Partisans have been writing and rewriting the story of the trial and punishment of Jesus of Nazareth since Mark first wrote his Gospel, probably around 70 AD. These rewritings range from the staid and devotional to the grotesque and reprehensible (remember Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), whose sequel, in two parts, shall soon, alas, be foisted upon us?). What these depictions share is the attempt to make vivid an event of central theological importance in Christian tradition. Through this vividness, they seek to inspire one to take a side: one is either with Jesus, or with his persecutors. The temptation to take sides – to declare one’s theological loyalty – is made deliberately hard to resist. Indeed, the only attempt that I know of that successfully rejects this choice also happens to be my personal favourite, Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, from 1979. It was a grave disappointment to me this year when, while teaching a course on Judaism and Rome, I found that my students didn’t know the movie; it was even worse when, upon showing them some clips (‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’), they indicated to me that they found it distinctly unfunny. In a partisan age, it seems, only taking sides will do.
Unsurprisingly, the scholarly world – a world that claims to be non-partisan, or at least differently partisan – has sought to add its voice to the discussion as well. The question of ‘what happened?’ and, perhaps more importantly, ‘who’s responsible?’ has generated an astonishingly large bibliography in a wide variety of languages, so much so that it would not be wrong to speak of a Prozeß Jesu genre. The question also constantly re-emerges as a way to test students of law and of history, and especially to test whether they can withstand the various political, theological and ethical traps that the trial of Jesus lays before them. Most importantly, in the present context at least, can one get to the bottom of these questions without engaging in learned but rank antisemitism – without positing, à la Tucker Carlson, that some men (powerful Jewish men, of course) in a dark and smokey room ‘eating hummus’ simply decided upon murder because Jesus was ‘telling the truth about us?’
The students who have to deal with this challenge – as I did as a first-year college student – have their work cut out for them. The sources themselves are partisan. None were written by eyewitnesses. The most useful source for the region in this period, the Antiquities of the Jewish aristocrat Josephus, provides huge amounts of data on the period but only a scant fragment, whose authority is sharply contested, on Jesus of Nazareth. It does not help that Josephus is also famously unreliable. Other Jewish claims about Jewish law and history, written two hundred years later and in Mishnaic Hebrew, come from a much different world: a world without the Jerusalem temple, which had previously been the central object of Jewish devotion – and the mise-en-scène for Jesus’ last acts. The voices of this ‘Rabbinic’ Judaism are strident about normative Jewish law but impoverished historically. Their job was to reconstruct Judaism in the wake of a series of historical traumas. The Rabbis were not historians: they were not interested in accurate documentation of Judaism’s past, much less in the nuances of how legal procedures operated under the control of Roman governors.
The ‘Christian’ sources are not exactly Christian, of course. The lines between Jews who did and Jews who did not accept that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah promised in prophetic texts were, at the end of the day, not really lines. The invitation of non-Jews into the prophecies about the coming of the kingdom of God only served to complicate matters. That is not to say that the Gospels of the New Testament were not seeking to draw distinctions between the right and wrong sorts of Jews. They were. But the Gospels are a minefield: four sources, each telling a version of the story but to rather differing purposes, and interacting among themselves in complex ways, they feature details that might be relevant but might also be fabrications or anachronisms. That is to say, we have to exercise great caution when we suggest that the Gospels preserve information, rather than construct ethical and theological stories about mission and responsibility. Context here matters tremendously, but scholars disagree sharply about what contexts we should imagine to be relevant in the first place.
Nathaniel Andrade, a leading historian of the Roman Near East, has stepped into this historical minefield. Starting from the broader provincial context, he moves through the careers of John the Baptist and Jesus, and the events leading first to John’s arrest and execution and then to Jesus’ more developed ministry. In addition to making the various pitfalls of the sources clear, he gives a detailed and critical narrative of Jesus’ relations with the priestly aristocracy, his arrest and ‘trial’ before the Jerusalem hierarchy and finally his trial and crucifixion by Pilate. A brief afterword on the longer history of Christianity in the Roman world follows.
Andrade brings to the table a central insight. The enemies of Jesus of Nazareth, he argues, were not upset by him simply because they were Jewish and Jesus challenged mainstream Judaism; they were upset with him because they resembled the sorts of local aristocracies that the government of the Roman Empire had long availed itself of in order to make the day-to-day management of the empire possible. Briefly put: Roman government was famously lean. A few troops could be kept handy, and a provincial governor had a support staff, but the bulk of state capacity was deployed by a deal made between Romans and locals. The locals would cooperate in the collection of taxes and the provision of public safety. In return, they would be honoured by their Roman leaders, their advice would generally be taken, and in some cases they would be incorporated, through grants of Roman citizenship, into the leadership class of the empire. Such a pattern was common, especially throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and Judaea was no exception.
Understanding this dynamic allows Andrade to skirt the antisemitism problem: the problem isn’t with Jesus of Nazareth and Jews qua Jews; the problem is with Jesus of Nazareth raising the hackles of a local leadership class and threatening to cause the sorts of public disturbances that might attract the attention of Roman governors. The leadership of Judaea was in charge of keeping the populace quiescent, but they had comparatively few means, other than persuasion, to achieve this. They were not in charge of criminal jurisdiction – or at least not capital jurisdiction – and they had no local army; they of course had some muscle, but not enough to overpower a hostile crowd. If a crowd became hostile, their only option was to call upon the governor himself to send troops. But to do so was essentially to admit local failure – hence the need to get ahead of any possible problems (see further Brélaz Reference Brélaz2005; Bryen Reference Bryen2026; Goodman Reference Goodman1988). Besides the reputational damage with the governors that such an intervention might cause, intervention by governors similarly served to make the local aristocracy less credible with the populace, not least because Roman interventions tended to be astonishingly brutal.
The result of this sort of reading is that the eventual trial and execution of Jesus is framed less as a purely legal problem (i.e. what specific laws was Jesus breaking?) and more as a legal-political problem – that is, the fact that Jesus was threatening to the broader public order, and needed to be dealt with, through legal means if possible but other means if not, in order to ensure the smooth operation of the empire. According to the local aristocracy, what must be avoided at all costs are mass movements – anything that might, in Andrade’s terms, seem ‘seditious’. It must be admitted that sedition, in this story, is a hugely malleable category. Anything that might upset the political applecart is imagined to be potentially seditious: preaching about the coming Kingdom of God, arguing that the poor will eventually be placed in positions of power, but also operating in the classic Jewish tradition of prophecy whereby one chastises a ruling class for corruption and indolence.
One way, then, to read Andrade’s work is to see it as reconstructing the political contexts that conditioned the operation of Roman justice more generally, and to see Roman courts – like that of Pontius Pilate – not as independent institutions, but ones that were ultimately subordinated to ideas about some sort of public good, and in some sense dependent on a local political context. As an abstract principle this conclusion will not be especially surprising to legal scholars, but the payoff here is less one of theoretical heft than of solid, place-and-time-dependent contextualisation. It also offers a valuable historiographical corrective. Historians have often assumed that Jews were somehow legally and institutionally exceptional. In Andrade’s story, by contrast, they are not – they’re simply subjects of the Roman Empire like any others. Any attempt to push back on Jewish (legal) exceptionalism is, in my mind, to be welcomed, for assumptions that Jews are somehow just different occur in many histories indeed – not just those of antiquity.
With that said, one might make two further points. First, it does seem to be the case that this sort of ‘seditious’ behaviour was simply much more common in Judaea than it was elsewhere. The Gospels, Acts and Josephus record a number of such figures: John the Baptist, ‘The Egyptian’, and a mysterious figure named Theudas who brought his followers out of Jerusalem to cross the Jordan River, thus recreating the exodus from Egyptian slavery (and casting the Jerusalem priestly authority as the story’s antagonists). Add in the periodic riots in Jerusalem and Caesarea, plus the banditry endemic in the region, and the area looks hard to govern indeed. Is this a trick of the extant sources? All were written after the great revolt of 66–70 AD, which led to the sack of the Jerusalem temple. Were the Jewish and early Christian sources looking backwards, trying to find instances that were harbingers of that great catastrophe?
Of course, they may have been. But there were non-Jewish analogues too, stories of redemptive leadership known only through scattered notices in other, perhaps less controversial sources. After the death of Nero and the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, at least three ‘false Neros’ emerged, each drawing followers (see further Champlin Reference Champlin2003). One of them, a man named Terentius Maximus, brought his followers over to the rival Persian Empire, where the Parthian king Artabanus groomed him to retake the Roman throne. Even the future emperor Vespasian was greeted as a quasi-messianic healer in Alexandria. Perhaps there was vastly more religious enthusiasm, at least in the eastern Mediterranean, than we have previously assumed. Jews were a part of that, it seems, but they were not themselves unique.
Where this becomes interesting for legal history is when we remember that Roman institutions were not designed to deal with the effects of such movements. Roman courts were designed for the relatively rapid resolution of civil disputes and the punishment of criminals. Outside of these categories, they lacked a clear institutional framework for keeping order – and so they jumped immediately to violence when they felt that the broader public order was being undermined – and the more extreme and memorable the violence, the better. Not for nothing did the governor of Syria, Ummidius Quadratus, when faced with violence between Jews and Samaritans during the Passover festival, crucify a group of Samaritan prisoners and then behead some eighteen Jews he deemed responsible. He also deposed the imperial official who was supposed to have been keeping the peace. Unsurprisingly, the public disturbance immediately quietened down, and the remainder of Passover was passed without further incident (Josephus, The Jewish War, 2.241). (The same Quadratus was also responsible for forcing a group of Lusitanians to swear an oath of allegiance to Caligula. He must have been a frightening and formidable man indeed.) Whether this capacity for violent terror is a feature or a bug of the imperial legal system is ultimately a matter of one’s personal values; but it is a useful reminder, either way, that despite the feeling we get from Roman jurisprudential texts that Roman law was somehow especially pure or refined, in reality there was a broad understanding that courts did, and indeed should, operate in the shadow of practical governance. There would be no constitutional suicide pacts for Roman governors.
This leads to the broader question of ‘sedition’. What makes a seditionist? As I noted, Andrade’s account seems especially malleable: a seditionist is whatever makes the local aristocracy nervous. It will be noted that this seems to be restricted to the local aristocracy: Pontius Pilate, in the Gospel narratives, is overwhelmingly concerned not with ‘sedition’ but with claims of kingship, a potentially dangerous thing in a region where Jewish monarchs, be they Hasmonean or Herodian, had ruled, normally with Roman blessing, until recent years. But let us assume that Andrade is right, and it was the local Jerusalemite authorities who were best placed to judge seditiousness. Were they right?
Here we come back to the fundamental theological problem. We have to presume, on such a narrative, that the things Jesus of Nazareth was saying and doing were somehow profound, and profoundly disruptive. They could only be met with resistance or acceptance; one either got the message and was raised to a higher spiritual plane or (to paraphrase the apostle Paul) one was condemned to the world of Flesh. Indifference, irritation, disgust, ridicule – these are not options. To be pushed into making this sort of choice has been the goal of all partisan writers about Jesus of Nazareth since the Gospels were first composed. But it is a problem when this sort of choice quietly invades historical scholarship. On this very theological premise, a (in this case Jewish) aristocracy is made to look especially paranoid, always concerned that sedition is lurking around the corner. They worry about John the Baptist, then they worry about Jesus who acts as his successor. They worry about keeping the peace on the Passover just as much as they worry about itinerant preachers alongside the Jordan River. They constitute a very anxious state apparatus indeed.
The difficulty here isn’t that this story isn’t believable – in part it is, if only because we’ve been telling it for so very long. But I worry that it occludes something that historians do not often care to admit: that criminal justice is very often done with tremendous amounts of indifference. We feel compelled to believe that the Roman government tortured Jesus and crucified him because they felt somehow especially upset by him and his ideas, rather than because they were used to committing violent acts (against their slaves, or against their subjects) and engaging in such acts was, at the end of the day, pleasurable to them. In this sense, the long line of subjects in a mass-produced crucifixion that ends The Life of Brian for me manages to capture something essential about Roman governance, at least in this region and in this period: that it found its subjects irritating and troublesome, hardly worth the burden (see now Larsen and Letteney Reference Larsen and Letteney2025 for some important revisionism on the scale of criminal punishment in the Roman world). No one would be sent to Judaea to win great military honours, and in fact the Emperor Claudius eventually had to resort to sending his freedman’s brother to govern this region. It was hardly a plum assignment, and if Roman governors punished as much out of boredom as out of anger and a desire to keep order, that should not surprise us.
This is not, of course, the only possible answer to the question, and Andrade is to be congratulated on having made what might be the strongest case for a version of the traditional narrative. But we would do well to worry about smuggling theological presumptions into historical arguments, and to face our subjects with as much irreverence as possible. We might also profitably wonder what role institutional indifference ought to play in our stories of criminal punishment. To write the history of indifference is easy enough in a disenchanted modern world, where large and callous bureaucracies process the poor on what seems to be an endless assembly line. But it may well be that the story of institutional indifference is – or can be – pre-modern as well.
