Note 4 — Chapter III · Salathiel’s Resolution in the Temple

—page 16. The High Priest was Caiaphas, before whom Jesus had just been on trial. The beginning of the public ministry of Jesus was contemporaneous with the accession of Pontius Pilate to the procuratorship and the appointment of Caiaphas by Pilate to the high priesthood. Under the administration of Pilate, Roman rule reached the deepest depths in “venality, violence, robbery, persecutions, wanton, malicious insults, judicial murders without even the formality of a legal process, and cruelty.” History records of Caiaphas that he was appointed High Priest, not because of his piety—the Talmud describes in terrible language the “gross self-indulgence, violence, luxury, and even public indecency” of the high priests of that day—but because in him was found “a sufficiently submissive instrument of Roman tyranny.” The irreverence here displayed is the natural expression of an utterly godless nature, and the supernatural events that centered in that crucifixion hour could not have failed to call forth such manifest feelings of horror.