The really sick thing about it is that it was the Jews who wanted him dead. He was one of their own. So they present him to Pontius Pilate and say "We want you to punish one of our own"!
Pilate's all like, "I see no guilt in this man. You tell ME what you really want done with him."
They all say, "Put him to death!"
Jerks.
This didn't actually happen. The entire macabre scenario was entirely on the shoulders of Pontius Pilatus, who wished to terrorize the Jews as they arrived from all over the world to celebrate that years Passover. It would have been peak traffic in and out of the main gates, offering him an opportunity to display crucifixions in sight of one of the main gates. It was to let Jews know who was the boss in the region. It was literally terrorism, and he did seek out Jesus specifically to be among the victims to emphasize the perception of his power over the region.
The reason for the fraudulent embellishment of the story was to involve the Jewish high priesthood in a human sacrifice, so to make Jesus a Passover lamb, unbeknownst to the high priests themselves. In this, and so many ways, those Jews who wanted to make Jesus their Messiah tried to make Jesus a fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. The presumption is you can't have a legitimate sacrifice, animal, human, or god, without involvement of the priests, as if there were such a thing as a legitimate sacrifice, or class of legitimate sacrificing priests.
"The historicity of the gospel narratives has been questioned by scholars, who suggest that the evangelists' accounts reflect the later antagonism that arose between the Church and the Synagogue. They show a tendency to minimize the actions of Pilate and emphasize the responsibilities of the Jews. " ~
Wikipedia
Instead of acknowledging Ocam's Razor, the embellishers had Jesus paraded in front of all the Jewish elders and high priests, in the middle of the night, when they would normally be concentrating on getting ready for the Sabbath/Passover. Not once, but again in the morning! They could not get their story straight whether these meeting were at Caiaphas' house or Annas' house, or both, but then paraded off to Pilatus in the morning (as if he is seeing Jewish priest on demand), who parades him off to King Herod (because he is Galilean), who parades him back to Pilatus, all three parties of whom humiliate Jesus, beat him, mock him...until finally we are supposed to believe that instead of preparing for the special Sabbath and the special high holy day Passover, the priests gather as social justice warriors at Pilates court after Herod sends Jesus back, meeting there to make sure he is crucified that very day, as if we are supposed to believe that Pilatus was beholden to their wishes for such an unusual request, at an unusual time.
No, it's much simpler than that. Much more obvious. And Jesus own motive for giving himself up to custody was much simpler: He wished to demonstrate to his followers that they had nothing to be afraid of, if they followed his instructions. To be exact, he intended to feel no pain through the ordeal, organically, through his knowledge, which explains why he refused alcohol. To corroborate this, no Christian can actually say, just from the text itself, whether or not Jesus felt any pain, because nothing in the text, in the description of his behavior, suggests he was feeling any.
The assumption that Jesus felt pain, and the promotion of this demonstration of miraculous power as if it was a pain-fest (the more the better) that would satisfy the masochistic tendencies of god, is, actually, in concert with Pilatus' own motivations around the event: To terrorize the populace into submission. Anyone who is promoting the pain story is doing the exact same thing.
Pain is actually a sin, and so is death. Both mock any god that is actually Good. Jesus would not do this.