The Acrostic in the Sign on Jesus' Cross

"And Pilate wrote a title, and put [it] on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS. This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, [and] Greek, [and] Latin. Then said the chief priests of the Jews to Pilate, Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews. Pilate answered, What I have written I have written." John 19:19-22

Acrostics in the Bible are not the same thing as the Bible Codes which some believe that God has embedded into the Tanakh (Old Testament) and especially in the Talmud, the first five books. The Bible Codes are considered to be predictive of future events which would have been unknowable to the writers of the original texts. The Bible Codes would be, by their very nature, supernatural.

An acrostic is a poetic form in which the first, and sometimes the last, letters of a line in the poem form a word, a name, and sometimes a sentence. They are an intentional poetic form and occur in many places in the Old Testament. In "The Epitaph on the Cross of Yeshua," Chuck Missler suggests that the Hebrew line on the sign which Pilate wrote contained the acrostic YHWH, the Tetragrammaton, Yahweh, The Name of God. This would be an otherwise unknown ocurrance of the Hebrew poetic practice in the New Testament. http://xwalk.ca/yhwh.html

Pilate obviously meant to insult the Jewish leaders by what he wrote. Thinking that he understood the complexities of Hebrew poetry might be a stretch.

In "Acrostic Code Failure," Joel Stienke shows how the supposed acrostic in the sign could not be correct because it violates common Hebrew practice in the use of the letter "waw." The article is a highly technical explanation of Hebrew grammatical usage which shows that the words could not have spelled out YHWH, but instead probably YHHH or, more likely YHMH. There was probably no acrostic involved. http://xwalk.ca/acrostic.html

Joel Steinke holds a Masters of Divinity degree from Concordia Seminary and is a conservative Lutheran.