Why did Pontius Pilate crucify Jesus Christ?

 

The fact that Jesus was crucified was an awkward one for the early Jesus sect, since crucifixion was a Roman method of execution reserved for runaway slaves, pirates, bandits and rebels against Rome. The first gospels seem to have been written in the wake of the failed Jewish Revolt of 66-70 AD and the writer of the earliest gospel, gMark, seems to have worked particularly hard to distance Jesus from any hint that he was like the recent Jewish rebels, since trying to sell a faith that had a crucified Jew as its focus would have been difficult in that environment.

This is why the gospels work so hard to put the blame on "the chief priests and the elders" or, in the last of the gospels, simply "the Jews". gMark makes out that the priests accused Jesus of blasphemy, but this doesn't fit with what we know about how such an accusation would play out at the time. The Jewish temple leadership did have the right to execute people for religious crimes*, so if this was the accusation against Jesus, the Sanhedrin could have sentenced him to be stoned to death - the punishment for blasphemy. So the fact that the gospels depict Jesus being crucified rather than stoned indicates that this part of the story is not true.

The gospels also go to some lengths to depict Pilate as highly reluctant to execute Jesus, as weak and vacillating and bullied by the Jewish leaders and even as sympathetic to Jesus. None of this fits with the ruthless and violent figure we find when we turn to other sources about this man's rule of Judea. He was eventually removed for his cruelty - not something the Romans did lightly. Again, this element in the story does not ring true.

That the Jewish temple leadership played some part in the arrest of Jesus and then handed him over to Pilate is highly likely. Pilate was camped on their doorstep in the Fortress Antonia with several cohorts of troops specifically to keep a lid on any trouble by radical political rabble-rouser or apocalyptic end-times preachers during the Passover festival. Pilate demonstrated his ruthless capacity for quelling any hint of rebellion by wholesale violence unleashed indiscriminately on crowds in the past, so the idea of handing Jesus over to him to avoid any more wholesale reprisal by Pilate's troops would have made sense to the Jewish leaders.

But even the gospels depict Jesus being crucified alongside two political bandits and even have Pilate ordered the words "Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews" affixed to his cross. This indicates that there was no getting around the fact that Pilate had crucified Jesus because his preaching was seen as a direct threat to the sovereignty of Rome. He was crucified as a political rebel.

* Edit: Several answers here have repeated the common Christian claim that the Jewish leaders did not have the power to execute people and so had to get Pilate to do this for them. This is based on John 18:31, where Pilate asks "the Jews" why they don't try Jesus according to their own laws and they reply "But we have no right to execute anyone,” This claim is not made in any of the other gospels, but this one comment in gJohn is held up by modern Christians as an explanation for why Jesus was crucified rather than stoned to death.

Unfortunately, this single line from gJohn is contradicted by a mass of historical evidence:

(i) Archaeologists have found two inscriptions in Greek warning non-Jews against entering the inner courts of the Temple on pain of death. Josephus (Ant. XV) also notes that intruders in this part of the Temple were executed.

(ii) Talmudic texts, including the Tractate Sanhedrin, give long and detailed instructions on how a capital trial was carried out in the Second Temple Period, including what forms of execution were to be applied for what crimes and exactly how an execution was to be mandated by the Sanhedrin.

(iii) Talmudic literature also mentions or details examples of executions being ordered by the Sanhedrin, with the names of the victims and of the court members involved.

(iv) Philo of Alexandria matter of factly notes that anyone entering the Holy of Holies in the Temple "is subjected to inevitable death for his impiety".

(v) Josephus mentions the execution of James the brother of Jesus and "some others" by the High Priest Hanan ben Hanan who "delivered them to be stoned" (Ant. XX. 9. 1)

(vi) Several NT passages involve or imply executions by the Jewish authorities. Stephen is depicted as executed by the Sanhedrin in Acts 7:54-8:2 and the letter of Claudius Lysias to Felix in Acts 23:25-30 talks about Paul potentially being executed by the Sanhedrin.

All this evidence clearly shows that the Jewish authorities did have the power to execute people for religious crimes. Josephus' account of their execution of James indicates that, in the 60s AD anyway, they needed to get endorsement of their sentence from the Roman prefect before they carried it out, but they did not need to get the Prefect to carry it out for them, nor would someone condemned by the Sanhedrin be executed by the specialised Roman method of crucifixion.

So the claim that they could not execute Jesus themselves for their own crime of blasphemy is simply wrong - they could. Yet Jesus was not stoned (the execution for blasphemy), he was crucified. This was the Roman execution for sedition against the Roman Empire.

And this is why the gospels try to pretend that the Jewish leaders were using Pilate to do their dirty work - the implications of his crucifixion were awkward in the wake of the Jewish Revolt of 66-70 AD and this "we cannot condemn a man to death" stuff was a fiction invented to try to deflect some of that awkwardness.