Every Sunday around the world, millions of Christians recite a creed that includes the following proclamation of truth about Jesus: He “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” This Apostles’ Creed, likely going back in some form to the second century AD, has held Jesus’s crucifixion at the direction of Pontius Pilate as a key historical truth and an unquestioned part of the events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.
And yet, in his wide-ranging book, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History, David Lloyd Dusenbury traces a concomitant nearly two-millennia-long tradition that has questioned Pilate’s guilt—and argued, instead, for his innocence in Jesus’s crucifixion. In the process, Dusenbury consults an impressive array of historical, theological, literary, and artistic sources from antiquity to the twentieth century. How did different people make this argument for Pilate’s innocence? Why did they do it? And why does it matter now? Dusenbury explains:
“The thesis of this book is that what we now call the ‘secular’ is not a Roman (pre-Christian) inheritance, or a late modern (post-Christian) innovation. On the contrary, the ‘secular’ is constituted by Christian philosopher-bishops, legal theorists, and polemicists… I am inclined to think that the term-concept of the ‘secular’ owes incalculably much (1) to a single utterance in the Roman trial of Jesus as it is narrated in the fourth gospel: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36); and (2) to a singular interpretation of this utterance in the early fifth century by a formidable African bishop, Augustine of Hippo, in his Homilies on the Gospel of John.”
The book proceeds chronologically, running through ancient attempts to defend Pilate—like the two theories that Lactantius popularized in the late third and early fourth centuries AD. The first of these held that Pilate refrained from making any judgment and thus cannot be considered guilty for Jesus’s death. And second, it was the Jews, not the Romans, who executed Jesus—an argument that also gets Pilate, a representative of the empire, off the hook. Another theory ascribes the judgment not to Pilate but to Herod.
In yet other traditions, including Islamic ones, Pilate is not guilty for a more creative reason: Jesus never was crucified himself. As in the best action flicks, the lead actor used a body double for this most daring stunt. Sounds creative, but there are other such stories in ancient mythology. One could note the alternate myth about Helen never going to Troy, but spending the Trojan War in Egypt, while the heroes at Troy fought over her phantasm. And there is the alternate myth of Iphigenia, in which her father did not sacrifice her, but the goddess Artemis whisked her off to become her priestess at Tauris. For unbelieving readers in pagan contexts, in other words, there were plenty of inspirations for highly creative readings of the Jesus-Pilate drama in lieu of accepting the crucifixion narrative at face value.
But the continued interest in the question of Pilate’s innocence on the part of Jews, Christians, and over time, Muslims and much later, agnostics and atheists too shows that something significant is at stake. It is, at the end, not just a debate over the justice of one isolated trial, but over justice in a larger sense: If Jesus, supposedly the perfect, if not divine man was executed, can true justice exist on this earth? Dusenbury points out the significance of Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s (482-565) Institutes for such conversations. The Institutes, which open his magisterial collection of Roman law, begin with the dedication: “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…” In other words, the sanctity of Justinian’s law code relies on his veneration of an innocent man whom the Roman legal system executed—and considered it justice. Is this a paradox? Or a restoration of true justice by a Christian emperor, wisely versed in both the Law of Rome and the Gospel of Christ?
Legal history and the pursuit of justice are tricky, of course, and two millennia of twisting and reimagining of terms whose modern meanings we take for granted muddy up the waters. So it is with a term of particular significance to the stories of Pilate and Jesus: “secular.” In common parlance, we simply take this to mean the opposite of “religious.” Except, that’s not what it meant originally.
Its Latin roots are obvious—saeculum for Romans designated the measure of a human life; a generation. Marking the end of one saeculum and the beginning of the next were opulent Secular Games, honoring the Roman gods for their protection of the city. Augustus celebrated these games in 17 BC, and the poet Horace composed a hymn, Carmen Saeculare, which still survives. Its very first line is an invocation to the god Apollo and his twin sister Artemis. So much for “secular” as “not religious.”
Descended from this Latin term is the modern French word siècle, which designates the more precise meaning of saeculum—a century. The problem is, as Dusenbury reminds, with both the legal terms he uses and the history that shaped them, European law has always been “common and civil—sacred and secular—old and new—Greek and Roman.”
But there’s another key part of the linguistic puzzle here; the lynchpin that makes it all click. In the Latin Vulgate, whenever Jesus refers to “this age,” the term used is saeculum. Likewise in the Vulgate, Paul uses saeculum to describe “this age” and its antipathy to Christ—e.g., in 1 Corinthians 2:6-8. The key to understand—and Dusenbury returns to this in his conclusion—is that in antiquity, again, there was no separation of religion and state, or sacred and secular (in the modern sense). But Jesus, with his brief statement about the nature of his kingdom at his trial before Pilate, made that very separation, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the saeculum.
In Homily 115, Augustine returns to Jesus’s defense statement at his trial, that his kingdom is not of this world—a sentence that, crucially, uses mundus for “world” rather than saeculum. Augustine interprets it, though, in light of the saeculum, the current age of this world, in which the innocence or guilt of someone like Jesus or his followers doesn’t matter—and Jesus knew it. Humans judge humans and do so imperfectly. There is no hope for true justice in this age, the saeculum—or, one could say, no hope in justice which is secular. Both the condemnation of Jesus and the various theories exonerating Pilate of guilt simply reiterate this. At the same time, without Jesus’s renunciation of secular power by his statement—a reading that Dante and others adopted—the modern concept of the secular and secularity would not have come to be.
Reading this book felt at times akin to unraveling a complex whodunit. Dusenbury introduces deep micro-study after micro-study of complex thinkers and texts from Origen to Dante to Rousseau and many more. The reader reaps the rewards of paying attention, as all the different pieces of the puzzle come together in the concluding half of the book—sort of. The lack of an overly neat connection between all the strands he is tracking actually makes the analysis more convincing. Dusenbury is not trying to force the evidence, but the different ways in which thinkers kept trying to defend Pilate’s innocence and (as in the case of Rousseau) even proposed Jesus’s guilt, shows how the flourishing of modern secular philosophy came to be.
In other words, as historian Tom Holland argued in Dominion, this is the world Christianity has built. We just live in it.