The council was declaring the case closed. They did not want more evidence; they believed Jesus' own answer had settled it. Their question was really a verdict: "for we ourselves have heard of his own mouth." Gill explains that they took what they heard as blasphemy, enough to condemn Him without other testimony. Barnes, on the parallel in Matthew 26:65, puts his finger on their error. They "assumed that he was an impostor, and that point being assumed, everything like a pretension to being the Messiah was, in their view, proof that he deserved to die." They never asked whether His claim was true.

They answered their own question: "for we ourselves have heard of his own mouth." Then they acted on it. "The whole multitude of them arose, and led him unto Pilate" (Luke 23:1). There they accused Him of "perverting the nation," of "forbidding to give tribute to Caesar," and of "saying that he himself is Christ a King" (Luke 23:2).

Under the law of Moses, a person could not be put to death on the word of one witness; it took "two witnesses, or three witnesses" (Deuteronomy 17:6). Mark records that the council had tried to find witnesses against Jesus, "and found none," because "their witness agreed not together" (Mark 14:55-56). Jesus' own words now gave them what the witnesses could not.

Barnes notes the real question the council should have weighed: "If he had not been the Messiah, the charge would have been true; but the question was whether he had not given evidence that he was the Messiah, and that therefore his claims were just."

The council said, "we ourselves have heard of his own mouth," and they were right. They had heard the truth from Jesus Himself. Their mistake was not in what they heard but in what they did with it. Matthew Henry writes, "Their eyes being blinded, they rush on."

This moment also fulfills what Jesus had told His disciples: "The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes" (Luke 9:22). Those are the very three groups Luke names in this council (Luke 22:66). Their rejection did not catch God by surprise. It was part of the road Jesus had said He must walk, a road that led through death to being "raised the third day."