The “Political Jesus” of 1970s Liberation Theology (who presents as an anti-colonial activist and proto Utopian-socialist) rests on shaky historical ground. Nevertheless in this book David Lloyd Dusenbury argues that Jesus’s life, death and teaching were “political” in more important terms occurring within the life of overlapping polities and so should frame the Christian conception of Christians’ relationship to earthly power.
Focused on the trial of Jesus itself, this book makes an interesting companion to the author’s earlier The Innocence of Pontius Pilate (Hurst, 2021) which explored that event’s long reception history. The Gospel accounts of the events that followed the Last Supper are told so quickly, and heard so often, that their complex shades of legal-political meaning are easily missed. In those dark hours Jesus is not passed simply between the binary Jewish and Roman worlds, still less between the religious and secular spheres. His case involves a similar number of competing jurisdictions with claims of authority over him, and his treatment exhibits a three-way tension between person, place and polity.
As a Galilean, Jesus is personally subject to the Tetrarch, Herod, before whom he appears in Luke 23:8-12. By place Jesus is within the purview of the Temple priesthood, to whom the Roman Prefect delegates government of the city of Jerusalem. Yet the latter itself exists emphatically within Rome’s structures. Caiaphas and Annas seek to extradite Jesus to the imperial jurisdiction yet the short journey from the high priest’s house to the governor’s palace is no transfer to or from the religious: for Rome and Jerusalem are both religious states. Pilate is no mere colonial governor, but rather the nuncio of Caesar, who is Pontifex Maximus – the high priest of the Roman temple cult.
This, not Caesar’s supposed secularity, earlier made the question of whether the temple tax could be paid in Roman coin (which attested to Caesar’s supreme sacerdotal and quasi-divine status) so dangerous. Now Jesus’s accusers clumsily try to transmute his supposed offence from the legal grammar of Jerusalem’s temple-state (blasphēmia) to its proximate, but inexact, Roman equivalent: maiestas.
Secularity thus arises from Jesus’s Roman trial, rather than being presupposed by it. It is born from his radiant manifestation of authority coupled with his refusal either to make an explicit verbal claim to it or doing so only in baffling terms: “My Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). This, Dusenbury argues, is Jesus making the quintessential assertion of his “new philosophy”. It is an assertion for which the narrative presentation of Jesus (with elements of a traditional Hellenistic martyr-sage) has already prepared the reader.
This may sound surprising, but Judaism in the 1st-century Mediterranean diaspora, even in Palestine, was significantly Hellenised. Thus, Dusenbury maintains, New Testament presentation of Jesus, even in the synoptic Gospels, can at points be read as having been influenced by culturally potent Greek traditions concerning martyr-philosophers like Socrates, whose teachings had profound implications for public ethics: politics in its purest form.
Dusenbury’s argument intersects with that of the late Geza Vermes. For both of them “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) grounds an understanding of Jesus in terms of existentialist philosophy. Yet Dusenbury goes further. For Vermes this existentialism appears coterminous with a perpetual still small voice of calm (or, to put it another way, conscience), the tones of which remain elusive. Conversely, Dusenbury fleshes out its implications in terms of the pragmatism that Christians may legitimately use to navigate the complexities of realpolitik and handling money.
Dusenbury’s argument is both fluent and thought-provoking, but at times the book attempts too much. Exploration of the presentation of Jesus as philosopher is underdeveloped. Dusenbury offers interesting technical arguments for echoes between some of Jesus’s recorded sayings and those of both Seneca and the Stoics – but oddly he eschews more obvious comparisons. Does the cup Jesus first takes at the Last Supper with his disciples and later prays “to pass from me” allude to the cup of hemlock Socrates drinks before his followers?
The reader yearns for this to be probed and is puzzled to find it passed over. It also would be interesting to know how the presentation of Jesus as philosopher influenced perception of Christianity’s founder in the (non-Roman) Middle and Far East in the early centuries AD. These points admitted, Dusenbury’s work matters, for he skilfully draws the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith closer together.
The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist
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