The Good Friday story is so familiar to many Christians that it’s possible for them to miss some parts of it that shouldn’t be missed.
Let’s consider some of those points.
First, what we read today in John’s gospel about Jesus’ arrest says that “Judas brought a detachment of soldiers together with police from the chief priests and the Pharisees.”
What does “a detachment” mean? Scholars say the Greek word “speira,” rendered as “detachment,” can mean 600 soldiers or it can mean a cohort of auxiliary soldiers numbering 1,000 men or, more rarely, it can mean a smaller force of 200.1
It’s true that none of the gospel stories of Jesus’ arrest gives us an actual number of troops, though Matthew and Mark say a “great multitude” and Luke simply says a “multitude.” And some scholars are skeptical that hundreds and hundreds of Roman soldiers marched through the Kidron Valley at night to sneak up on and arrest one man.
But officials clearly took Jesus seriously. This wasn’t a case of a street cop or two picking up a homeless man on a trumped-up charge of vagrancy. Jesus represented a genuine threat in the minds of the Roman rulers and the synagogue leaders to whom Judas had spoken about him, and they responded with force to arrest the unarmed Prince of Peace.
&nbs
