Judging Pontius Pilate

In The Innocence of Pontius Pilate, David Lloyd Dusenbury argues that the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate helped bring about modern secularization and the split between church and state. Dusenbury examines the fact of Jesus’s trial and Pilate’s judgment of him, as well as its interpretation by different thinkers. He seeks to expose and refute harmful myths, misinterpretations of the biblical data by “whole traditions of Christian, and post-Christian commentary.” These include the idea that Pilate is an innocent actor who is not ultimately responsible for Jesus’s death, that he is not actually a judge imposing a real sentence on Jesus, and that it is the Jews who crucified Jesus and not the Romans.