Is the fourth power responsible for killing Christ the Jewish people in Pilate's courtyard? (SOLVED)

(UPDATE: SEE MY FOLLOW UP MESSAGES. I think that the answer is No and that they are the four kingdoms of Daniel 2.)

In Book VIII of the Christian Sibylline Oracles, the author sees the 4 wounds on Christ's limbs as representing the world, and writes that "so many royal powers" consummate Christ's killing, and I am not sure if this means that specifically four powers/kingdoms killed Christ or that the powers/kingdoms of the world were responsible for His killing. M. Terry translates the passage in the Oracles as:

And first then openly unto his own
Shall he as Lord in flesh be visible,
As he before was, and in hands and feet
Exhibit four marks fixed in his own limbs,
Denoting east and west and south and north;
For of the world so many royal powers
Shall against our Exemplar consummate
The deed so lawless and condemnable.

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Charlesworth translates the last sentence as:
"For so many kingdoms of the world will accomplish the unlawful blameworthy action as our archetype."

When I read the passage, I took it to mean that "so many", ie. the same number of (four), royal powers as the four cardinal directions were responsible for killing Christ. And this raised for me the question of what the fourth power was, the three being Rome/Pilate, Herod, and the Sanhedrin.

In Christ in Christian Tradition, Aloys Grillmeier comments on this passage: "In short, the suffering Christ as the Son of God who embraces the whole world, the creator, redeemer and judge of men, will make even the Roman authorities tremble."

Rev. William Deane comments: "In Christ's hands extended on the cross the writer recognises the comprehension of the whole world in the benefits of the Passion; in the wounds in His hands and feet he finds a representation of the four quarters of the globe as being concerned in His death."
It sounds like Deane would interpret the "royal powers" or "kingdoms" to be the royal powers of the world, since he interprets the passage to mean that the four quarters are "concerned in" Christ's killing. The fact that the passage refers to "of the world royal powers" or "kingdoms of the world" stands in favor of this interpretation.

This passage about four directions and "so many royal powers" in the Oracles reminded me of Zechariah 11's prediction of three shepherds who reject the Good Shepherd, which Christians traditionally interpret as three leaders (eg. Pilate, the Judean King Herod Antipas, and the High Priest Caiaphas) rejecting the Messiah. The passage in Zechariah 11 goes:

3. There is a voice of the howling of the shepherds; for their glory is spoiled: a voice of the roaring of young lions; for the pride of Jordan is spoiled.

4. Thus saith the Lord my God; Feed the flock of the slaughter;

5. Whose possessors slay them, and hold themselves not guilty: and they that sell them say, Blessed be the Lord; for I am rich: and their own shepherds pity them not.
...
8. Three shepherds also I cut off in one month; and my soul lothed them, and their soul also abhorred me.

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The theme of four powers or kingdoms (Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome) that led up to the time of the Messiah was a major feature in Daniel, but it doesn't sound like those four kingdoms were responsible for his death.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find more on this topic.

Certainly in the gospel story there are three authorities that kill Jesus, Pilate on behalf of Rome, the Sanhedrin, and Herod as the king in Judea.
In John 18, the sense is that "the Jews" want the rebel leader Jesus Barrabas, not Jesus of Nazareth, and they want the latter killed:

[38] Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.
[39] But ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the Jews?
[40] Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber.

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Granted, reading more verses in John 18-19 shows that the Jews in the passage are specifically the chief priests and officers and not necessarily a crowd from the common people. But often John writes as if the rejection in effect comes from "the Jews" as a collective group.

Matthew 27 on the other hand presents the crowd crying as "the multitude" and "all the people", alluding to the people's responsibility:

23 And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified.
24 When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.
25 Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

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Then in Acts Peter preaches to a crowd about Jesus who "ye" crucified, implying collective responsibility.
So it seems in the gospel stories and Acts that the Jewish people was an authority responsible for Jesus' killing and that they preferred to have Barrabas, whom Matthew 27 says was a "notable prisoner" and whom another gospel says murdered someone in a revolt, iirc. I take this to imply that they wanted a rebel leader instead of Jesus of Nazareth the spiritual king.

To me, the Oracle's phrase "so many kingdoms/royal powers", coming after describing the four wounds, means literally four authorities when saying explicitly, "For so many kingdoms of the world will accomplish the unlawful blameworthy action as our archetype."

I guess "so many kingdoms of the world" could mean that there are so very many powers that killed Christ, like how medieval Europe had "so many diseases", ie. alot of diseases.
But the sentence structure seems more likely to me that it means that Christ had four words "for so many powers"- ie. because four powers - condemned Him.

And the people, who wanted the rebel Barrabas, seem like a fourth power directly responsible, according to the gospel writers' views.

rusmeister said:

Yeah. We ARE the Jews. We want to keep our sins and not pay for our own salvation with repentance, just as they wanted a Messiah to roll in and kick out the Romans without them having to do anything but bask in being God’s chosen people, an inheritance they blew by rejecting Christ (obviously excluding the Jews who accepted Him). The Jews just represent us.

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That would match the idea of the Jews (besides the Romans, Priests, and Herod) being one of our archetypes, as it says,

"For so many kingdoms of the world will accomplish the unlawful blameworthy action as our archetype."

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On his blog, Paul Dyal notes that in Ephesians 6, Paul lists 4 enemy powers:

12. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but
against principalities,
against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places.

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"Excursus to the Revelation" in A New Testament commentary for English readers, (Volume 3) lists four evil powers in Revelation: the dragon, the first beast/Anti-Christ, the second beast/ the false prophet, and the harlot / Babylon.
But these don't seem like 4 powers responsible for killing Christ so much as the four earthly powers, eg. Rome and the chief priests.

I checked Haydock's Catholic Commentary and Lopuhin's Orthodox one and they don't list the three Shepherds in Zechariah 11 as Herod, Pilate, and the Sanhedrin, but rather give different guesses like three chief priests who included Joseph and Ananus and who served soon one after the other in short terms.

But anyway the Christian Sibylline Oracle can have in mind different figures or powers than Zechariah 11 does.

At this point it looks like the four powers are ambiguous. The four successive powers in Daniel leading to Rome's killing of Jesus are pretty famous, but they did not directly participate in the killing like Herod et. al. did. Maybe the consummation or accomplishment of the act means that they succeeded one another leading up to the accomplishment of the task, like Jesus was destined to be killed after the coming of the three kingdoms, so that their coming effected the task in terms of fulfillment. This feels pretty clunky but at least conceivable as an explanation.

The four directions theme fits in with Revelation, which has four evil powers like the false prophet, but it's doubtful that they are all responsible for killing Christ.

In Book VIII of the Oracle, it sounds like royal powers mean governing powers or states, as it says earlier:

M. Terry"s translation:
From the time When the great tower fell and the tongues of men
Were parted into many languages
Of mortals, first was Egypt's royal power
Established, that of Persians and of Medes
And also of the Ethiopians
And of Assyria and Babylon,
Then the great pride of boasting Macedon,
Then, fifth, the famous lawless kingdom last
Of the Italians shall show many evils...

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This reference to royal powers and how they include the Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians also brings to mind the four powers of Daniel's prophecy in Dan 2. and Dan. 7.
Charlesworth's translation also lists Egypt as the first kingdom and Rome as the fifth, with Macedon apparently being the fourth and some of the others being consecutive.

In describing God's judgment, Book VIII says:

Common to all is keeper of the key
Of the great prison before God's judgment-seat
With images of gold and silver and stone
Ye are ready, that unto the bitter day
Ye may come to see your first punishment,
O Rome, and gnashing of teeth. And no more
Shall Syrian or Greek lay down his neck
Beneath thy servile yoke, nor foreigner,
Nor other nation.

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Here, the Syrians and Greeks are under Rome's yoke.
The words on the Cross were in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, so you could guess that the Oracle is pointing to the Romans, Jews, Greeks and Syrians as involved in Christ's killing. But it looks to me from the gospels that the Syrians and Greeks were not really involved.

Certainly the Jews are implicated by the Oracle because of the reference to the fulfillment of the Law as being a reason for His piercing:

They shall pierce his side
With a reed that they may fulfill their law;
For of reeds shaken by another spirit
Were nourished inclinations of the soul,
Of anger and revenge. But when these things
Shall be accomplished, of the which I spoke,
Then unto him shall every law be loosed
Which from the first by the decrees of men
Was given because of disobedient people.

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In conclusion, the way that the Oracle uses the term royal powers to refer to kingdoms makes me think that the four kingdoms of Daniel are the four kingdoms of the Oracle, along with the fact that in the beginning of Book VIII the author gives 5 royal powers that include 4 of Daniel's. The kingdoms consummate or accomplish the prophesied killing in the sense that they lead up to it, like how different events can occur to consummate a prophecy. The Oracle is talking about 4 kingdoms of the world which accomplished/consummated the killing of Messiah, comparable to how there are four directions, whereas Daniel was revealing four major kingdoms of world history that lead up to the Messiah's rule. Actually the Oracle in neither translation says that the kingdoms will perform the task, but rather that they will accomplish it, which could have a sense like fulfill, eg. 12 hours accomplish half a day, or 31 days starting on October 1 accomplish the month of October.

The other options that I suggested don't work as well as kingdoms. The four evil powers of Revelation like the dragon and the four authorities that condemned Christ like the Sanhedrin are not kingdoms or royal powers in the way that the Oracle uses the term. The Syrians and Greeks had kings in Jesus' time, but they were under Roman fealty and didn't seem particularly involved in killing Jesus.

Nonetheless, the Oracle seems a bit ambiguous, as it doesn't name the kingdoms, and my impression when taking the sentence out of context is that the 4 kingdoms are involved in the killing, which doesn't seem the case for all 4 of Daniel's kingdoms.