It was now two days before the Passover and the feast of Unleavened Bread, and the High Priests and Scribes were bent on finding how to seize Him by stratagem and put Him to death.
But no sooner had the Pharisees left the synagogue than they held a consultation with the Herodians against Jesus, to devise some means of destroying Him.
On this account then the Jews were all the more eager to put Him to death–because He not only broke the Sabbath, but also spoke of God as being in a special sense His Father, thus putting Himself on a level with God.
The Pharisees heard the people thus expressing their various doubts about Him, and the High Priests and the Pharisees sent some officers to apprehend Him.