By this time the crowd had hushed to hear the governor’s first statement. Turning to the chief priests on his right, he asked, in common Hellenistic Greek, “What charge do you bring against this man?”
The Jewish leaders were thunderstruck, for this was the opening formula of a Roman trial, the interrogatio. Pilate was not going to endorse the action of the Sanhedrin; instead, he was reopening the case and beginning his own hearing!
“If he were not a criminal, we would not have brought him before you,” replied Ananias defiantly, caught off guard by this turn of events.
Stung by the insolent reply, Pilate retorted, “Very well, then, take him out of this court and judge him according to your own law.”
“That is not possible according to your law,” said Caiaphas, speaking for the first time. “We are not allowed to put anyone to death.”
A trace of a smile warped Pilate’s lips. Were it not for the mass of observers and his own problems in Rome, he would have ended the hearing then and there.
Again he asked, “What charge do you bring against this man?”
This time several of the chief priests prepared to act as the principal accusatores or prosecutors. They presented a formal bill of indictment, which opened the case against Jesus: “We found this man subverting our nation, forbidding the payment of tribute money to Tiberius Caesar, and claiming that he is Messiah, a king.”
It was a triple accusation, magnificently tailored to alarm a Roman prefect, since the charges were thoroughly political. Of the religious grounds on which Jesus had been condemned by the Sanhedrin there was not a word, since the Judean authorities knew that Pilate would not likely put a man to death for the purely theological offense of blasphemy.
Touching the tips of his fingers together, Pilate paused to review the charges. The first, that Jesus was an instigator of sedition, a resistance leader, was very serious. According to a Roman legal compendium, those who caused sedition or incited the populace were liable to crucifixion or were “thrown to the beasts, or deported to an island.” But the subversion charge would have to be proven, since, from all reports, Jesus seemed to shy away from political involvement.
The second accusation, that he opposed payment of the tribute, Pilate knew to be a lie, but he checked himself from flinging it back at the prosecutors. They might have used the charge in good faith from garbled reports, although their attitude seemed hypocritical. Many of these plaintiffs, especially the Pharisees, spent their days protesting payment of the Roman tribute, yet here they were patriotically defending it.
But the third indictment, that Jesus was giving himself out as “Messiah, a king,” was the gravest. Depending on the nature of that kingship, the claim could be construed as maiestas, high treason, the most heinous crime known in Roman law. The weary succession of trials in Rome after the Sejanian conspiracy had all been prosecuted under the rubric of maiestas. With Tiberius as emperor, here was a provincial allegedly daring to call himself king. It could be harmless, perhaps a delusion of grandeur. But it could also be deadly treason.
Since no one seemed ready to defend Jesus, Pilate thought it fair to give him a brief, confidential hearing before proceeding with the trial in order to learn something more about the defendant away from the glare of his accusers. He stepped back into the palace, summoning Jesus inside the reception hall.
“Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate. “How do you plead?”
Jesus looked up at him. “Do you ask this of your own accord, or did others tell it to you concerning me?”
“What! Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have brought you before me. What have you done?”
“My kingship is not of this world. If it were, my followers would fight to defend me. But my authority as king comes from elsewhere.”
“So? You are a king, then?”
“It is as you say, that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world: to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.”
“A kingship of truth, you say?” Pilate asked quizzically. “What is truth?”
What was truth indeed, Pilate reflected. As a child he had believed in the mythological gods and goddesses, only to repudiate them as a thinking adult. Truth used to be the word of Sejanus, yet Sejanus was a liar. Once he could swear by the nobility of Rome, but that city murdered innocent children and flung them into the Tiber. Truth was the Roman state, yet now the Senate itself could not trust the princeps, nor he the Senate.
The private hearing, however, convinced Pilate that Jesus’ claims for kingship, his visionary “kingship of truth,” had no political implications, so it would hardly be possible to construct a case of maiestas against him. But he might do well to avoid using the dangerous term king in the future.
Pilate led Jesus back to his outdoor tribunal and announced, “I find no guilt in him.” Ordinarily, this would have signified a quashing of the major indictments, if not of the entire case itself. In Pilate’s now-tenuous status in Judea, however, it was more a way to test the prosecution, which was already greeting Pilate’s statement with loud murmuring.
“I find no case against Jesus thus far,” Pilate repeated. “What evidence do you have to substantiate your charges?”
Annas bent over to whisper something to Caiaphas, who then relayed the information to Ananias. After a quick review of strategy by the principal accusatores, they now summoned witnesses by name, some of them Sanhedrists, to lend stature to their testimony. In ranks of two or three at a time, they supplied their evidence to Pilate, for Roman law also required plural witnesses. A scribe in a conical hat told of hearing Jesus attack the Jerusalem authorities on three different occasions and inciting the masses thereby. A gray-bearded priest spoke eloquently of his violence at the temple. An elder member of the Sanhedrin, his story well-corroborated by colleagues, reported Jesus’ claim to be Messiah-king in front of the entire Sanhedrin.
Clearly, the prosecution was better organized than at the Sanhedral hearing. Caiaphas had chosen his witnesses well. But a certain, seemingly contrived sameness in the evidence Pilate found less than convincing, while such other items as Jesus’ supposed opposition to the tribute he knew to be false.
After providing testimony on the principal charges, the plaintiffs now introduced additional subsidiary accusations against the defendant, indicting him also for magic and sorcery. In planning his confrontation with Pilate, what had worried Caiaphas most, if it came to a trial, was how to neutralize the testimony of witnesses for the defense, if any dared show themselves, since their evidence would largely concern good deeds, healings, and other apparent miracles wrought by the accused. He now shrewdly forestalled such testimony by producing his own witnesses to these spectacular deeds, who explained them as products of the black arts. Sorcery was also punishable under Roman law.
When the prosecution rested its case, Pilate turned to Jesus, who had remained silent the whole time, and asked, “Have you nothing to say in your defense? Don’t you hear all this evidence against you?”
But Jesus remained silent. He supplied no defense, not even to a single charge. Pilate was astonished at this conduct. In his seven years on the provincial bench, this had never happened. Innocent defendants at his bar usually could hardly wait to launch their counterattacks on the prosecution, and even the obviously guilty at least pleaded some mitigating circumstance and sought leniency. But Jesus was making no defense. And no advocate was pleading in his behalf.