So he took some water, washed his hands in front of the crowd and said “I am innocent of this man’s blood. It is your concern.”
Pontius Pilate delivered one of the greatest symbolic scenes we could imagine in the midst of the drama of the trial of Jesus. This fascinating gesture, which contained within it a canny intelligence and philosophic statement, frequently runs through my mind over Easter Week.
It is probably this arresting gesture which drew Mikhail Bulgakov to centre the narrative of a novel within his novel “The Master and Margarita” on the character of the Roman governor of the province of Judea.
He depicts Pilate as an extremely sharp local governor, with an almost supernatural intuition, who sees the implications of the events simmering up before him in the context of the febrile political balance in his province. He understands the implications of the simple claims the stranger is making, but as Christ stands before him bloodied, cut, and fearful, he sees something else.
Christ notices in Pilate’s subtle and almost perfectly concealed movements that Pilate is in pain, and He heals his migraines. Pilate is no fool. As a governor of a volatile province of powerful political factions precariously balanced, he understands power and cause, and is deeply empirical. When Jesus takes his pain away, his empiricism informs him that Jesus’s claims are true.
This is the plot of Bulgakov’s fiction anyway.
Pilate is a fascinating character from a philosophical standpoint. In the washing of the hands, he physically makes a powerful symbolic statement. He believes there is no cause to crucify Jesus and so he disassociates from the act completely. The Gospels tell us that this happened outside the Praetorium, as in preparation for Passover the Jews did not want to enter there. So outside the residence of the Roman governor – possibly on the steps of what would look like a town hall – Pilate spoke to the crowd.
Inside the Praetorium, he spoke to Jesus, and outside he spoke to the crowd. There is an ‘inward’ and an “outward” to this story, and these correlate to truth and deception.
This all ties in with the symbolism that the washing of the hands signifies, because Pilate was ostensibly the most powerful man in the province; his word was law. Inside the halls of the Praetorium the judgement of law stood, but outside, amidst the madding crowd, there was a different law. Pilate, on the steps of the house of law, recognised that there was a temporary stay on his jurisdiction.
Matthew describes the scenes of the crowd in nearly neutral descriptive terms, saying that Pilate noted that “a riot was imminent.” Mark and Luke describe a rising bloodlust in the crowd as they shout “crucify him” and, “if you set him free you are no friend of Caesar; anyone making himself king is defying Caesar”.
And so, Pilate, the man with all the authority of Rome, is cowed by a spirit of vengeance and falsehood. The will of the mob supplants cynical Rome. A mass formation forms; Pilate recognises its power, and washes his hands of it; declaring the consequences are not on him.
This comes only moments after Pilate makes one of the most striking philosophical arguments which we might recognise today as cultural relativism.
Pilate asks Jesus; “What is truth?”
This was in response to Jesus saying “I came into this world to bear witness to the truth, and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice”
Pilate is the ultimate metamodern man. He knows that truth exists, and as his political instincts inform us he is very tuned into the empirical realities of shifting feelings and power, but he is also attuned to the cynicism of power and the twisting of narratives for the sake of power.
When he asks “what is truth” he may as well be paraphrasing the entire postmodern school of philosophy. He understands that the powerful can declare what “truth” is, and that power, through an Hegelian dialectic, can project a version of truth onto reality and thereby make it seem so.
In short; that the perception of truth is more powerful than truth. The question “what is truth” gets to the root of a Kantian discourse on language, of knowing “what is”.
He plays with the same epistemological uncertainty later when the chief priest, Caiphas, asks him to change the sign he posted on the cross, saying to him: “you should not write King of the Jews, but ‘This man said: I am King of the Jews’.”
Pilate responds “What I have written, I have written.” It is as if he is saying you can create a perception of reality by stating things as if they are truth, but that it is more powerful to create a reality by doing the thing: by the action. What is done is a fait-acompli that projects onto the world a new reality.
Pilate oscillates between cynicism and certainty. He has the metamodern understanding of relativism as embodied in post modernism, but chooses to reject that epistemology when it suits him, favouring positivism.
G.K. Chesterton, in The Everlasting Man, wrote about this scene:
“In the lightning flash of this incident we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world. He who is enthroned to say what is justice, can only ask “what is truth?” So in the drama which decides the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role. Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands forever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible… Standing between the pillars of his own judgement seat a Roman had washed his hands of the world”
Jesus has his profound moments in this interrogation also. For most of it he remains silent but even in his condition of exhaustion and weakness after being beaten, his response to Pilate is rhetorically brilliant.
Pilate asked him if he was the king of the Jews and Jesus replied, “It is you who say it”. The rhetorical framing of this answer is that the question is only asked because the questioner sees something that the accused never claimed. It rings of the modern response: “in every accusation there is a confession.”
There is one other very modern moment from the show trial of Jesus which strikes me for its familiarity. Jesus was brought before the Sanhedrin and questioned. They were looking for crimes to charge him with and so started questioning him and bringing false witnesses against him. Jesus replied that his words were on record and they should ask his hearers what he said.
A guard slapped him in the face because he wasn’t showing due respect – deference to the experts, you might say.
Jesus’s response was don’t shoot the messenger just because you don’t like the argument. Attack the argument not the man. I paraphrase of course, He did point to the ad hominem fallacy of argument, but He put it slightly differently.
We all know what an ad hominem attack looks like. “How dare you question the experts. Are you an expert?” Or “you can’t talk about this stuff, are you a far right racist?”
I went around the church with my son afterwards and told him about the Stations of the Cross. At one stage he asked me, “Why did they hate Him so much?”
“Because he told the truth,” I said. “There is nothing that will make people committed to a lie more angry than people telling them a truth that disconfirms the lie they want to believe. Many will literally call for your death if you refute the lies they champion.”
In spite of all that, life springs eternal. Happy Easter, He is risen.