You’re conflating two different Gospels by two different authors with different agendas.  Bart has answered the question of what the Messiah was in very recent blog posts.

Sorry, I thought you had a verse from Luke in there.

Bart has answered the question of what the Messiah was in very recent blog posts.

Stephen said
I still have a hard time accepting that Jesus would have gotten a personal interview with Pilate at all.  Surely the Romans had  more bureaucracy than that!  I could see Pilate pencil whipping that death warrant and not remembering it the next day.  But even if it did occur what are the chances that Pilate could speak a lick of Aramaic or had the slightest interest in Jewish theology?  I suspect Jesus simply got chewed up and spit out by what was by then a very efficient Roman crucifixion machine. 

I agree, more or less. The early Christians no doubt started collecting information about what had happened, soon after. But they would at most have access to gossip spread by servants being around /inside the High Priests quarter. That would definitely not be very precise. If there was a public scourging/humiliation of Jesus prior to the execution, meted out by the Romans, that would be publicly known, too.

Therefor one should basically think of the exchange of words between J. and the high priest and J. and Pilate, as literary inventions aiming to describe what they thought were the motives of the Jewish temple authorities and of Pilate. Beside that , Pilate is partly exonerated in order to not create difficulties for Christian communities  in general within the Roman empire. A gospel with a Roman official in the role of the chief scoundrel would not be a very smart marketing device.

Mark is the most apocalyptic Gospel and John is the least.  As Prof. Ehrman has been writing on his blog lately “the Son of Man” is an apocalyptic figure.  Mark’s Gospel speaks of eternal life that will occur in the future when the Son of Man arrives.  For John eternal life is in the here and now.  This is why John has no use for a Son of Man figure.  John is not a rebuttal of Mark.  Many scholars think John didn’t even know of Mark’s Gospel.  Note how John speaks in the present tense (“My kingdom is not of this world….But now my kingdom…”) and Mark uses the future tense (“…you will see…”).  Mark and John simply had very different, I would say almost diametrically opposed, views of who and what Jesus was.  We see this growth as the Gospels progress from views of Jesus given in Mark and then in Matthew and Luke and finally in John.  The view of Jesus matures as the early Christians have more time to think about and re-interpret the stories they have about him.