark gets to the hearing he puts one other man in the picture. Peter has followed him at a distance, all the way into the courtyard, and he is down there sitting with the officers and warming himself at the fire. Mark sets him by that fire and then leaves him alone while the night goes on upstairs.

Mark also does what a careful reporter does. He tells us what the council wanted before he tells us how the night went.

Now the chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin were seeking testimony against Jesus to put Him to death, but they did not find any.

A court that already knows the sentence is not weighing anything. It is shopping. And the strange part of this particular shopping trip is how badly it goes, because they cannot get even a manufactured case to hold together.

For many bore false witness against Jesus, but their testimony was inconsistent.

The law is what gives that sentence its weight. Under Deuteronomy nobody goes to death on the word of one witness. A charge has to be established by two or three, and their accounts have to line up with each other. Liars who contradict themselves are worth no more to that court than an empty room.

Eventually some men stand up with the strongest thing anybody has. They quote him about the temple.

We heard Him say, "I will destroy this man-made temple, and in three days I will build another that is made without hands."

Mark has already shown his readers where that came from. Earlier in the week, with the disciples admiring the stonework, Jesus told them that not one stone of the temple would be left on another. He was describing what was going to happen to the building. He did not say he would pull it down with his own hands. So the best charge in the room is a real saying carried secondhand, distorted somewhere along the way, and repeated by men who were not there when he said it.

Mark writes the failure down a second time anyway. Even that testimony did not hold together. A council with its mind made up, a room full of willing witnesses, and after all of it no case at all, which is why the high priest is about to get up and put the question to Jesus himself.