Awesome review. Thanks for the link! This was good:
We also see the high priest Caiaphas watching the scourging — not sadistically reveling in the spectacle of Jesus’ sufferings, but clearly troubled, finding it painful to watch.
Significantly, this humanizing touch in Caiaphas’s characterization comes neither from the gospels, nor from sources such as Sr. Emmerich, but is original to the film. In fact, Sr. Emmerich’s account includes a strikingly different account of the Jewish onlookers during the scourging: She depicts Jewish leaders paying the Roman soldiers and plying them with drink to induce them to even more brutality. Gibson’s film not only omits this unsavory flourish, but goes in the opposite direction, giving a humanizing detail not found in the gospels.