An illustration of Jesus carrying his cross (rudall30/Getty Images)
An illustration of Jesus carrying his cross (rudall30/Getty Images)
In The Innocence of Pontius Pilate, David Lloyd Dusenbury argues that the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate helped bring about modern secularization and the split between church and state. Dusenbury examines the fact of Jesus’s trial and Pilate’s judgment of him, as well as its interpretation by different thinkers. He seeks to expose and refute harmful myths, misinterpretations of the biblical data by “whole traditions of Christian, and post-Christian commentary.” These include the idea that Pilate is an innocent actor who is not ultimately responsible for Jesus’s death, that he is not actually a judge imposing a real sentence on Jesus, and that it is the Jews who crucified Jesus and not the Romans.
The heart of his argument, though, is that the trial of Jesus is responsible for the creation of the concept of “the secular,” especially from Jesus’s response to Pilate “my kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36) and Augustine’s commentary on that text in his Homilies on the Gospel of John. “Wherever Augustine’s commentary on John’s Pilate trial is not read — as in much of the Byzantine and Islamicate zones — the ‘secular’ never crystallizes,” Dusenbury concludes. And later, when figures such as Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf wrestle with the question of church–state relations, they do so in light of Jesus’s words.
Dusenbury begins by quoting the opening of Justinian’s Institutes, the progenitor of much of European law. He notes that this tome of Roman law begins with an invocation of Jesus, a Roman criminal executed by a Roman judge but later acclaimed as God. Dusenbury wagers that because of this irony, that judge “might be a pivotal and recurring figure in the history of European legal and political theory.”
He then explores a variety of authors who, by omission or commission, blur the memory of Pilate as Jesus’s condemning judge — which frequently puts the blame for his death exclusively on the Jewish people and casts Pilate as almost another victim of the mob, along with Christ. Ironically, the Babylonian Talmud echoes this tradition, proudly claiming that Jesus was sentenced by a Jewish court for Jewish crimes and executed in a Jewish way, not a Roman one.
But the primary tradition of Christian interpretation believes that Pilate is a real judge offering a real judgment and that he is guilty for the death of Christ as such, even if the Jewish leaders who pushed him to render that judgment are guiltier than he. As Pope Leo the Great wrote in his sermon 59,
Other authors may glide over Pilate’s role and complicity, but they are not the major stream of Christian tradition. It is important to underscore the fact that Jews and Gentiles alike are responsible for Christ’s death, because that helps us see its theological significance more clearly and because antisemitism still needs to be fought. Correcting the record is important, but Dusenbury fails to drive home how getting Pilate’s guilt right informs the rise of secularization.
That concept begins, he argues, with the apostle Paul, who proclaims in his letters that “this age” (saeculum) is unable to perceive the glory and truth of the crucified Christ. It continues with Augustine’s commentary on John and with Pope Gelasius’s famous letter in 494 arguing that there are two swords, or distinct but complementary authorities and jurisdictions, between the church, which rules in matters of religio, and the state, which governs the saeculum. Dusenbury underscores that Augustine and Gelasius are both Africans but does not offer a substantive case for how that origin shaped their thinking.
The book’s final section focuses on Jesus’s refusal of earthly kingship as the part of his trial that gives rise to secularity as we conceive it. Robert Bellarmine and other defenders of the papacy held that the Church was Christ’s kingdom on earth, and the pope his vice-regent. Against them, Hobbes claimed that if Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, then ecclesiastical rulers have no sovereignty or coercive power, all of which resides in the secular sovereign. This means that there is really only one sword, not two: “Spiritual Commonwealth there is none in this world, for it is the same thing with the Kingdom of Christ; which he himself saith, is not of this world.”
Pufendorf objects to Hobbes’s collapse of all authority — even that of preaching — to the state. He sees Christ’s kingdom as a “Kingdom of Truth” in this age, and “Truth is not subject to human empire.” The union of Christian believers should therefore be seen as a kingdom, but one that requires no coercive power because it brings souls to obedience to its king by the force of truth alone.
In the end, Dusenbury welds together a set of historical explorations and a somewhat related theological-political argument into one book. He conflates Pilate’s actions and Christ’s words as “the trial of Jesus,” but the two are distinct and have different significances. He takes the reader on an interesting journey through facts and texts across continents, but debates over the event of the trial of Jesus add little to the proclamation he made about his kingdom. And while Dusenbury makes lengthy digressions, he never treats the other saying of Jesus that helps create the idea of secular and sacred: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21). It turns out that Pilate is not a “pivotal and recurring figure” in legal history — certainly not as pivotal as the man he tried and executed.