The textual variant we are concerned with occurs in the next verse. Pilate is said to have flogged Jesus and then “handed him over to be crucified.” Anyone reading the text would naturally assume that he handed Jesus over to his own (Roman) soldiers for crucifixion. That makes it all the more striking that in some early witnesses—including one of the scribal corrections in Codex Sinaitius—the text is changed to heighten even further the Jewish culpability in Jesus’s death. According to these manuscripts, Pilate “handed him over to them [i.e., to the Jews] in order that they might crucify him.”
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