Join the IHE for a conversation with David L. Dusenbury on his book, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History, moderated by IHE Fellow Steven Waldorf.

The gospels and the first-century historians agree: Jesus was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, the Roman imperial prefect in Jerusalem. To this day, Christians of all churches confess that Jesus died ‘under Pontius Pilate.’ But what exactly does that mean? Within decades of Jesus’ death, Christians began suggesting that it was the Judaean authorities who had crucified Jesus — a notion later echoed in the Qur’an. In the third century, one philosopher raised the notion that, although Pilate had condemned Jesus, he had done so justly; this idea survives in one of the main strands of modern New Testament criticism. So what is the truth of the matter? And what is the history of that truth?

David Lloyd Dusenbury reveals Pilate’s ‘innocence’ as not only a neglected theological question, but a recurring theme in the history of European political thought. He argues that Jesus’ interrogation by Pilate, and Augustine of Hippo’s North African sermon on that trial, led to the concept of secularity and the logic of tolerance emerging in early modern Europe. Without the Roman trial of Jesus, and the arguments over Pilate’s innocence, the history of empire — from the first century to the twenty-first — would have been radically different.

Steven Waldorf specializes in political and moral philosophy in the medieval and early modern periods. His current research focuses on how Aquinas and later Scholastic thinkers understood the relationship between man’s natural and supernatural ends and the implications of their views for political philosophy. His research interests also include natural law, the relationship between acquired and infused virtue, and church-state relations in both medieval and contemporary political theory.