The Scourging

As the Savior headed to Jerusalem for the final events of His life, He prophesied, “The Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, And shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify him: and the third day he shall rise again” (Matt. 20:18-19).  Here he highlighted one of the ways in which He was going to suffer: He would be scourged.  This is exactly what Pilate did to Him: “And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be crucified” (Mark 15:15).  We don’t often speak of this brutal whipping that Jesus received shortly before He was led to the cross, but surely it was part of the great atoning sacrifice for each of us. 

               The pain endured by the Savior during this part of the final hours of the His life must have been excruciating.  Elder Talmage described the brutal practice this way: “Scourging was a frightful preliminary to death on the cross. The instrument of punishment was a whip of many thongs, loaded with metal and edged with jagged pieces of bone.”  Though it is not recorded in the scriptures how many lashing He received at the hands of the Romans, Elder McConkie suggested that He received 39 (like Paul did as mentioned in 2 Corinthians 11:24): “But above it all he was scourged, scourged with forty stripes save one, scourged with a multithonged whip into whose leather strands sharp bones and cutting metals were woven. Many died from scourging alone, but he rose from the sufferings of the scourge that he might die an ignominious death upon the cruel cross of Calvary.”  He had already bled from every pore, and that He could survive this beating after the suffering in the garden is beyond comprehension.    

            That Jesus was scourged with the whip was, it seems, a part of the great sacrifice that was meant to take place.  At least it was prophesied well in advance that it would happen.  Nephi wrote 600 years before the event, “And the world, because of their iniquity, shall judge him to be a thing of naught; wherefore they scourge him, and he suffereth it” (1 Nephi 19:9).  His brother Jacob similarly wrote, “The Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, should manifest himself unto them in the flesh; and after he should manifest himself they should scourge him and crucify him” (2 Nephi 6:9).  Hundreds of years later, King Benjamin also testified of this brutal punishment that Jesus would receive: “Even after all this they shall consider him a man, and say that he hath a devil, and shall scourge him, and shall crucify him” (Mosiah 3:9).  Abinadi also spoke of this event to King Noah and his wicked priests, saying that Christ “suffereth himself to be mocked, and scourged, and cast out, and disowned by his people” (Mosiah 15:5).  This unimaginable treatment that He received at the hands of the Romans was surely part of that “bitter cup” that caused Him to “tremble because of pain” as He gave His life for the sins and suffering of all mankind (D&C 19:18).