The ‘chief priests’ in this Gospel correspond to the Sadducees in the Synoptics; the chief priests and Pharisees together make up the Sanhedrin. This body had its own servants and apparitors, whom it sent to arrest Jesus; and their report is discussed in a debate which we may be sure exactly reproduces the kind of thing that actually happened. ‘Hath any of the rulers believed on him, or of the Pharisees?’ ‘But this multitude which knoweth not the law are accursed.’ ‘Doth our law judge a man, except it first hear from himself and know what he doeth?’ ‘Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and see that out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.’ It is a perfect specimen of the kind of speeches that would be made, and the kind of answers that would be given. We again get an interior view of the meeting of the Sanhedrin in xi. 47-50. ‘The chief priests therefore and the Pharisees gathered a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many signs. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation. But a certain one of them, Caiaphas, being high priest that year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor do ye take account that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.’ Here we are introduced to the politics of the time. ‘The Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation’ was exactly the fear which constantly haunted the minds of the Sadducean aristocracy, but is expressed in such general terms as would appeal most to the Pharisees as well. The haughty Caiaphas makes a speech which, as reported to the Evangelist, he interprets in a sense that was very possibly not that of its author. The high priest may have meant only that as an act of policy a single individual might be made a scapegoat. But the Evangelist, who is himself a true prophet, has so strong a sense of divine overruling in all that happened and of divine inspiration taking hold of men without their will, that he sees in the words a profounder meaning than they were intended to have, though not perhaps than they really had in the counsels of God and to an insight like his own. Another example of the same attitude of mind meets us a little lower down in another passage that has the same strong marks of verisimilitude.