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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