These various considerations may perhaps help us to trace the course of events. In the darkness before dawn the traitor came, with the servants of the high-priest, to the garden of Gethsemane somewhere on Olivet beyond the Kidron. Jesus was led thence perhaps across Ophel, and under the great bridge, to the “hall” of the high-priest, which may probably have adjoined the Council House. He was seen first by Annas, who ordered that He should be sent bound to Caiaphas. The latter had hastily summoned “all the Sanhedrin,”[296] probably in the Council House. This expression no doubt means the full Sanhedrin of seventy-one members; for Caiaphas inquired of Jesus concerning “His doctrine,”[297] and He was arraigned as a false prophet and false Messiah. Many false witnesses were examined, and the examination may have been long, since, according to the Mishnah, “every judge who extends examination is to be commended.” A false prophet, according to the same authority, could only be judged at Jerusalem and by the full Sanhedrin, and could be tried and executed on a holiday, which in other cases was not allowable.[298] Jesus could not, according to law, be condemned as a blasphemer,[299] for that crime was defined as being the utterance of the name Jehovah. Yet the fact that the Sanhedrin “rent their clothes” shows that He was condemned unjustly on this accusation also. Peter stood in the outer court of the building, where a brazier burned because of the cold. His denial of his Master probably occurred at the moment when He was being led from the council chamber to be taken before Pilate,[300] this being at “cock crow,” though the procurator was not to be approached till the morning[301]--that is to say, after sunrise, which took place about 6 a.m. The power of life and death had been taken from the Sanhedrin by the procurators, so that it was not lawful for them to put any man to death. They no longer held their meetings in the Temple court, and though their decisions were obeyed by Israel, their private assembly, in the precincts of the high-priest’s “hall,” had no force under Roman rule. It was necessary to induce the Procurator himself at least to consent to the punishment of Jesus by death, but the priests had scruples which forbade their entering Pilate’s Prætorium at Passover time. They passed through the Temple, where Judas met them and cast down the thirty pieces of silver, and they waited in the open court below the stairs and scarp of Antonia, with the gathering crowd of fanatical Jews, just where (more than twenty years later) another mob assembled and was addressed by Paul from the same stairs.