THE TRIAL OF JESUS CHRIST. 



73 



of either the church or the state. There are laws 

 which are invalid because they strike against the 

 basis of all law. But this brings us to the final 

 question, What was the law of Rome in the mat- 

 ter of the trial of Jesus Christ ? 



My space warns me to give a general answer to 

 this question, and to avoid references to sources. 

 It is well known that the policy of Rome as a 

 conquering power toward the religions of subject 

 states was one of toleration. But that meant lit- 

 tle more than toleration of existing religions in 

 their local seats. Because the worship of Serapis 

 or Isis was tolerated on the Nile, as a monothe- 

 istic worship was in Judea, it by no means fol- 

 lowed that either of them became a religio licita 

 on the banks of the Tiber. Even if such a re- 

 ligion was tolerated on the Tiber, exclusive devo- 

 tion to it was tolerated only in natives of the 

 country from which it came, and was at no time 

 permitted to Roman citizens. For them all over 

 the world the old religion was imperative; and 

 for the world the religion of the Tiber, though 

 not imperative, was dominant. The concessions 

 made to the provinces for their religions were 

 strictly concessions, not concordats. According- 

 ly, the concession was generally limited by the 

 idea, Cvjus regio, ejus religio. Outside the re- 

 gion or province where the local cult ruled, it 

 was denied the rights of publicity and of prose- 

 lytism, and was restricted to a passive and a 

 private existence. These general considerations 

 explain some of the variations in the Roman 

 treatment of the Jewish and Christian faiths. 

 The old Jewish religion had the paradoxical 

 quality of being national or local on the one 

 hand, while on the other it claimed to be exclu- 

 sive truth. The union of the two qualities went 

 far to explain that hostility to the human race 

 which the Romans were fond of ascribing to it. 

 A faith which attacked that of all other men, 

 without inviting them to share in it, invited this 

 misconstruction. But its very want of aggres- 

 siveness saved it from collisions. When Chris- 

 tianity appeared, a different problem had to be 

 dealt with. Here was a faith which not only 

 claimed to be the absolute truth, but which re- 

 fused to be confined within local limits. It was 

 essentially proselytizing, and therefore essentially 

 public; and it demanded universal individual ac- 

 ceptance — acceptance by the Roman as by the 

 Greek and the Jew. What was the result '? 

 "The substance of what the Romans did was to 

 treat Christianity by fits and starts as a crime." ' 



1 " Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," p. 00. 



That occasional persecution was not founded 

 upon any specialties in the nature of Christian- 

 ity, or excited by any great dislike to it as a form 

 of worship or belief. It was persecuted gener- 

 ally as a form of atheism, or of opposition to the 

 established and tolerated institutions. And the 

 opposition to it on this ground was set in motion 

 and regulated by some of the greatest and wisest, 

 and even, in a sense, most tolerant emperors. 

 Trajan and the Antonines were wise and large- 

 hearted monarchs. There was little in Christian- 

 ity to repel, and there was much in it to attract, 

 such men. They were not bigots, and those 

 around them were generally skeptics. They did 

 not believe in absolute or universal truth in mat- 

 ters of religion, and they did believe in the sover- 

 eignty and supremacy of the Roman state. The 

 consequence was, that while they protected in 

 Egypt, and Palestine and Italy, all religiones lici- 

 f<-c which would live in peace with each other and 

 claim no universal dominion, they bent the whole 

 force of the state against the one religion which 

 said, "For this cause are men born, that they 

 should bear witness unto the truth," and "Every 

 one that is of the truth heareth His voice." There 

 is no way of explaining the history except by ac- 

 knowledging that the constitutional law of Rome 

 reserved to the state the right on the one hand to 

 approve the license, or on the other to repress and 

 forbid, the expression of new religious convic- 

 tions, the public existence of a new faith. And 

 this prerogative was held to form part of the 

 majestas or supremacy of the state. 



It was so in the days of Tiberius as truly as in 

 the Terreur juridique of Domitian. Pilate, as 

 his deputy, seems to have been convinced that 

 the claim of Jesus to be " Christ a king " was 

 not a claim to temporal sovereignty. He ac- 

 cepted in some sense his own assurance that it 

 was a kingdom not of this world. Yet this 

 meant, at the least, that his kingdom was a reli- 

 gion, which he was about to found. It meant 

 more. A religion which takes the form of a king- 

 dom, with a king and his non-combatant servants, 

 however little of " of this cosmos " it may be, 

 must be not only religion but a church. A uni- 

 versal religion, starting with individual faith, but 

 adding immediately an obligation to confess that 

 faith and to proselytize, is already (according to 

 the Protestant definition) a church. The defense 

 of Jesus gave at least as much prominence to this 

 as his disciples did during the early ages ; and it 

 gave additional seriousness to the charge of trea- 

 son. A great student of history of our time has 

 perhaps gone too far in holding that the Roman 



