My kingdom is not of this world.”
—John 18:36
This short yet powerful sentence, uttered by Christ before Pontius Pilate, produced a Western world that uniquely separates the religious from the secular, the church from the state. That, at least, is the contention of this bold and far-ranging study by David Lloyd Dusenbury, entitled The Innocence of Pontius Pilate. Although Pilate is conspicuous in the title, and his innocence or guilt in the death of Jesus a recurring topic, the primary focus of this book is Christ’s renunciation of worldly power and its effect on Western civilization. According to Dusenbury, that effect was profound. “If Jesus had not been tried by Pilate, and the Pilate trial had not been lavishly narrated in the four canonical gospels, then the political history of Europe and the Americas would be unrecognizable.”
To make that case, Dusenbury digs deep into ancient responses to Jesus’s trial, be they Christian, Jewish, or pagan. Luke, in his gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, makes a clear distinction between children of this age (translated as saeculain St. Jerome’s Vulgate) and the Christian children of light. There is no doubt that early Christians saw themselves as separate from a corrupt world that would soon pass away. Corruption, they believed, had blinded the world to the divinity of Christ. 1 Corinthians 2 gives voice to this: “None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if
