John 19 Footnotes

19:12,15 Jewish authorities were hardly friends of Caesar (v. 12); could they really have affirmed their allegiance to him (v. 15)? Probably only in the sense that they would have said just about anything to get Pilate to crucify Jesus. Pilate would have cared deeply about how the emperor viewed him, so these statements were ploys to get him to look favorably on their request.

19:17 John said Jesus carried his own cross (as crucified people usually did), but Mk 15:21 describes the authorities conscripting Simon of Cyrene for that task. Presumably, Jesus started out carrying it, but the weight of the wood could have made it difficult for Jesus, weakened by the flogging, to walk far with it.

19:24,36 This is another passage that is typological in the OT (Ps 22:18). Ps 22 contains numerous details strikingly paralleled in Jesus’s life, even though it was originally describing the afflictions of the psalmist. To the believing Jew, this was no coincidence but a sign of God’s hand at work.

19:25-27 Why would Jesus entrust his mother to “the disciple he loved”—the apostle John—rather than to her husband, Joseph, or to one of Jesus’s half brothers? Presumably because Joseph had died by this time and Jesus’s brothers had not yet become his followers. It is possible that John was Jesus’s cousin, so they had a biological as well as spiritual relationship. In John’s account, Mary and her sister are named as witnesses at the crucifixion. John didn’t name Mary’s sister, but Mark says that Salome was among the women present. Salome was the mother of Zebedee’s sons, James and John (Mk 15:40).