Was Pilate right when he crucified Christ? The question is very strange to the ear of an Orthodox reader, and also to every educated person who respects the principle called freedom of conscience. It seems that only one answer is possible: no.
If this principle is rejected, says John Stuart Mill, then we must approve Marcus Aurelius and other persecutors of Christianity. We must go still further and justify Pontius Pilate.
Yet a bold critic appeared who did not hesitate to attack the principle of freedom of conscience. He took upon himself the task of justifying Pilate. Let us examine the argument of this advocate of Pilate, the Englishman Stephen.
He begins with the supposition, first made by him, that Pilate could have sincerely believed his course of action necessary for preserving public peace in Palestine.
Such a supposition is wholly arbitrary. Later we shall touch on whether Pilate can be acquitted of condemning a man whom he considered innocent. For now we say that we find not the slightest basis for the supposition just mentioned.
According to the unanimous testimony of the Evangelists, Pilate clearly expressed his conviction that his Prisoner was innocent. He knew that they had delivered Him up out of envy, Mt 27:18; Mk 15:10; Lk 23:4, 14, 22; Jn 19:4, 6.
He spoke with mockery and contempt to the Jews about their King. Finally he yielded to those senseless popular cries, the vanae voces populi against which Roman law itself warned him. He yielded only when his personal interests began to be endangered.
It is noteworthy, however, that the Christian narratives of these events show no hostility toward Pilate. Jewish and other writers, when speaking of this ruler's character, portray him as greedy and unjust.
The Christian historians did not take upon themselves the labor of describing his moral image in detail and exactness. They speak of him only incidentally, while describing acts that could have aroused the deepest indignation against him.
Yet these incidental sketches of Pilate's person present the ruler as delicate and even mild. The accusatory portrait of him in Philo and Josephus seems like a crude, vengeful caricature.
Those who know the pressure of public opinion will understand the inward struggle that occurred that morning in the soul of the sixth procurator of Judea.
They will value the high impartiality with which this struggle was described by the friends of the Prisoner whom he crucified. They will also understand the reasons for Pilate's hesitation.
Yet they still will not suppose that, even for one moment, he thought his decision aimed at preserving peace in the province. As has been said, such a supposition has not the slightest historical foundation.
We pass to the other propositions of the critic who defended Pilate. No one will dispute that a judge could and should put to death a man who openly and deliberately stirred up rebellion.
This would be so even if the judge were not a military governor sent from Rome with unlimited authority. Neither Mill nor any other defender of freedom questions the government's duty to protect public peace.
But a serious question arises. Was the ruler, whether sitting as judge or not, obliged to put to death a man who, in his own conviction, had no personal designs against public peace, yet was in fact dangerous to it?
In deciding this question, one must keep in view the distinction between judicial and administrative authority. The question therefore divides into two parts.
First, could Pilate, as governor of the province, condemn an innocent man to exile or even death in order to preserve peace in the province?
Second, could he do anything similar while sitting, as in the present case, as a judge and investigating whether a given man was guilty of the crimes of which he was accused?
Only the latter question is important for us, because Pilate acted here as judge.
A story is told of a judge who said to a prisoner on trial: I sentence you to death, not because you robbed this house, but so that others may not rob other houses in the future.
If this judge really existed and pronounced such a sentence, he simply committed judicial murder. Caiaphas, not Pilate, stood on such ground when he thought that it was better for one man to die for the people, Jn 18:14.
But not only Pilate, even Caiaphas did not prove the usefulness of the execution by an immediately threatening outburst of popular passions or by some danger to public peace.
In fact there was no such immediate danger. The last argument in favor of the Roman ruler is the only argument that can have any historical weight. It also bears on the great question of freedom of conscience or the suppression of freedom of opinion.
Pilate's English advocate states it as follows. Pilate's duty was to maintain public peace and order in Judea and to defend Roman dominion.
It is wholly impossible to argue seriously that he, or anyone in his position, was obliged to recognize in the man brought before his tribunal, not the incarnate God, but even a teacher and preacher of a higher form of morality and a stronger form of social order.
This higher order would have been superior to that represented by Pilate himself. For a man in Pilate's position, the morality and social order he represented were unconditional standards for all practical purposes.
We shall see later whether Roman law held such a theory. The author presents his theory as universal and true, and claims that it is difficult to argue seriously against it.
Let it be so. However much this theory contradicts our views, its analysis does not belong to our inquiry.
Here it is especially fitting to point out that the Accused, in His defense, spoke directly against such a theory. His discourse about His kingdom, that is, about the higher and ruling form of moral and social order which He was establishing in the world, already indicated by itself the duty to recognize that kingdom.
It was a kingdom distinct from Rome's authority. When this discourse was strengthened by an appeal to truth, for the confession of which men are born into the world, the One defending Himself directly declared that truth must serve as the final and unconditional standard.
Neither any social order nor any faith handed down by tradition can be that final measure. The last words addressed to Pilate indicate the duty of everyone in his position to recognize the teacher of this higher order of things and of truth beyond this world.
'Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice' (Jn 18:37).
Those who deny the authenticity of John's Gospel in general, and in particular do not accept this conversation as historically accurate, still cannot fail to recognize that this was precisely the position Christianity took in history.
Christianity declared not only that it was the highest form of morality and religion among other forms. It declared that it was the true religion, both in universality and in obligation.
The empire might still have left Christianity unnoticed while it presented itself simply as a higher form of morality, or even of social order. But the empire could not fail to notice it when it declared itself a universal and obligatory form.
When Christianity declared that it was truth, Rome first asked: What is truth? When it began to insist on the right of truth to subject men to itself, Rome answered with persecutions.
Meanwhile Christianity persistently and constantly preached the duty of every member of the state, whether vested with authority or not, to recognize this truth, bear witness to it, and if necessary die for it.
Now the interest that Pilate's question about truth has always aroused in investigators becomes understandable. This question was not the expression of a philosopher or a statesman. It was simply a typical phrase of the educated Roman of that time.
Precisely because this was so, the question, What is truth? reveals to us the inclined plane down which the mighty Roman world was then irresistibly sliding into the abyss.
The Roman republic, we must never forget, had already ceased to believe in its own moral and social order. This fact is unquestionable, but its great significance is too rarely recognized.
One recalls Greece here with sadness, with her search for ideal truth. It was a bold and fruitless search, never ending, always beginning again, passing through deserts of doubt and seas of speculation under unreliable guiding stars.
The Greeks were now succeeded by a greater race, the greatest the earth had known. It was a race called and prepared for long centuries for the labor of ruling the world.
Yet it was stricken with inner impotence because it lacked motives and hopes, precisely when control of the world's inheritance came into its hands.
An English poet vividly depicted the condition of the Roman of that time. In his cool hall, with gloomy eyes, the noble Roman lies. He has raced furiously along the Appian Way.
He has feasted, drunk heavily and much, and crowned his hair with flowers. Yet the disobedient hours did not pass more lightly or more quickly for him.
Men were seized by that moral weariness and satiety with life which continued throughout the empire. It often passed into deadly apathy or unaccountable despair.
This cheerless moral condition of the ruling race was the inevitable result of the new circumstances into which fate had thrown it.
In former days the Roman believed in himself, in his gods, in his institutions, and most of all in his state. It was for him theatrum satis magnum, a sufficiently great spectacle, his banner, his law, and his truth.
He was just, though in a harsh and inexorable way. But now the world had widened. What had been sufficient for virtue in earlier times became insufficient for virtue now.
The faith of a region, the religion of a tribe, became too narrow for the world. It necessarily fell and left the lords of the earth with strong hands and empty hearts.
They became skeptics toward truth and therefore apostates from the justice of law. Historians recognize that such was already the state of things in the reign of Tiberius.
Understandably, it was very unfavorable for the reception of the principles of a higher moral and social order introduced by Christianity.
It would be quite unjust and cruel to demand that Pilate, or Pliny, or any Roman dignitary renounce a higher moral order approved by his conscience simply because his state believed in a lower one.
But it would be still more cruel to demand that such a dignitary renounce this higher morality or religion after he and his state had ceased believing in the lower kind.
In such circumstances, the greatest misfortune for a judge would be his duty to raise systematic persecution against convictions known to be higher. He would do this simply to suppress in embryo every revolt against an established confession of faith in which he and all men had begun to doubt.
Probably nothing arouses such disgust in the human spirit as a state that persecutes for a faith it has itself already begun to lose. Yet such phenomena were most likely to occur, and did occur, at that time.
In examining the question whether Pilate was right when he crucified Christ, we shall exclude all the circumstances that aggravate his guilt in the present case.
Let us suppose that Pilate and the Romans of his time still believed in the ancient religion of Rome. Let us suppose that Jesus was by birth a subject of that city, and that its law required persecution of all religious convictions hostile to its ancient faith.
In such circumstances, what was the duty of a man in Pilate's position? We answer that, after first taking measures to preserve peace in his province, he was obliged rather to refuse obedience to the law and abandon his office.
He had to do this rather than violate the principle of conscience, which has a deeper foundation than the social superstructures made by the state.
This brings us to the final question: what did Roman law require in a case like the trial of Jesus Christ? The limits of this treatise force us to give only one answer and not to cite sources.
THEOSIS