“What is truth?” — Pontius Pilate

Was Jesus ever actually brought before Pontius Pilate? Nobody knows. What we have is the story of such a confrontation and what it meant.

Biblical scholarship is a phenomenon of both early modern and modern science; one can go back, for example, to Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Scholarship has made great advances since the 19th century, but the “quest for the historical Jesus” only leads back to the original gospel writers’ intent: to demonstrate the meaning of historical events.

I recommend in particular the works of John Dominic Crossan. We’ll see later in this essay why I can’t recommend Albert Schweitzer’s.

A distinguished historian once mentioned that scholars who work in the first century usually have an axe to grind. A character in one of my stories adds that anyone who lived in the first century had an axe to grind. And, as I’m sure you’re beginning to see, the same goes for our time as well.