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Japanese The Gospels give no number. They say only that Pilate had Jesus scourged. The well-known “39 lashes” comes from Jewish law, which allowed forty stripes and no more (Deuteronomy 25:3) and in practice gave “forty stripes save one,” as Paul received (2 Corinthians 11:24). Pilate was Rome’s governor, and no Roman limit is known.
The count was never kept. What Scripture keeps instead is a promise spoken long before. “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Nobody wrote down how many stripes there were. God wrote down what they were for.
What do the Gospels say about the scourging?
Three Gospels tell it in a single line each. Matthew writes that Pilate released Barabbas, “and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified” (Matthew 27:26). Mark adds why Pilate gave way: he was “willing to content the people” (Mark 15:15). John says simply, “Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him” (John 19:1). In Luke, Pilate twice offers to punish him and let him go: “I will therefore chastise him, and release him,” and again, “I will therefore chastise him, and let him go” (Luke 23:16, 22). The crowd will not have it.
Jesus knew it was coming. On the road up to Jerusalem he told the Twelve that the Gentiles “shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he shall rise again” (Mark 10:34). He went up to Jerusalem knowing what waited for him.
The words themselves point to Rome. Matthew and Mark use the Greek verb phragelloo, which Strong’s concordance says was borrowed from the Latin flagellum, the Roman whip, and which appears in the New Testament only in these two verses. John uses mastigoo, the common Greek word for scourging, the same word the Gospels use when Jesus foretold it.
Where does the number 39 come from?
It comes from the Law of Moses. When a judge found a man “worthy to be beaten,” Deuteronomy says, he was to be beaten “by a certain number. Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed: lest, if he should exceed, and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother should seem vile unto thee” (Deuteronomy 25:2–3). The limit was there so that the guilty man would still be counted a brother.
In the first century the practice was already thirty-nine. Paul had felt it himself: “Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one” (2 Corinthians 11:24). The rabbis wrote the rule down in the Mishnah around AD 200: “With how many lashes does one flog a person sentenced to receive lashes? One flogs him with forty lashes less one,” reading the words “by number, forty” in Deuteronomy as a number close to forty (Makkot 3:10). The Mishnah also has the court assess beforehand how many lashes a man can survive (3:11). So when someone asks why the lashes were “forty less one,” the answer belongs to Paul’s story and to the synagogue’s law, and not to the scourging of Jesus.
Did the Romans limit the number of lashes?
No Roman limit is known, and Jesus was in Roman hands. Roman law did protect its own citizens. When a Roman officer in Jerusalem ordered Paul “examined by scourging,” Paul asked the centurion, “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned?” and the order was dropped at once (Acts 22:24–29). Jesus was not a Roman citizen. He had no such appeal.
The Jewish historian Josephus shows what a Roman flogging could be. A few years before the war with Rome, a man also named Jesus, the son of Ananus, went through Jerusalem crying woe on the city, and the governor Albinus had him “whipped till his bones were laid bare.” Josephus also records that the governor Florus “first chastised with stripes, and then crucified” people taken in Jerusalem, and that Titus’s soldiers took prisoners during the siege who “were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died, and were then crucified.” Scourging and then the cross was the Roman order of things, and the Gospels follow that order exactly, down to the nails that came after.
Why was Jesus scourged before he was crucified?
Matthew and Mark tell it as part of the punishment: scourged, then delivered to be crucified. In their order the scourging comes after Pilate gives way to the crowd. John puts it earlier, before the verdict, while Pilate is still trying to set Jesus free, and with Luke he lets us see something more in Pilate.
Pilate had found “no fault in him” (John 19:4), and he seems to have hoped that a beating would be enough for the crowd. Why the priests and the crowd wanted more is its own question, taken up in why Jesus was crucified. After the scourging, John says, Pilate brought Jesus out “wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe,” and said, “Behold the man!” (John 19:5). The answer came back at once: “Crucify him, crucify him” (John 19:6).
So the innocent one was beaten for the sake of a crowd’s peace, and then killed for it too. Christians have long heard his voice in the words of the prophet: “I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting” (Isaiah 50:6).
Where do the numbers 120 and 5,480 come from?
The first comes from the Shroud of Turin. The Italian writer Emanuela Marinelli, who defends its authenticity, speaks of about 120 blows from a whip of three cords. A 2024 newsletter of the Diocese of Trieste counts 90 to 120 wound marks and suggests that forty blows, the Jewish maximum, from a whip with weighted tips could have made them. Even the readers of the Shroud do not agree. Those numbers come from marks on the linen, not from the Gospels. Radiocarbon tests by three laboratories, published in Nature in 1989, dated the cloth to the Middle Ages, and the arguments have continued since. The Catholic Church does not rule on it. Pope John Paul II said at Turin in 1998, “Since it is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions.”
Another number, 5,480, comes from the devotion known as the prayers of St Bridget of Sweden. It tells of Christ appearing to her and saying, “I received 5480 blows on My Body,” counting the whole Passion and not the scourging alone. Popes have approved the prayers, but in 1954 the Vatican’s doctrinal office warned that the supernatural origin of the promises attached to them “is uncertain.” Such private revelations, the Catholic Catechism teaches, “do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith,” so no Christian is bound to believe them.
You may also hear that the 39 stripes match 39 kinds of disease. The Bible never counts the stripes, and it never makes such a list.
What does “by his stripes we are healed” mean?
Peter answers that for us. Writing to Christian servants of harsh masters, who might have to endure “grief, suffering wrongfully” (1 Peter 2:18–19), he points them to Jesus, “Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not,” and then gathers up Isaiah’s words: “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed” (1 Peter 2:23–24). The healing Peter has in mind is the healing of sin. “For ye were as sheep going astray,” he goes on, “but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls” (1 Peter 2:25).
Paul counted his own stripes; no apostle counted the Lord’s. Each one was one more thing he carried that should have been ours. And whatever we carry on our own backs today, the shame, the old wounds, the sin we cannot shake, Peter’s word still stands over it, brothers and sisters: “by whose stripes ye were healed.”
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