Who judged Jesus?

Answer 1

Good question! This was the plan to have Jesus executed: The Jewish leaders, including both the religious leaders and the "elders" whom the Jews looked up to and obeyed, thought they'd go find any possible kind of evidence against Jesus and use it to get Him, hopefully, killed (Matt. 26:1-5).

That plan seems simple enough, but the way it went down turned out very weird. They ended up with Judas offering to "hand over" Jesus to them, and they seized the opportunity, so they arrested Him. Now they held Jesus in their custody and interrogated Him to try and get the evidence they needed to say "He's worthy of death" (Matt. 27:1-2; Luk. 22:66-71) and they kind of, sort of, got what they thought was good enough "evidence."

Now here's the interesting part of your question: at this time period, the Romans were in control of Israel; the Jews paid taxes to the Romans, they were subject to Roman laws and they couldn't do much without Roman permission. Because of this, and also because the chief priests were scared that if they killed Jesus people would riot against them (Jesus was popular with many people), the chief priests took Him up to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, like they would with a very dangerous rebel or a dangerous criminal. The Jews would take a criminal to the Romans and say "Hey, here's a dangerous guy, he's committed crimes and you should deal with him." This would kill two birds with one stone for the Jewish leaders because it would get Jesus killed and also, since the Romans did the deed for them, nobody could blame them for the death.

They take Jesus before Pilate, the governor, who is probably a bit too important to be judging a common criminal, but they go straight to the highest Roman authority in their area and try to make sure the job gets done (Matt 27:11).

Now Pilate asked Jesus questions, saw pretty quickly that the man appeared totally innocent, and tried to find a way outof having an innocent person executed. He took Jesus out before a crowd of Jews who gathered and asked what should be done with Jesus, and the crowd began demanding that Jesus be crucified even though they couldn't give Pilate a good reason why. Pilate didn't want to deny them because he was afraid a riot would erupt, so he washed his hands in front of the crowd and said "I'm washing my hands of this man's blood."(Matt 27:11-26).

This is why I gave so much background to answer your question, and why it makes the story so special: a normal criminal would have been "judged" and executed by important Romans, and the Jewish leaders tried to escape their own guilt by giving Jesus to a Roman, claiming He deserved death, and thus no blood would be on "their hands" symbolically. The normal justice process backfires on them, however, because Pilate literally and symbolically "washes his hands" of Jesus' blood and, basically, says to the Jews "Hey, I think the guy's innocent, but I'm giving in to your demands. It's your execution, not mine." So in this way, it ends up that the Jews become Jesus' judges. They try to get the Romans to take the responsibility of judgement, but the plan fails and they end up judging that an innocent man is worth of death.

Answer 2

Pilate judged Jesus.