The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History
DAVID LLOYD DUSENBURY
(HURST, 456 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

With both his title and his subtitle provocative, David Lloyd Dusenbury makes, from the outset, tremendous claims: “This is the first book to retrace the brute fact of Jesus’ trial and death as a legal fact of epoch-defining significance.” The hyperbole (and the enthusiastic italics) persist throughout this learned and very scholarly book. There are 150 pages of notes and bibliography.

In a nutshell, Dusenbury’s contention is that Jesus’ response, “My kingdom is not of this world”, to Pilate’s question, “Are you the king of the Jews?”, made possible the distinction between the sacred and the secular which did not pre-date Christianity and has run ever since, more or less contentiously, through Christian and post-Christian history.

In our non-religious times, historians – Tom Holland in his recent book Dominion is another – find the origin of “the secular” in Christianity’s line drawn between the saeculum, this world, this time, and the Kingdom of God. In general terms this is uncontrovertible, but Dusenbury concentrates the origin of the secular into Jesus’ brief response to Pilate without acknowledging that this resonantly simple statement is representative of the whole of Jesus’ life and of much that the gospels report of his teaching.