Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Introductory lesson of the Trial of Jesus

I took up this module named “The Trial of Jesus” for one my electives for this semester. It is taught by this professor who previously taught the same course at New York University. I figured that it would be a fun course, and something that would be interesting to blog about in my blog here, which has pretty much a lot of stuff to do with religion. From looking around at the students who have enrolled in the class yesterday, I can see that this course is mostly popular with students from campus religious organizations like the Varsity Christian fellowship and the Catholic Student society.

The professor gave an account of how he got onto the pages of the New York Times for his course. It is not something to actually boast about. He said that one of his student was being interviewed by the New York Times press after course about something to do with the use of iphone in school, and in passing, she mentioned that she had just came from the Trial of Jesus course. This pricked the interest of the New York Times jorunalist, who sent people to inquire about the course. They later did a negative write-up in the New York Times about how premium law universities were teaching silly modules, one of which being this trial of Jesus module. They even asked for the public to comment on the most ridiculous modules that they encountered in their own universities.

But I think my experience on the first session of the module has been positive thus far. From my understanding of what was asked and said in the class, the lessons seek to analyze whether the trial of Jesus was a fair one; whether there was any miscarriage of justice. This has important implications to the theological foundation of Christianity, since one of the claims that Christians make is that Jesus fulfills the Messianic prophecy of being innocent and blameless. A non-theological usefulness of the inquiry would be to understand how the trial of Jesus impacted the way western civilization understand the concept of justice and its legal system.

The professor made some assertions that I shall highlight here. He said that historical research to the trial of Jesus actually reveals very little information about the historical veracity of the trial. It is not clear whether there was even a trial. For example, according to the professor, Catholics believe more in the version of the John Gospel which portrays the ‘trial’ of Jesus as more of an interrogation. Moreover, there is little information of the legal system in place during those times, and how it works substantively and procedurally.

Yet, barring the limitations of a historical understanding of the trial, the professor asserts that what is important is the narrative as accepted by Christians as ‘gospel’ truth. And it is this narrative by which the analysis of the trial of Jesus can be conducted.

Nevertheless, determining the account that happened according to the Gospel encounters problems of its own, notwithstanding apparent difference in accounts of what took place in the trial of Jesus. Several methods are employed to construct a narrative based on the gospel accounts. One which I found memorable was the criterion of ‘Embarassment’, that is that ‘if something reported about Jesus was embarrassing to the early church, the early preachers or the evangelists are not likely to have invented it’ (Brown, The Death of the Messiah pg 18). A Christian law student in class, perhaps a little too overconfidently, suggested a reason why this criterion works. He said that this shows that the Christian authors writing the account must have been committed to the ideal of the truth and presenting it as such. While that could have been the case, the professor had a more modest suggestion that the more likely reason is that the truth of the matter would have been so well-known and notorious to other people, including non-Christians, such that the Christian writers would have come closely within the scrutiny for his integrity if he had presented the information otherwise.

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