THE trial of their Messiah by the Sanhedrin, had it stood alone, would have no doubt been the most interesting judicial transaction in history. The law of Moses, perpetuated though modified by Christianity, has perhaps been more influential than any other code of the world. Yet that law has had one rival — in the mighty jurisprudence of Rome. “The written reason of the Roman law has been silently or studiously transfused” into all our modern life, and lawyers of every nation look back with filial reverence to the great jurisconsults of the great age of the Imperial Republic. But between the two influences there is one important point of contrast. In the Hebrew commonwealth law was the product of religion. It was received, as Christendom has been content to receive it, as a Divine rule. There is no evidence whatever that the Jewish race was remarkable for an innate passion for justice, or for any such “tendency to righteousness” as might have originally led it to religion. Their whole history and literature indicate, on the contrary, that it was the intense sense of the Divine which molded the nation originally, and which afterwards led to a widespread though imperfect cultivation of the ars boni et aequi . Even that Rabbinic cultivation, as we have seen, was marred by continual exaggerations and artifices which reveal the original inaptitude of the race for the highest judicial excellence. Accordingly, down to the time with which we are dealing, it remained a small, isolated Asiatic tribe, filled through and through with national and religious prejudices. It is not to such a source that men look for a model of the administration of equal laws. But there have been races in the world who reflected, as there are races who do reflect, in an eminent degree, that deep sense of righteousness which lies at the root of all law. And of all such races, ancient and modern, the greatest was that which at this time ruled over Palestine and over the world. When the scepter departed from Judah, it passed into the strong, smiting hands of Rome; and already all the nations had begun to exchange their terror of Rome’s warlike might for that admiration of its administrative wisdom which has grown upon the world ever since. And already, too, that admiration was mingled with confidence and trust. Those Eastern races felt, what we two thousand years after can historically trace, that the better part of the unequaled authority of Roman law was due to the stern, hard virtues of the early race and early Republic. It was dimly recognized then, and it is clearly traceable now, that that influence and authority sprang from an instinct of righteousness enforced by praetor and proconsul in every subject land, long before Ulpian or Gaius had written it out into immortal law.

Pontius Pilate was at this time the representative of Rome in Judaea — the governor, as he is called in the Gospels. But it will be found instructive to note more carefully what his exact position was. He was the Procuator Caearis ; the procurator, deputy, or attorney of Tiberius in that province.

And he was no procurator fiscalis , with functions equivalent to those of Quaestor. Pilate’s was no such subordinate or financial office, he was a procurator cum potestate ; a governor with civil, criminal, and military jurisdiction; subordinated no doubt in rank to the adjacent Governor of Syria, but directly responsible to his great master at Rome. And what was the relation of the Emperor himself to the inhabitants of Judaea and to the world? The answer is important. The Emperor was neither more nor less than the representative of Rome. In modern times men associate the imperial title with absolutism, and a more than royal power. To Romans, even in the days of Tiberius, the name of a king was intolerable, and absolutism, except under republican forms, distasteful. Accordingly, when Augustus became the undisputed chief of the Republic, and determined so to continue, he remained nominally a mere private nobleman or citizen.

The savior of society did not dare to attack the constitution of the State.

He effected his object in another way. He gathered into his own hands the whole powers and functions, and accumulated upon his own head the whole honors and privileges, which the State had for centuries distributed among its great magistrates and representatives. He became perpetual Princeps Senatus, or leader of the legislative house. He became perpetual Pontifex Maximus, or chief of the national religion. He became perpetual Tribune, or guardian of the people, with his person thereby made sacred and inviolable. He became perpetual Consul, or supreme magistrate over the whole Roman world, with the control of its revenues, the disposal of its armies, and the execution of its laws. And lastly, he became perpetual Imperator, or military chief, to whom every legionary throughout the world took the sacramentum , and whose sword swept the globe from Gibraltar to the Indus and the Baltic. And yet in all he was a simple citizen — a mere magistrate of the Republic. Only, in this one man was now visibly accumulated and concentrated all that for centuries had broadened and expanded under the magnificent abstraction of Rome. Tiberius, therefore, the first inheritor of this constitution of Caesar Augustus, was in the strictest sense the representative of that great city that ruled over the kings of the earth. And the Roman knight who now governed in Judaea was his representative in his public capacity. For Augustus, as is well known, had divided the provinces into two classes. To the more peaceful and central he allowed the Senate to send proconsuls, while even over these he reserved his own consular and military power. But some provinces, like Judaea, he retained in his own hands as their proconsul or governor. Strictly and constitutionally, the governor of the Jewish nation, at the time of which we write, was not Pilate at Caesarea or Vitellius at Antioch, but Tiberius at Rome. He was the Proconsul or Governor of Judaea under the still-existing Republic — a Republic now almost identified with himself. And Pilate, whom the Jews popularly called their governor, was strictly the procurator of the great Proconsul, holding civil and military authority by delegation from him in whom was now embodied the boundless authority of Rome. Such was the tribunal before which the Council of the Sanhedrin is now to lead a prisoner.

Pilate sat in his Praetorium on the morning of that “preparation-day,” to transact business and administer justice as usual. In what spot in Jerusalem his judgment-seat was on this occasion set up, cannot certainly be known.

It may have been within the fortress and under the tower of Antonia, the visible symbol of Roman predominance which frowned beside the temple.

Much more probably it was “Herod’s Praetorium,” that magnificent palace to the north of the temple which Josephus describes, and which had been recently built by the Idumean kings. Their former palace was also still in existence, and the visit of the Roman procurator and the Tetrarch of Galilee to the same feast, while it raises the question which of them occupied the new and more splendid residence, suggests the inevitable rivalry and possible “enmity” of their relation. If we suppose that Pilate, like Florus, asserted his right to occupy the new palace, we may remember that its white marble semicircle enclosed an open Place which had looked out on the sacred city, and was almost as public as the space between Antonia and the temple. In the open space in front of this or any other Praetorium the movable Bema or tribunal could at once be set up. But on this morning Pilate was still sitting within the judgment-hall. Outside was the roar of the Eastern city awakening on a Passover dawn; within, the clash of Roman steel, the altars of the Roman gods, and perhaps the sculptured frown of the distant demigod Tiberius. Into that heathen chamber the priests and doctors of the separated nation would not enter during their sacred week; and the Roman, with his Roman smile, graciously removed their difficulty by coming with his soldier-lictors to the gate. But his first words there, as his eyes fell upon the prisoner who stood with his hands bound before him, were: “What accusation bring ye against this man?” We recognize instantly the spontaneous voice of Roman justice. It was no doubt meant to suggest his own authority and power of review, and in that respect we must presently consider it. But it was before everything else the instinctive utterance of a judge, and it at once recalls that memorable dictum of Pilate’s successor in the same seat: “It is not the manner of the Romans to deliver any man to die, until that he which is accused have the accusers face to face, and have license to answer for himself concerning the crime laid against him.” So ever spoke the worst of the Roman governors — and neither Pilate nor Festus was among the best — out of the mere instinct and tradition of justice which clung to their great office among the treacherous tribes around. The chief priests and scribes on this occasion avoided the demand to know the accusation. “If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him to thee.” The insolent evasion of his question was not likely to propitiate Pilate, who instantly puts the matter on its true footing by the calm but somewhat contemptuous reply, “Take ye him, and judge him according to your law.”

Sullenly came the answer, “It is not lawful for us (it is not permissible — oujk e]xestin ) to put any man to death.” The answer revealed (what the word “malefactor” had perhaps already implied, and what may have been involved in their bringing their prisoner to Pilate at all) that it was a capital charge which they had come to make. But it closed this important opening dialogue. The conversation just narrated is only found in the Gospel of John; and it is remarkable that a narrative supposed to be much later than the others should record words which not only have the strongest internal evidence of truth, but to which subsequent investigation has given immensely increased historical value.

For at this point of the story comes in the question of conflict of jurisdiction . Why did the Jews go to Pilate at all? We have seen that their Council condemned Jesus to be “guilty of death.” Had they no right to pass such a sentence? or, having the right to pass it, had they merely no power to execute it? How far did the authority of the governor trench upon, or supersede, the authority of the Sanhedrin? Which of them had the jus vitae aut necis ? What was the relation of the two powers, the Jewish and the Roman, to each other at this time?

This broad historical question lies at the root of the views which may be taken of the legal point — views which have sometimes been extremely contrasted. In the controversy between Salvador and Dupin, the former (true in this to the sad claim of some of his nation of old, “His blood be on us “) urged that the Sanhedrin had full authority to try even for capital crimes, and that their sentence of death required only the countersign or endorsement of the Roman governor. His opponent held that the Jewish court had no right to try for grave, or at least capital, crimes at all; that their whole procedure was a usurpation; and that the only real or competent trial was that which we are about to consider. I have no intention of going into the great mass of historical investigation which has been accumulated on this confessedly difficult point. There seems no one consideration which is quite conclusive upon it. Thus it would be rash to ascribe to the assertion of the Talmud, that “forty years before the destruction of the temple the judgment of capital causes was taken away from Israel,” the praise of exact chronological accuracy. Yet it. is very striking as showing the time about which the doctors of the Jewish law were willing to hold that their power of life and death (no (doubt already restricted or suspended under the despotism of Herod) had finally passed away. But on the general subject of the relation of the two powers in that age there are some considerations which reasoners on either side do not seem to have always kept in view, but which are important. 1. There was no concordat on this subject between the Romans and the Jews. The latter were the conquered nation; their jurisdiction, including the power of life and death, was wrested from them de facto , and they were obliged to submit. But de jure they never did. To them, at least to the great mass of the nation, the Sanhedrin was still the national authority, especially in accusations relating to religious matters. 2. On the Roman side, the matter was of course precisely the reverse.

Their view of the jurisdiction of subject races generally, and of the Jews in particular, was, I suspect, that it was just so much as they chose to leave them. In most cases that formed a very large field. The Roman governor sanctioned, or even himself administered, the old law of the region; but the policy of the ruling power was to concede to local self-government as much as possible. The concession was of course all the larger where there was no disposition on the part of the province to provoke a contest. In Roman law as in Roman campaigns, in questions of jurisdiction as in questions of politics, the maxim of the haughty and wise rulers of the world was parcere subjectis et debellare superbos . 3. It is evident that a large latitude was allowed on this subject to the great Roman officers — proconsuls or procurators — who administered la haute justice . The Republic and the Emperor permitted, and indeed demanded, that they should stretch or relax their authority as the particular case or exigency required. In ordinary matters brought before their tribunals, the rule on which they acted is perfectly expressed, a few years after this, by Annaeus Gallio, the humane proconsul of Achaia, and brother of the philosopher Seneca: “If it were a matter of wrong or wicked lewdness, O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you: but if it be a question of words and names, and of your law, look ye to it; I will be no judge of such matters.” But while they drove such questions from the judgmentseat, so long as they did not affect the rights of the sovereign power, the least hint that one of these words or names or questions of another law could prejudice the supreme power of Rome was enough to authorize the governor to plunge his ax into the offending part of the body politic with prompt and savage severity.

These general considerations should never be forgotten in reading the scattered and often inconsistent historical notices on the subject. They show that the extreme views, which critics in our own time have maintained, were probably held even then by the opposing powers whose jurisdictions were in poise. But the balance of evidence is very strong that, at this time, all questions of life and death in Judaea were by Roman law and practice reserved for the final decision of the Roman governor. In such cases the Jews had, at the most, only the cognitio causae they could try the cause, but not sentence the accused. Nor can there be much doubt that the governor’s final power in these cases was not a merely ministerial right of endorsement and executio ; it was also a power of re -cognitio , or review, in so far at least as he chose to exercise it. Whether this reservation to the governor was such as to deprive the Jewish courts of their rights as tribunals of first instance — whether any previous trial of a capital cause before the Sanhedrin was necessarily a usurpation — is another and a more difficult question. With regard to ordinary civil crimes — robberies or assassinations — the Jewish rulers may have been content not to interfere further than to bring the perpetrators to the Roman tribunal for judgment.

The Roman judges, on the other hand, may have been quite willing to send to the cross without much inquiry any ordinary malefactors against whom the authorities of the country, having already inquired into the case, were willing to appear as accusers. But, obviously, a more serious question arose when the alleged crime was a religious one — a claim, as prophet or Messiah, to change the ecclesiastical institutions. In such a ease the Sanhedrin itself no doubt maintained, as the Jews generally did on its behalf, an exclusive right to judge in the first instance; and its tendency would be very strong to deny any re-cognitio by the Roman power, and either not to call in that power at all, or to limit it to a mere right of countersign. What view the Roman governor might take, in the very unusual ease of such a charge being brought to his tribunal, was another matter.

But in truth, while the dialogue-narrative of the Fourth Gospel admirably illustrates the historical relations of the parties at the time, the history as it actually occurred supersedes the necessity for referring to these more general relations. Whether it was legitimate or not for the Jews to condemn for a capital crime, on this occasion they did so. Whether it was legitimate or not for Pilate to try over again an accused whom they had condemned, on this occasion he did so. There were certainly two trials. And the dialogue already narrated expresses with the most admirable terseness the struggle which we should have expected between the effort of the Jews to get a mere countersign of their sentence, and the determination of Pilate to assume his full judicial responsibility, whether of first instance or of revision . The reluctance of the Jews on the present occasion was no doubt prompted, not so much by their usual ecclesiastical independence as by their dread lest inquiry by Pilate should prevent his carrying out their scheme. But as matters actually turned out, the collision which the Procurator’s first words provoked had the effect of binding him publicly, before the men of both nations who surrounded his judgment-seat, to deal with this capital case in his judicial capacity. It was henceforth no mere matter of administration, no incident of summary police jurisdiction or military court-martial. It was a deliberate judgment of life and death by the supreme civil ruler, who had interposed his jurisdiction between an accused man and the chief authorities of the subject nation.

The Accusation demanded by Pilate necessarily followed, now that he had insisted on being judge in the cause. We have this given with considerable formality in the Gospel of Luke; and though it is omitted in the three others, the first question of Pilate to Jesus, which they all record, implies a previous charge. Luke gives it thus: “We found this man perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King.” Had the accusation retained the form in which it was brought before the Sanhedrin — had it been a merely religious or ecclesiastical crime which was now named — a different question would have arisen. Had the chief priests, when they “began to accuse” Jesus, said at once what they passionately exclaimed at a later stage of the cause, “We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God,” it may be doubtful what Pilate would have done. He was authorized as governor to administer their law, or to preside over and control its administration; and while his leaning would be, like that of Gallio, to consider this question a matter of words, he might have been induced to see that these words covered grave consequences to the State.

But such difficulties were avoided by the deliberate change made by the accusers in the form of the accusation — or perhaps, by their reverting to that accusation which had been originally intended, and for which the ecclesiastical procedure of the night before was a pretext or preliminary. If we accept this sentence of Luke as equivalent to the nominis delatio of the Roman law, or to the affidavit of the prosecutor-witness of the Hebrew law already considered — and it has resemblances to both — it throws a flood of light before as well as behind. The charge of “perverting” (diastre>fonta ), including perhaps “revolutionizing” as well as “seducing” the nation, was fairly true, and was distinctly included in the Jewish procedure of the night before. No doubt to Roman ears it was ‘ambiguous, but the ambiguity recalls that very real doubt which had governed his mind who said, “If we let him alone, all men will believe on him, and the Romans will come and take away our place and our nation.”

The culminating charge, that Jesus called Himself “Christ a King,” was also true, and had just been acknowledged to be true, though scarcely in the sense in which the accusers desired that the ears of the governor should receive it. But if we are to take Luke’s narrative, we must believe that the charge was not left in this ambiguous and ineffective form. The managers of the impeachment had no doubt not intended to make a deliberately untrue statement before the heathen judgment-seat. They wished, at as small an expense of falsehood as possible, to throw upon the foreign power the odium of a prophet’s death. But the prompt utterances of Pilate seem to have forced them into the villainy they would rather have avoided, and between the more ambiguous charges of seducing the nation and claiming a royal Messiahship they add, by way of illustration, “forbidding to give tribute to Caesar.” It was a sheer falsehood, and some of the accusers must have known it to be the converse of the fact as recently ascertained. But it was a suggestion which, as they must also have known, would give the most deadly significance to the other vaguer and truer heads of the indictment, and would make it impossible for the governor to waive the capital charge.

For there is no mistake as to what the crime here imputed is. It is majestas — the greatest crime known in Roman law, the greatest crime conceivable by the Roman imagination — an attack upon the sovereignty or supreme majesty of the Roman State. In the early days of the Republic the name perduellio was applied to treason and rebellion, and the citizen condemned by the people for that crime was interdicted from fire and water, or hanged upon an arbor infelix . As the rule of the city spread over the world, treason came to be known as an attack upon its majesty; and various laws were passed to define this crime and the treatment of it, the chief enactment being the Lex Julia . According to this law, every accusation of treason against a Roman citizen must be made by a written libel. A Jewish provincial had of course no such protection. He stood before the Procurator of the Caesar, with no defense against the summary exercise of absolute power but the plea of justice.

We come now to the Defense . All the narratives bear that Pilate put the same question to Jesus, in the same words, “Art thou the King of the Jews?” but that, on His answering in the affirmative, the Roman came to the paradoxical conclusion that there was “no fault in him.” The Fourth Gospel contains the explanatory conversation which these facts almost necessarily imply. The statement of Jesus is unusually impressive. It is couched, no doubt, in that involved, allusive, and aphoristic style of utterance which we find in this Gospel from end to end. But we must remember that all the biographies represent this very style as occasionally used by Jesus, and as characteristic of Him in critical circumstances. It comes out in all the histories when He touches on the esoteric “mysteries of the kingdom” He preached, or where His own claims are brought in question; and it manifestly grew more and more His manner of utterance towards the close of His career. We hold, therefore, that a statement which, though only recorded in the latest Gospel, must according to all the others have been substantially made, and which as reported is at once startlingly original and intensely characteristic, has every internal evidence of being historical. This dialogue took place in the Praetorium, where Jesus may have possibly been detained while the question of jurisdiction was settled with His accusers. (It rather appears, however, that He must have been present while the accusation was made; the two first Evangelists state that either then or at a later stage His silence extorted the marvel of the governor, who said, “hearest thou not how many things they witness against, thee?”) He now, however, brings his prisoner within, and puts the sudden question, “Art thou the King of the Jews?” Jesus’ answer, “Sayest thou this of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?” does not seem to have been a request to know what had been uttered by the Jews in His absence.

The words evidently have a deeper reference. They are equivalent to, In what sense dost thou use the expression? “If thou sayest it of thyself, in the sense in which a Roman would naturally use the word, then I am not the King of the Jews. But if others told thee this of me, if thou art using the words of Hebrew prophecy, or of the world’s hope,” that may need further explanation. Pilate strives to reply as a Roman should, “Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee to me: what hast thou done?” It was throwing back, and not unfairly, the burden of explanation upon the accused. So He who had kept silence before the midnight Sanhedrin, and who made no answer even now to their dissimulated accusation, at once frankly answered the heathen magistrate, who desired himself to know the truth of the case: “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight:. . .but now is my kingdom not from hence.”

In considering words so memorable we must avoid as much as possible the theological and ecclesiastical, and look only from the historical, and in particular the forensic and judicial, point of view. Whatever else these words import, they are in substance, and almost in form, a defense. If they imply a confession of kingship, they express an avoidance of the particular kind of kingship charged. They do not set up a plea in bar of the jurisdiction. They seem to acknowledge that a kingdom of this world would be a legitimate object of attack by the deputy of Caesar, but they deny that the kingship of Jesus could be so described. The most important commentary on the words is of course the recent and famous scene of the tribute money, where Jesus, being demanded as a Jewish patriot and prophet., “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or no?” answered, “Show me a penny,” and, having asked the significant question as to Caesar’s image and superscription engraved upon it, closed the discussion with the words, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” The two incidents, in common with the whole of the history, make it certain that it was no part of His plan of kingdom, as it was no part of the plan of Christianity historically, to attack the Roman power. But this critical utterance to Pilate (like that former one) seems to go farther. On the face of it, it indicates that there was no necessary collision between the kingdom which Jesus was prepared to assert as His own, and that great “kingdom of this world” which His judge represented. All actual collision there too probably might be. But the words are meaningless unless they are taken as asserting separate spheres within which it was possible for each power to confine itself, and by confining themselves within which it was possible for them to escape collision. Only one of these kingdoms is described, and it is defined generally as “of this world,” the definition being illustrated by the suggestion that in every such kingdom the monarch may suitably be defended by the armed force of his subjects. The other is as yet only defined by the negation of these characteristics.

Pilate, as the result indicates, was already impressed by the statement, and perhaps convinced by it of the innocence of the accused of all conspiracy against Rome. And yet Jesus still spoke of a kingdom — a kingdom too in this world, though not of it — and His words of renunciation were more royal than all the Roman had ever listened to of greatness. With true judicial tact, the governor lays his finger on the exact point which required to be brought from negative implication into express statement. “Art thou a king then?” he asked the prisoner whose kingdom was not of this world.

And as before, to the adjuration of God’s High Priest, so now, to the representative of all the greatness of earth, the answer came back, making a crisis in the world’s history, “Thou sayest it: I am a king.” He who spoke so to a Roman governor knew that He was offering Himself to the cross, and that the next few hours might close that fateful life. And the thought was in His mind when he deliberately added, “To this end was I born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I might bear witness unto the truth.” Whatever else is included in words so great, this “witness to the truth” certainly embraces the testimony which a moment before had been given by the speaker Himself — by Him “who before Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confession” to the existence of a kingdom, true and real, though not of this kosmos . But this supreme utterance struck a deeper note than even the assertion of a spiritual and separate kingdom. It proclaimed that which is the basis of all human veracity and virtue, but which in those later ages was becoming strange to Roman ears — the existence of an eternal world of truth outside of man — a universal Divine system of things, high above all local or national tradition, and indeed above all human beliefs and desires. Over that objective truth men have no power: their highest privilege is to recognize and to confess it. And those do recognize it who have already a certain kinship and relation to that central truth — who are “of the truth.” For the last words to his judge of Him who now claimed to be both the witness and the King of that greater world were, “He that is of the truth heareth my voice.” “Pilate answered, What is truth?” The blank response, half-sarcastic, halfdespairing, wholly skeptical, will claim notice at a later stage. In the meantime we follow the course of the judge, who, thus waiving the personal question presented to him, goes on to deal with the accusation and the accused. The narratives all bear that Pilate reached and expressed the conclusion that the crime charged had not been proved — that indeed he found in the accused “no crime at all.” And the last Gospel distinctly refers the first public utterance of this conviction to the exact point in the conversation and defense at which we have just arrived. It was the only defiance which the accused is at any time stated to have offered; and Pilate now went straight out from the Praetorium, and announced his verdict, perhaps from the judgment-seat. Yet was this utterance, as it turned out, only the first step in that downward course of weakness the world knows so well: a course which, beginning with indecision and complaisance, passed through all the phases of alternate bluster and subserviency; persuasion, evasion, protest, and compromise; superstitious dread, conscientious reluctance, cautious duplicity, and sheer moral cowardice at last; until this Roman remains photographed for ever as the perfect feature of the unjust judge, deciding “against his better knowledge, not deceived.”

Upon some of the points in the Evangelic narrative we need not dwell. The graphic incident of the judge catching at an allusion to Galilee, and, on ascertaining that the man was a Galilean, sending him to Herod, may be just noticed in passing. The word used is ajne>pemyen (remisit ), which seems the exact technical term for restoring an accused to his proper jurisdiction, as here in sending Him from a forum apprehensionis to a forum originis . Herod’s declinature was prudent as well as courteous, when we remember the terms of the accusation. A man, even a provincial, accused of majestas , “stood at Caesar’s judgment-seat, where he ought to be judged”; and the Idumean “fox” may have dreaded the lion’s paw, while very willing to exchange courtesies with the lion’s deputy. The second appearance at the tribunal of the governor shows a distinct accession of weakness on the part of the judge, and of pressure upon him by the accusers. His wife’s morning message troubles his conscience, but does not purify his heart. Pilate is now willing to “chastise him and let him go,” i .e . to mangle an innocent man with the savage Roman scourge. The Jewish accusers refuse the compromise; and Pilate, characteristically, seems to have left them under the impression that he had finally sent Him to the cross, while he still intended to make a postponed appeal to their compassion. But before taking his first step in actual guilt, the judge washes his hands with the memorably vain words, “I am innocent of the blood of this just person’ see ye to it.” After the scourging, the three Evangelists record nothing but the insults of the fierce soldiery to one who was given up to them as a Jewish traitor to their Emperor. But the later Evangelist interposes a series of incidents which are, now as before, noted with the finest characterization and the most delicate verisimilitude. He alone records the “Behold the man!” with which the struggling Procurator, whose “faith unfaithful” still made him “falsely true,” sought to move the multitude. He alone records the response, “We have a law, and by that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God” — an utterance in exact accordance with that narrative of the Hebrew trial which is given by all the Synoptics, but which John has omitted. It is he who notices the unexpected but most natural effect of this claim upon the governor, whom the former utterances of the King “come into the world” had deeply impressed. “Whence art thou?” he almost tremulously demands. But from the first moment of his vacillation Jesus had given him no answer. Pilate, accordingly, at the very time when he is described as inwardly “more afraid,” flashes out in that insolent tone which less discriminating secular historians regard as the only one characteristic of him, “Speakest thou not unto me? knowest thou not that I have power to release thee, and power to crucify thee?” Jesus breaks the silence by a final word of answer, which is of high importance for our subject’ “Thou wouldest have no power against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that delivered me unto thee hath greater sin.” Some writers who hold that Pilate alone had “jurisdiction” in this case, and that the proceedings of the Sanhedrin were a usurpation, have appealed to this text, as containing in its first clause an acknowledgment of the exclusive right of the Roman tribunal, and in its last a denunciation of the illegality, as well as treachery, of Caiaphas. This is unwarranted, and in the circumstances grotesque. Yet, while we notice here first of all the extreme consideration and almost tenderness with which the sufferer judges His judge, we must confess that the words, “Thy power (ejxousi>a ) is given thee from above,” do relate themselves to the previous acknowledgment of a “kingdom of this world,” a kosmos in which men are to give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; while they add to that former acknowledgment the explicit idea (afterwards enforced by the apostles) that this earthly kingdom with its earthly aims is also from above. The powers that be are ordained of God; Pilate, who knew this not, was abusing a great and legitimate office partly through a heathen’s ignorance; and in so far he was less guilty than the false accusers who sat, in Moses’ seat. It was not strange that words so noble should have prompted one last effort on the judge’s part to save himself from his weakness. But it was too late. The Jewish hierarchs had now taken the full measure of the man, and their final argument was one fitted to bear down in him all of conscience that remained. “If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend: whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.”

Few utterances are more valuable historically than this last general statement. To feel the full force of it we must recall how, as already explained, the Caesar had gathered up in himself all the public offices of the Republic, so that treason against the State and treason against him had become almost the same. The old Roman watchfulness to crush out attempts against Rome was now intensified by being absorbed into the jealous personal suspicion of a despot. It was no anti-climax when the shrewd Jewish politicians, instead of saying, “Whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against the majesty of the State,” preferred to say, “Whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.” Long before this period of the reign of Tiberius the latter had become the deadlier form of the crime. Some of the accusers must have remembered the early days of the dynasty, when Julius and Octavius perpetrated their own successful lese-majeste , and the nation of the Jews, adhering to them in the great convulsion, merited the name which came afterwards to be known as the title of honor, of “Caesar’s friends.” For some time thereafter, indeed, Palestine was on the footing of a “client-state” under Caesar; since 6 A.D. it had been absolutely Caesar’s province. And the leading Jews must have been aware that while the first Emperor had extended the law of treason to punish libels against his own person, Tiberius, still more watchful in his jealousy, used the leges majestatis continually against all who failed in respect to the majesty of Caesar, even if they did not speak against him (ajntile>gein ) in the sense of favoring counter claims by themselves or others. The great historian records how, even before the date when Pilate was sent to Judaea, when the provinces appeared before Tiberius with complaints against their proconsuls, they took care to throw in along with the usual accusations of rapacity the added charge of treason — “Addito majestatis Crimine, quod tum omnium accusationum complementum erat!” To Pilate, as a personal dependant on the favor of the Emperor (a favor seemingly originally procured through Sejanus, who, if not already hurled from power, was by this time tottering to his fall), all this must have been continually and urgently present, the more as he had already earned the hatred of his province, and dreaded its revenge. His fears were not groundless. Tiberius was still upon the throne when, a few years after, Pilate was superseded, and ambassadors from Palestine, relying on the hereditary attachment of the nation to the imperial house, were sent to Rome to witness against the recalled and degraded governor. The shadow of that distant day paralyzed Pilate on this morning. What if he were to be accused before Caesar of spoliation and bloodshed, and, too well knowing himself to be guilty of those wrongs, should read also in the sunken eyes of his judge that other charge, the complement and the crown of every lesser crime? He who had so long persisted against all other arguments now succumbed at once before the well-chosen words: “If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar’s friend’ whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.” He ascended the tribunal, from which alone, a final sentence could be legally pronounced by a Roman judge — in the present case, apparently, a portable seat carried out from the Praetorium and placed in front upon a lithostroton or tesselated pavement. Yet even here he relieved his bitter feelings by the words to the accusers, “Shall I crucify your King?” But on the chief priests making the historical answer, “We have no king but Caesar,” the judge turned to Him who had claimed another kingdom, and, in such words as “Ibis ad crucem,” delivered him to be crucified. “Was Pilate right in crucifying Christ?” The question was put in the last generation in a book of extraordinary ability, which opens with the most powerful attack in our language on what has been known in modern times as the right of “liberty of conscience.” If you deny that right, argued John.

Stuart Mill and others, you must approve of Marcus Aurelius and the other persecutors of Christianity — nay, you must go farther, and find “a principle which will justify Pontius Pilate.” Sir James F. Stephen accepted the challenge; and his argument, while it in the first place raises the question, Did Pilate do right as a judge and as a man? will lead us on to the farther question, What was the law under which this judge ought to have acted? “Was Pilate right in crucifying Christ? I reply, Pilate’s paramount duty was to preserve the peace in Palestine, to form the best judgment he could as to the means required for that purpose, and to act upon it when it is formed. Therefore, if and in so far as he believed in good faith and on reasonable grounds that what he did was necessary for the preservation of the peace of Palestine, he was right.” 1. The suggestion which is here made, that Pilate may have “believed in good faith that what he did was necessary for the preservation of the peace of Palestine,” is purely gratuitous. Whether that would have justified him in condemning a man he believed to be innocent, we may touch upon hereafter. But in the meantime there is not the slightest ground for the suggestion itself. The narratives are uniform in asserting his expressed conviction of his prisoner’s innocence, his knowledge that Jesus had been delivered “for envy,” his scoffing incredulity in speaking to the Jews of their King, and his final yielding, as a judge, to those vanae voces populi against which his own law warned him, and yielding to them too, only when his personal and private interests were at last menaced. Now, the Christian narratives which have handed this down are, strange to say, in no respect hostile to Pilate. Jewish and other writers who expressly treat of the character of this governor give us his portrait as rapacious, cruel, and unjust. The Christian historians give no portrait, and have occasion to refer to him incidentally only where his actions are fitted to excite the keenest exasperation. Yet the few historical side touches of the Evangelists restore for us the man within the governor, with a delicacy, and even tenderness, which make the accusing portrait of Philo and Josephus look like a hard, revengeful daub. Is there, in the Tito or Bulstrode of modern delineation, anything more true to nature, more provocative of sudden sympathy from men who know the pressure of public life, than that morning’s mental history of the sixth procurator of Judaea, as given by the friends of the man whom he crucified? The character of Pilate and the motives for his vacillation are only too intelligible. But that at any point of this vacillation he came to believe that his sentence was called for to preserve the peace of the province, is an unhistorial suggestion. 2. Had the history run at all in the direction suggested, there are various situations which might be figured. That the judge, even if he were not a military governor with merum imperium delegated from Rome, should slay a man who was overtly and in intent seditious, raises no question. Neither Mr. Mill, nor any other advocate of liberty, questions the duty of Government to preserve the peace. That a governor, sitting or not sitting as a judge, should deliver to death a man whom he believed to have no intentions against the peace, because he was in point of fact dangerous to it, might raise a serious question. In particular, it raises the distinction between the judicial and the administrative. What Pilate as administrator of the province might do in the way of deporting or even killing an innocent man for the sake of its peace, is one question. What he might do sitting as a judge and inquiring whether there was “fault in this man touching those things where of ye accuse him,” is another matter; and it is the one with which we have to deal. The distinction, kept sacred in all jurisprudences, might well be confused in the minds of English lawyers by the powerful but provincial theory of Utility which they have been taught, but the spread of which from the professor’s chair to the judgment-seat will, I think, be prevented both by the scientific traditions of Europe and by the moral sense of mankind. In saying so, I do not forget the story of the English judge who told a prisoner, “I sentence you to die, not at all because you have robbed this house, but in order that other people may not rob other houses in future.” That judge, if he existed and pronounced such a sentence, simply committed murder. But in the case with which we here deal we have not to do with such unjudicial motives for action. It was Caiaphas, not Pilate, who thought it expedient that one man should die for the people. And neither the one nor the other grounded the expediency on any immediately apprehended outbreak or on any danger to the peace.

There was indeed no such immediate danger. How far there might be ultimate danger to the Roman State from the spread of convictions and the acceptance of claims like those of Jesus, was another matter, and it was the really important one. The true question, as the critic of the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity watchword soon discerns, is between the universal supremacy of a Government whose claims extended to something much higher than keeping the peace on the one hand, and the claims of a kingdom not of this world on the other. 3. Accordingly, the final defense made for the Roman governor — the only one which can be of any weight in consistency with the history, and the only one also which bears on the great question of liberty of conscience or repression of opinion — is contained in the following passage of very general theory, illustrated in the quotation in my notes: — “Pilate’s duty was to maintain peace and order in Judaea, and to maintain the Roman power. It is surely impossible to contend seriously that it was his duty, or that it could be the duty of anyone in his position, to recognize in the person brought to his judgment-seat, I do not say God incarnate, but the teacher and preacher of a higher form of morals and a more enduring form of social order than that of which he was himself the representative.

To a man in Pilate’s position, the morals and the social order which he represents are for all practical purposes absolute standards” (p.93).

Whether this was the theory of Roman law, we may afterwards see. But it is here presented as the universal and true theory, against which it is difficult to contend seriously. It may be so. This, at all events, is not the place to deal directly with it, farther than by recording fundamental and implacable opposition. But it is exactly the place to point out that this was the theory which the defense of the accused seems directed to meet.

The doctrine of the powerful book from which we quote is that “skeptical arguments in favor of moderation about religion are the only conclusive ones.” To suggest such arguments to the governor, or at least to leave his mind to the skeptical poise of the average educated Roman of the day, might have seemed the prudent part in a prophet accused of treason. His words take directly the opposite course. Their assertion of a kingdom — a higher and ruling “form of morals and social order” — set up in the earth, but in a different plane and kosmos from the secular power of Rome, might of itself have implied the proclamation of a duty to recognize that kingdom. But when its assertion was backed by an immediate appeal to the truth, as that which men are born into the world to confess, the defense plainly resolved into a claim that this truth, and not any social order or traditional belief, should be the “final and absolute standard.” And the last words addressed to Pilate clench “the duty of anyone in his position to recognize the teacher” of that higher order and extra-mundane truth; for “everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.”

And even if we prefer to disbelieve this conversation, we cannot escape from the fact that this was precisely the attitude taken up historically by Christianity. It did not claim merely to be one higher form of morals or religion among others. It claimed to be the true religion — in the sense of being both universal and obligatory. And the Empire, which would have been content to ignore it while it presented itself as simply a higher form of morals or even of social order, could not ignore it when it appeared as the universal and obligatory form. When it claimed to be the truth, Rome first answered, “What is truth?” and when it insisted on the right of truth to be obeyed, Rome answered again with persecution. And Christianity responded by the constant reiteration of the duty of every member of the State, whether an official or not, to recognize this truth, to bear witness to it, and, if need be, to die for it. Hence the immense interest which has always attached to Pilate’s answering inquiry. It was the utterance of one who was neither a philosopher nor a statesman, but simply a typical Roman gentleman, in a position where he represented his State. And precisely because it was so, his question, “What is truth?” lays bare the hinge upon which the mighty Roman world was then smoothly revolving towards the abyss. The Republic, we must never forget, was destined ere long to disbelieve — many of its leading spirits had come to disbelieve already — in its own morals and social order. The fact is certain, but the pathos of it has too seldom been acknowledged. Again and again in the past we have mused and mourned over Greece, and its search of truth intellectual — its keen and fruitless search, never ending, ever beginning, across wastes of doubt and seas of speculation lighted by uncertain stars.

But today let us for once remember that greater race, the greatest this earth has known; called and trained through long centuries to the work of governing a world, and when at last that mighty inheritance came into its hands, stricken with inward paralysis for want of a motive and a hope.

Too well has our own poet drawn the picture — “In his cool hall, with haggard eyes The Roman noble lay; He drove abroad, in furious guise, Along the Appian Way; “He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned his hair with flowers:

No easier and no quicker passed The impracticable hours.” And so there crept upon men that moral languor and satiety of life which underlay the whole time of the Empire, and which often, even in the presence of a noble and protesting stoicism, hardened into cruel apathy or reckless despair. But have we always reflected how certainly this cynical moral mood of the dominant race was the result of the new circumstances into which it was thrown? In early days the Roman believed in himself, in his gods, in his institutions, and, above all, in his State. It was for him theatrum satis magnum — his standard, his rule, his righteousness. And so he was righteous, in his stern, relentless way. But now the world had grown wider. And what had sufficed for virtue in former times did not suffice for virtue now. A provincial belief, a national religion, was too narrow for a world: it necessarily collapsed, and left the lords of earth, with strong hands and empty hearts, skeptical as to truth, and so lapsing from righteousness.

That this had become largely the result, even in the reign of Tiberius, is admitted. And it was plainly a position of matters very unfortunate for the application of the general rule suggested. That Pilate or Pliny, or any Roman official, should have to refuse a higher order of morals which his conscience approved, simply because his State believed in a lower, was hard enough. But that such an official should have to refuse that higher morality or religion, when both he and his State were ceasing to believe in the lower, was harder still. And that in such circumstances a judge should have to use systematic persecution against the confessedly higher convictions, simply to prevent their making head against a legal standard of faith which he or others had begun to disbelieve, was the most unfortunate thing of all. There is probably nothing which so excites the loathing of mankind as when the State persecutes for a faith which it has already begun to lose. And yet, obviously, that is precisely the time when dishonest persecution is most likely to happen, and on the theory with which we are dealing it is what ought to happen. Pilate was quite prepared to act upon this theory, for in point of fact he acted from a lower motive still — his private interest. But let us suppose that he had risen so far as to desire only to do what was right, and let us suppose also that the law he administered demanded the persecution of all convictions hostile to the religion of Rome. It is fair that we also should answer the question, What ought he in this case to have done? What in such circumstances was the “duty of a man in Pilate’s position “? I answer that his duty was (having first cared for the immediate peace of his district) to refuse to represent that law, and to resign his position rather than outrage a principle of conscience, which lies deeper than all social superstructures of either the Church or the State.

But this brings us to the final question: What, in point of fact, was the law of Rome in the matter of the trial of Jesus Christ?

Its fundamental principle was that the public law of the imperial State had the right to permit or to forbid the exercise of the religion of private men.

In its exercise of this right, it was no doubt generally cautious and wise, at least in its dealings with polytheistic States. It is well known that the policy of Rome as a conquering power towards the religions of subject peoples was one of toleration. But that meant little more than toleration of existing religions in their local seats, or, at the farthest, in the race to which such a religion properly belonged. Because the worship of Serapis or Isis was tolerated on the Nile, as a monotheistic worship was in Judaea, it by no means followed that either of them was permitted on the banks of the Tiber. In order to be so, it required to be expressly authorized by Rome — to become a religio licita . And even when it was tolerated throughout the Empire, as the Jewish religion at this time was, — at least in the East, — exclusive devotion to it was tolerated only in natives of the country from which it came, and was at no time permitted to Roman citizens. For them, all over the world the old religion was imperative; and for all others, the religion of the Tiber, though not imperative, was dominant. The concessions made to the provinces for their religions were strictly concessions, not concordats. Accordingly, the concession was generally limited by the idea, Cujus regio , ejus religio . Outside the region or province where the local cult ruled — and, in the case of Jews, outside the Jewish race — it was denied the rights of publicity and of proselytism, and was restricted to a passive and a private existence. These general considerations explain some of the variations in the Roman treatment of the Jewish and Christian faiths. The old Jewish religion had the paradoxical quality of being national or local on the one hand, while on the other it claimed to be exclusive truth. The union of the two qualities went far to explain that hostility to the human race which the Romans were fond of ascribing to it. A faith which attacked that of all other men, without inviting them to share in it, invited this misconstruction. But its very want of aggressiveness saved it from collisions. When Christianity appeared, a different problem had to be dealt with. Here was a faith which not only claimed to be the absolute truth, but which refused to be confined within local limits. It was essentially proselytizing, and therefore essentially public; and it demanded universal individual acceptance — acceptance by the Roman as by the Greek and the Jew. What was the answer of Roman law? “Non licet esse vos” — a refusal of leave to exist. It was not always put in force. “The substance of what the Romans did was to treat Christianity by fits and starts as a crime.” That occasional persecution was not founded upon any specialties in the nature of Christianity, or excited by any great dislike to it as a form of worship or belief. It was persecuted generally as a form of seditious or innovating atheism, or as opposition to the established and tolerated institutions. This principle was expressed in the words said to be taken from the Twelve Tables: “Separatim nemo habessit deos, neve novos; sed ne advenas, nisi publice adscitos, privatim colunto.” And the principle was supported by later “leges” or authoritative utterances, as when Marcus Aurelius denounced banishment against all who troubled the light minds of men by inducing a dread of the Divine. The opposition to Christianity on such grounds was set in motion and regulated by some of the greatest and wisest, and even, in a sense, most tolerant emperors. Trajan and the Antonines were wise and large-hearted monarchs. There was little in Christianity to repel, and there was much in it to attract such men. They were not bigots, and those around them were generally skeptics. They did not believe in absolute or universal truth in matters of religion, but they did believe in the sovereignty and supremacy of the Roman State. The consequence was, that while they protected in Egypt and Palestine and Italy all religiones licitae which would live side by side with each other, and claim no universal dominion, they from time to time bent the whole force of the State against the one religion which said, “For this cause are men born, that they should bear witness unto the truth,” and “Every one that is of the truth heareth his voice.” There is no way of explaining the history except by acknowledging that the constitutional law of Rome reserved to the State the right on the one hand to approve and license, and on the other to repress and forbid while unlicensed, the expression of new religious convictions, the public existence of a new faith. And this prerogative was held to form part of the majestas or supremacy of the State.

It was so in the days of Tiberius as truly as in the Terreur juridique of Domitian. Pilate, as his deputy, seems to have been convinced that the claim of Jesus to be “Christ a King” was not a claim to temporal sovereignty. He accepted in some sense his own assurance that it was a kingdom not of this world. Yet this meant, at the least, that His kingdom was a religion which He was about to found. It meant more. A religion which takes the form of a kingdom, with a king and his noncombatant servants, however little “of this kosmos ” it may be, must be not only religion, but a Church. A universal religion, starting with individual faith, but adding immediately an obligation to love the brethren and to proselytize, is already (according to the Protestant definition) a Church, needing no visible center and no earthly head. The defense of Jesus gave at least as much prominence to the Church idea as His disciples did during the early ages; and in His case as in theirs it gave additional seriousness to the charge of treason. A great student of history who has left us has perhaps gone too far in holding that the Roman laws against unlicensed association or combination were the unhappy root of all the persecutions, too far even in holding that they were the instrument by which all these persecutions were carried on. Those laws were the branches rather than the root, but they were in living union with the root.

There can be no doubt that the laws regulating collegia , and repressing all unlicensed associations, had from the beginning a close connection with the majestas of the State, and especially with its right to institute and enforce religion. The two things worked together, and they did so in theory and practice. A claim of Jesus merely to found a universal religion might no doubt, in practice, have come into collision with the law of Rome. But His claim to found it as a kingdom, though not of this world — “une association dans l’etat en dehors de l’etat,” as it is happily expressed — seems to me to have been essentially inconsistent with the public principle of that law. Christianity, in short, was incompatible with the Roman public law, and that not merely because its contents were different from those of the old religion of Rome, but because its claim to universal individual acceptance and public confession conflicted with the unlimited and unbalanced sovereignty of the Roman State. Christianity appealed to the individual conscience, and in order to its even taking root in the world demanded liberty of conscience. But the Roman law, while it sometimes permitted in practice a large amount of contemptuous toleration, was at all times opposed to rights of conscience — opposed to them even in theory.

And on these very points, on which the Roman State was afterwards to come into conflict with Christianity, it now came into conflict with the Author of Christianity. It does not perhaps follow that Pilate, as its administrator, was bound at once to condemn Jesus. As Trajan explains in his famous letter to the Governor of Bithynia, it was the duty of the higher magistrate to use a certain discretion in dealing with those who had transgressed the law on religion. And Pilate, who had satisfied himself of the non-existence of any immediate conspiracy on the part of the new faith, does not seem to have adverted to the future and fundamental conflict between it and the law he represented. It is clear, indeed, that he believed Jesus to be both just and harmless; and, so believing, he sinned in corruptly swaying from his first judgment, and betrayed the innocent blood. Yet had he adverted to the claim of his City to regulate religious opinion and conscience, and compared it deliberately with the counter claims of the prophet before him, or had he sent on his prisoner to answer for Himself at the imperial tribunal, it seems certain that in either case the trial would still have been followed by the tragedy which the world knows so well. Even the gentle Pliny, under the express orders of the magnanimous Trajan, devoted to the ax or the cross those whose obstinate refusal to recant and obey made them unworthy of the leniency of Rome.

And the “obstinacy” of generations of His followers during the first three centuries found precedent and justification in his who now stood to bear witness to the same truth. For in point of fact, when Pilate ultimately sent Jesus to the cross, it was as claiming to be a King, and on the original charge of acting adversus majestatem populi Romani . The judgment, was legal, though the unjust judge did not believe in it. For whatever Caesar’s deputy may have thought, the claim of Jesus was truly inconsistent with the claim of the State which Caesar represented; and the world must judge between the two.

I have recalled the most famous of all trials from a legal and almost formal point of view. I have said nothing of its more memorable and characteristic aspects, — how the authoritative love which had originally arrested the eyes of disciples now deepened into an intenser glow, and a personality, which had attracted in peaceful days only a few fellow-countrymen towered at the close over suffering and shame so as henceforth to draw all men to Him. We have omitted even what might seem nearer to our subject, — how the righteousness, negatived by a condemnation to the cross, shone out in that darkness till it became to subsequent generations not merely a center of admiration, but the star of the world’s hope.