6G 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY,— SUPPLEMENT. 



tribute to Cresar." It was a sheer falsehood, and 

 some of the accusers must have known it to be 

 the converse of the fact as recently ascertained. 

 But it was a suggestion which, as they must also 

 have known, would give the most deadly signifi- 

 cance to the other vaguer and truer heads of the 

 indictment, and would make it impossible for the 

 governor to waive the capital charge. 



For there is no mistake as to what the crime 

 here imputed is. It is majestas— the greatest 

 crime known in the Roman law, the greatest 

 crime conceivable by the Roman imagination — an 

 attack upon the sovereignty or supreme majesty 

 of the Roman state. 1 In the early days of the 

 republic the name perduellio was applied to trea- 

 son and rebellion, and the citizen condemned by 

 the people for that crime was interdicted from 

 fire and water, or hanged upon au arbor infelix. 

 As the rule of the city spread over the world, 

 treason came to be known as an attack upon its 

 majesty ; and various laws were passed to define 

 this crime and the treatment of it, the chief en- 

 actment being the Lex Julia. According to this 

 law every accusation of treason against a Roman 

 citizen must be made by a written libel. A Jew- 

 ish provincial had, of course, no such protection. 

 He stood before the procurator of the Cassar, 

 with no defense against the summary exercise of 

 absolute power but the plea of justice. 



"We come now to the defense. All the nar- 

 ratives bear that Pilate put the same question to 

 Jesus, in the same words, " Art thou the King of 

 the Jews ? " but that, on his answering in the 

 affirmative, the Roman came to the paradoxical 

 conclusion that there was "no fault in him." The 

 fourth Gospel contains the explanatory conversa- 

 tion which these facts almost necessarily imply. 

 The statement of Jesus is unusually impressive. 

 It is couched, no doubt, in that involved, allusive, 

 and aphoristic style of utterance which we find in 

 this Gospel from end to end. But we must re- 

 member that all the biographies represent this 

 very style as occasionally used by Jesus, and as 

 characteristic of him in critical circumstances. 

 It comes out in all the histories when he touches 

 on the esoteric " mysteries of the kingdom " he 

 preached, or where his own claims are brought 

 in question ; and it manifestly grew more and 

 more his manner of utterance toward the close 



1 " Crimen adversus populum Romanum vel adversus 

 seenritatem ejus." — Ulpian, "Digest," xlviii., 4, 1. The 

 origin of the name is plain. Cicero defines majestas as 

 "magnitudo populi Romani,"' and the full name of the 

 crime is "crimen tesffi aut imminuta? majestatis." It is 

 very adequately expressed by our word treason. 



of his career. We hold, therefore, that a state- 

 ment which, though only recorded in the latest 

 Gospel, must, according to all the others, have 

 been substantially made, and which as reported is 

 at once startlingly original and intensely character- 

 istic, has every internal evidence of being histori- 

 cal. This dialogue took place in the pnetorium, 

 where Jesus may have possibly been detained 

 while the question of jurisdiction was settled with 

 his accusers. (It rather appears, however, that 

 he must have been present while the accusation 

 was made; the first two evangelists state that 

 either then or at a later stage his silence extorted 

 the marvel of the governor, who said, " Hearest 

 thou not how many things they witness against 

 thee ? ") He now, however, brings his prisoner 

 within, and puts the sudden question, "Art thou 

 the King of the Jews ? " Jesus's answer, " Sayest 

 thou this of thyself, or did others tell it thee of 

 me ? " does not seem to have been a request 

 to know what had been uttered by the Jews in 

 his absence. The words evidently have a deeper 

 reference. They are equivalent to — " In what 

 sense dost thou use the expression? If thou 

 sayest it of thyself, in the sense in which a Ro- 

 man would naturally use the word, then I am 

 not the King of the Jews. But if others told 

 thee this of me, if thou art using the words of 

 Hebrew prophecy, or of the world's hope, that 

 may need further explanation." Pilate strives 

 to reply as a Roman should : " Am I a Jew ? Thine 

 own nation and the chief priests have delivered 

 thee to me ; what hast thou done ? " It was 

 throwing back, and not unfairly, the burden of 

 explanation upon the accused ; and he who had 

 kept silence before the midnight Sanhedrim, and 

 who made no answer even now to their dissimu- 

 lated accusation, at once frankly responded to 

 the heathen magistrate who desired himself to 

 know the truth of the case : " My kingdom is not 

 of this world : if my kingdom were of this world, 

 then would my servants fight : . . . . but now is 

 my kingdom not from hence." In considering 

 words so memorable we must avoid as much as 

 possible the theological and ecclesiastical, and 

 look only from the historical, and in particular 

 the forensic and judicial, point of view. "What- 

 ever else these words import, they are in sub- 

 stance, and almost in form, a defense. If they 

 imply a confession of kingship, they express an 

 avoidance of the particular kind of kingship 

 charged. They do not set up a plea in bar of 

 the jurisdiction. They seem to acknowledge that 

 a kingdom of this world would be a legitimate 

 object of attack by the deputy of Ctesar, but 



