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Not Pontius Pilate, the Roman in charge; he and his kindly wife are sympathetic characters.

Sympathetic?

Perhaps from the standpoint that Gibson showed him as a man, a military governor and not a savage, as portrayed in many stories.

It is un deniable that even knowing that Jesus was innocent, he had him flogged and crucified.

as to the rabid Jewish crowds, they were interspersed with well meaning Jews, some of who risked their very lives to stop the madness.

Sapphire did not see the same film that I did, or refuses to acknowledge the role that some few Jews played in the killing of one of their own. Also he misses the point that they were but few.

Another interesting point from another area altogether:

I was reading Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, which for its day was pretty shocking reading. Rather than heap praise and eulogize the Caesars, he wrote a tell-all.

The bargain of power in that day was that civil obedience, high taxes, military conscription, etc. would be exchanged for the circus of the arena: bloodsport.

One caesar after another would top themselves in the bloodshed of it all until no amount of blood could compensate the people for the situation they were in.

Pilot reigned in the era of Claudius, the emperor who succeeded Caligula, and to a large extent spent the fourteen years of his rule righting a badly tottering empire left behind to him by that butchering sadist.

To hand a single man over to be murdered to placate the a populace was so small in that era as to be less than a footnote. During Caligula's reign, even Romans were made to battle like gladiators for their lives in the end. Nobody was safe. This incident with Jesus garnered attention only for the fact that never before had a people called for the blood of one man with such unified strength.

To test this lust, Pilot offered a choice between a convicted murderer of Jews, and Jesus, and it wasn't even close.

I think it was charitable that Mel personified Satan in this movie. Ultimately, 'the devil made us do it' might be the dodge.

Ultimately, Christ was killed by the very people he sought to save, including me. The whole 'Jews killed Jesus' question may just be an angle Satan has been using over the millenia to salvage what turned out to be a bad situation for him.

It really seemed to me that it was the Romans who conducted (and enjoyed) most of the brutality. I don't doubt that they were as brutal as they were told to be - part of the Roman ideology was to be strong, unmovable, stern, and vicious when necessary. But I thought that the Romans were nothing if not disciplined, and the movie showed them almost as out of control as the mob.