The role that Judea’s ill-fated prefect played in the trial and death of Jesus has always fascinated scholars and laymen alike. Each year as Easter draws near, we tend to wonder what degree of responsibility Pontius Pilate—this central, yet elusive figure—bore in the death of the Son of Man. But after deeper inquiry, it appears that the answer matters far less than the question itself, with legal and philosophical implications that go well beyond a simple establishment of guilt or the lack thereof.
David Lloyd Dusenbury, who’s perhaps the foremost expert on the matter, is a historian of ideas and has been writing extensively on various topics in philosophy, religion, and law while holding lectures all over Europe. We reviewed his latest book, I Judge No One: A Political Life of Jesus, not long ago, so it’s only fair we talk about his other major work, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History, which was originally published in 2021 but was announced this Easter to be reprinted in paperback later this year.
As the title and subtitle suggest, the book explores two major themes. The primary theme is the question of the innocence of Pilate and the different interpretations of the Passion from various legal perspectives. I believe the first thing everybody who takes your book into their hand wants to know is if Pilate was guilty or not, but I suppose the answer is a lot more complicated than the question.
You’re right, the answer is a lot more complicated. What I discovered and what I tried to show in the book (which is new, because this theme has never been investigated as such) is that Christians have come to very different conclusions about the guilt and innocence of Pilate. What I tried to do was to trace these different traditions—one of which depicts Pilate as innocent, the other as guilty—down the centuries. A lot of really interesting people discussed the question and reached various conclusions. So, this is one of the narratives of the book, which is entirely based on commentary on what Christians have made of the Bible.
And not only Christians. Weirdly enough, I am one of the first people to line up what non-Christian traditions have said about the trial and death of Jesus. We have references to the trial of Jesus in a number of ancient pagan texts, in a certain number of Judaic texts (including the Babylonian Talmud), and in both the Quran and its commentaries. So, the death of Jesus is actually a theme in Judaism, Islam, and paganism, and it’s perceived in different ways in these three traditions. And all of these traditions also deal with the question of Pilate’s innocence. Basically, in the book I try to show that in the ways different communities—Christian and non-Christian—think about this historical event, the question of Pilate’s innocence is always in the picture, giving rise to different answers.
But then, the second thing I argue is not based so much on commentary, but on the Bible itself. I have a chapter in which I present some readings of New Testament texts. Of course, there are very few books in circulation, if any, that have been more commented upon than the New Testament. Nevertheless, I seem to have raised some new points, or at least some that theologians find interesting. I am among the few people to notice that the Apostle Paul, who wrote his letters even before any of the Gospels were written, seems to indicate in one passage that everyone who put Jesus to death is innocent in a certain respect. And this is an interpretation of 1 Corinthians 2:8, where he says, if the “rulers of this age” had known what they were doing, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
Clearly, what Paul meant was that no one who was involved in crucifying Jesus knew he was the Lord, which means that in a certain sense, the highest crime which was ever committed—killing Christ, the Son of God, the Lord himself—was something no one knew they were even doing. So, in an important sense, I’m arguing that the innocence of Pontius Pilate (and Caiaphas, and everyone else) is actually recognized in the New Testament. And then of course, this is exactly what Jesus says in Luke 23:34: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”
Basically, I tried to argue that, on the one hand, there is an important theme, not just in tradition but in the New Testament as well, to attach a certain kind of innocence to those involved in putting Jesus to death. But then, on the other hand, I argue from Scripture and from writers such as St. Augustine that the Christian tradition, which portrays Pilate as innocent in the Gospels, is completely mistaken and fundamentally wrong. As a Roman judge, he clearly puts to death someone he doesn’t believe needs to be put to death, which is one of the reasons the Passion is so interesting for legal theorists, because this is a legal situation, which gives rise to a different set of questions.
In the book, you regard the inscription on the cross as one of the major clues toward establishing Pilate’s guilt from a legal point of view. What is the significance of that inscription?
The main significance is simply the fact that such an inscription—INRI, “Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum”—could not be placed on a cross without the verdict or a sentence being passed by a Roman court or Roman tribunal. All four gospels attest to this script, this judicial placard. That really demonstrates, in a way that even highly critical historians can accept, that the crucifixion was a Roman punishment. And if it was a Roman punishment, that means the Roman prefect sentenced Jesus.
One of the main ways Christians have denied that Pilate delivered Jesus’ death sentence is by saying he only conducted an interview, but didn’t engage in any sort of formal trial. The writing on the cross really undermines that entire tradition.
Incidentally, this tradition stretches from a very interesting character who served at the court of Constantine the Great, a rather significant person named Lactantius. He’s one of the first people who said very clearly that Pilate talked to Jesus, but he never sentenced him. Then, in the 21st century, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who might be well-known to some of our readers as a very interesting cultural philosopher, wrote on topics of real importance. It was Agamben, in fact, who got me interested in the whole topic in the first place. He says the same thing in the 21st century, namely, that Pilate never sentenced Jesus, even though the inscription on the cross clearly indicates otherwise.
And since I’ve connected Lactantius from the court of Constantine to Georgio Agamben, there’s another important figure our readers might be familiar with. Roughly, between them falls a Dutch legal thinker called Hugo Grotius, who’s regarded as the father of modern international law. And Grotius made the same argument that I make now, that this Roman script proves that Pilate sentenced Jesus to death. So, it’s not my original argument, but one that is well-attested in legal tradition.
Could you briefly summarize the major historical narratives about Pilate in each period throughout the past millennia? Can we identify certain ages when either his guilt or innocence dominated the scholarly debate?
This is an excellent question. Weirdly enough, I have never put that question to myself in exactly those words. Nonetheless, at different points in the book, you will find my thoughts on what was changing within the narratives. This is most clear at the very end of the book, where I show that certain German legal commentators of the early Enlightenment start to do something new. They begin to say, for instance, that the way to make sense of the Roman trial of Jesus is by looking at the law of nature. And so even though they’re still reading scholars like St. Augustine, Dante, and others who talk about the trial, they adopt a very novel approach, which you find before this time and place.
In one of your prior interviews, you pointed out that this book is about “remembering and misremembering” the death of Jesus. What is it that we consequently tend to misremember about the Passion?
With that particular phrase I was referring to the fact that in every age, starting very early, there are different ways in which we misremember what the biblical writers really told us about these events. Honestly, I think that the main problem for us, at the moment—which I do refer to in the book—is that increasingly we just don’t remember all the events which are at the core of the story.
So, one of the things I tried to show in the book was that the Passion is at the core of the entire European political imaginary. This really shouldn’t be a weird or surprising thing to say. And yet, the book is somewhat surprising and unique, because not many people seem to have said that before. I think the first task of contemporary political thinkers is just to remember that every legal thinker we regard as important—right until the mid-20th century—was concerned with the Passion in some way.
I talk, for instance, about Hans Kelsen, one of the most illustrious, founding legal thinkers of the European Union. Certainly not an obscure or reactionary figure by any means. And yet, Kelsen repeatedly comes back to some of the questions raised for the whole idea of democracy in the Roman trial of Jesus. So, I think a failure to remember would be the main issue we have today.
With regards to this second theme of the book—how the Roman trial of Jesus influenced the evolution of political thought in Europe—I think there’s a very significant and fascinating conclusion you make, that the separation of state and church, in a sense, is actually a Christian invention.
Absolutely correct—though let’s say, rather, a differentiation of church and state. This differentiation can take many forms. And what I do not argue in the book is that one necessarily needs to approve of or disapprove of some of the developments I’m tracing. I’m trying to make a historical argument, that one can lament or celebrate.
But nevertheless, certain themes, topics, and conclusions seem to be historically related over time. Something I seem to be one of the first to argue, at least recently, both in this book and then in my new book on the political life of Jesus, is that the concept of the saeculum—from which we get the words secular and secularization—is a distinctly Christian concept, which is entirely lacking in Roman law before the Christianization of the empire. This concept comes to play a very interesting and complex place in the history of Roman Church law in the Middle Ages. It’s actually Roman Church lawyers who create the terms ‘secularity’ and ‘secularization’. People can very much differ on the judgments of such matters, but it seems to be the Protestants of northern Europe who really began to leverage these terms in quite revolutionary ways in the Early Modern period.
So, this is the history I’m tracing, with reference to the term saeculum, the term “age.” And I further argue that this term, which has such an important place in Christian legal and political theory—and sadly, in post-Christian legal and political theory, which is what we’re dealing with now—seems to be a very straightforward translation of the Greek concept of aion, which you find throughout the Gospels and the New Testament. The aion is the order of this world before the full manifestation of the kingdom of God. For instance, as a term that might be familiar to many European Conservative readers, the aion is what endures as long as what Carl Schmitt calls the katechon is in place. The katechon is a structure that prevents the world from ending, and so the aion is the space of time in which redemption has somehow been accomplished, but the final manifestation of redemption has not yet occurred.
So, basically, I try to argue that a lot of these continent-shaping legal concepts are both related to Christian thinking about the Bible and even to the Bible itself. And one of the most epochal moments in this tradition is when Jesus says to Pilate in the Gospel of John, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Is there a message hidden in your book that’s especially relevant on Good Friday, the day the Passion took place?
Writing the book, I have come to believe that both Christians and non-Christians can recognize the fact that we really can’t imagine the world without this drama that unfolded between Jesus and Pilate. What I tried to do in the book is just to begin to explore some of the ripple effects of that drama. It has shaped our world in ways that we should neither forget nor neglect to explore further.
