64: 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



their sentence of death required only the counter- 

 sign or indorsement of the Roman governor. His 

 opponent held that the Jewish court had no right 

 to try for grave, or at least capital, crimes at all ; 

 that their whole procedure was a usurpation ; 

 and that the only real or competent trial was that 

 which we are about to consider. I have no inten- 

 tion of going into the great mass of historical in- 

 vestigation which has been undertaken on this 

 confessedly difficult point. There seems no one 

 consideration which is quite conclusive upon it. 

 Thus it would be rash to ascribe to the assertion 

 of the Talmud, that " forty years before the de- 

 struction of the temple the judgment of capital 

 causes was taken away from Israel," the praise 

 of exact chronological accuracy. Yet it is very 

 striking as showing the time about which the doc- 

 tors of the Jewish law were willing to hold that 

 their power of life and death (no doubt already 

 restricted or suspended under the despotism of 

 Herod) had finally passed away. But on the gen- 

 eral subject of the relation of the two powers in 

 that age, there are some considerations which 

 reasoners on either side do not seem to have al- 

 ways kept in view : 1. There was no concordat on 

 this subject between the Romans and the Jews. 

 The latter were the conquered nation ; their juris- 

 diction, including the power of life and death, 

 was wrested from them de facto, and they were 

 obliged to submit. But de jure they never did. 

 To them, at least to the great mass of the nation, 

 the Sanhedrim was still the national authority, 

 especially in accusations relating to religious 

 matters. 2. On the Roman side, the matter was 

 of course precisely otherwise. Their view of the 

 jurisdiction of subject races generally, and of the 

 Jews in particular, was (I suspect) that it was 

 just so much as they chose to leave them. In 

 most cases that formed a very large field. The 

 Roman governor sanctioned, or even himself ad- 

 ministered, the old law of the region ; but the pol- 

 icy of the ruling power was to concede to local 

 self-government as much as possible. The conces- 

 sion was of course all the larger where there was no 

 disposition on the part of the province to provoke a 

 contest. In Roman law as in Roman campaigns, 

 in questions of jurisdiction as in questions of 

 politics, the maxim of the haughty and wise rul- 

 ers of the world was parcere subjcctis el debel- 

 lare superbos. 3. It is evident that a large lati- 

 tude was allowed on this subject to the great 

 Roman officers — proconsuls or procurators — who 

 administered la haute justice. The republic and 

 the emperor permitted, and indeed demanded, 

 that they should stretch or relax their author- 



ity as the particular case or exigency required. 

 In ordinary matters brought before their tribu- 

 nals, the rule on which they acted is perfectly 

 expressed, a few years after this, by Annagus 

 Gallio, the humane Proconsul of Achaia and 

 brother of the philosopher Seneca : " If it were 

 a matter of wrong or wicked lewdness, ye 

 Jews, reason would that I should bear with you : 

 but if it be a question of -words and names, and 

 of your law, look ye to it ; I will be no judge of 

 such matters." But, while they drove such 

 questions from the judgment-seat, so long as 

 they did not affect the rights of the sovereign 

 power, the least hint that one of these words or 

 names or questions of another law could preju- 

 dice the supreme power of Rome was enough to 

 authorize the governor to plunge his axe into the 

 offending part of the body politic with prompt 

 and savage severity. — These general considera- 

 tions should never be forgotten in reading the 

 scattered and often inconsistent historical no- 

 tices on the subject. They show that the ex- 

 treme views, which critics in our own time have 

 maintained, were probably held even then by 

 the opposing powers whose jurisdictions were in 

 poise. But the balance of evidence is very 

 strong that, at this time, all questions of life 

 and death in Judea were by Roman law and 

 practice reserved for the final decision of the 

 Roman governor. In such cases the Jews had, 

 at the most, only the cognilio causa;. Nor can 

 there be much doubt that the governor's final 

 power in these cases was not a merely ministe- 

 rial right of indorsement and executio ; it was 

 also a power of cogniiio, or review, in so far at 

 least as he chose to exercise it. Whether this 

 reservation to the governor was such as to de- 

 prive the Jewish courts of their rights as tribu- 

 nals of first instance — whether any previous trial 

 of a capital cause before the Sanhedrim was 

 necessarily a usurpation — is another and a more 

 difficult question. With regard to ordinary civil 

 crimes — robberies or assassinations — the Jewish 

 rulers may have been content not to interfere 

 further than to bring the perpetrators to the Ro- 

 man tribunal for judgment. The Roman govern- 

 or, on the other hand, may have been quite will- 

 ing to send to the cross without much inquiry 

 any ordinary malefactors against whom the au- 

 thorities of their country, having already inquired 

 into the case, were willing to appear as accusers. 

 But obviously a more serious question arose 

 when the alleged crime was a religious one — a 

 claim, as prophet or Messiah, to change the ec- 

 clesiastical institutions. In such a case the San- 



