FAMILIARITY with the Gospels and particularly with the Passion narratives can engender a settled range of impressions of the life of Jesus and of his condemnation and death. Within that range, there is room for some challenge, but often the challenge and reassurance fall within that settled range. Rarely does there come into view an account sufficiently disturbing to question whether critical questions have been excluded.

David Dusenbury’s book is just such an account. Quoting a sermon by the fifth-century Bishop of Carthage Quodvultdeus, “Who is this young man who confused Pontius Pilate?”, Dusenbury sets out not to resolve that question, but, as an essential preliminary to it, to describe Jesus’s “political life”, the political and social structures within which he lived, and to which he addressed the challenges and questions that ultimately led to his death.

Dusenbury does this in 21 short chapters arranged as a seven-part sequence: an immensely erudite essay on the place of Jesus in the history of ideas. His starting point is a contrast between Reimarus’s theory of Jesus as a failed political figure and Kant’s account of him as seeking to inaugurate a new community without political coercion. He quotes liberally from ancient philosophers in support of the view that Jesus is, above all, philosophically interesting — and that means politically disturbing.

Subsequent chapters take us, always with distinctive insight, through Jesus’s relations with the political structures and the economic powers of his day and his refusal to be entrapped in the political debates in which he is asked to take sides. There are immensely illuminating expositions of key moments: the alabaster jar of ointment and the “temple action”, his protest against the Temple’s subversion of its function as “house of prayer” to “place of commerce”, the betrayal, and the part played by Judas.

The “temple action”, in particular, is a key pointer to Dusenbury’s salient point about the political structures within which Jesus lived his life, namely, that Rome and Judaea were both “temple states”, both securing their authority with religious sanctions. Jesus is the one who steadfastly refuses to constitute a new “temple state”, as he also refuses to exercise the religious/political functions of kingship. Without doubt, we are intended to take from the book a profound suspicion, rooted in the life of Jesus, of such politically powerful and religiously sanctioned structures.

The concluding sections of the book take us to the heart of its purpose: not “Who is Jesus?” (doctrinally or “essentially”) but, as Quodvultdeus asks it, “Who is this young man who confused Pontius Pilate?”. The question of Jesus’s life cannot be answered without investigating the reason for his condemnation and death, which brings us to Pilate’s confusion. This book continues the author’s fascination with and study of the reasons for Jesus’s death in his The Innocence of Pontius Pilate (Books, 8 April 2022); it is the Governor of Judaea who is to be held responsible for Jesus’s judicial murder.

The Judaean “temple state”, with the High Priest at its zenith, is also crucially the context of Jesus. Throughout the book, hoi Ioudaeoi is translated “the Judaeans”, and nowhere as “the Jews”. The Judaean and the Roman temple state join in the actions that lead to Jesus’s death, the Judaeans on account of his “blasphemy”, and the Romans on account of his “maiestas”, his treason against Caesar.

The book’s message — perhaps the most important and, at the same time, the most controversial — about the terrible history of Judaeophobia (like “Jews”, “anti-Semitism” is not a word that appears in the book) is that it is not to be found in the New Testament and, most importantly, not in John. Others have, of course, made the point that “Judaeans” is the more accurate translation, but Dusenbury assumes it, and asserts the implications of that judgement in relation to who the adversaries of Jesus were, and their part in his death.

The erudition and clarity that make this book a vital read reveal also a deep passion, and in this matter of the translation of “Judaeans”, as well as in his careful analysis of Pilate’s situation and motives, perhaps lies the clue to it: to be clear about Jesus’s engagement with the politics within which he lived, and through the responses of which he died. And, if a further clue is needed, we should note the warm sentence of acknowledgement of the Haredi boy who greeted him as tzadik, a righteous one, as he prepared to end a visit to Jerusalem; surely what “quietened his heart”, as he puts it, is that his determination has been recognised: to lift the burden of guilt from a people who should never have borne it, belonging as it does to the two temple states that, together, brought the “young man who confused Pilate” to his death.
 

The Rt Revd Dr Peter Selby was formerly Bishop of Worcester, Bishop to HM Prisons, and President of the National Council for Independent Monitoring Boards.

I Judge No One: A political life of Jesus
David Lloyd Dusenbury
Hurst £25
(978-1-78738-805-5)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50