BTW, here’s something about Jesus’ and Pilate’s conversation in John 18 by
N.T. (Tom) Wright:
Which brings us back neatly, in the second half of this lecture, to John chapter 18 and 19. What might John have to say, through this astonishing conversation of Jesus and Pilate, to the confused and confusing world of our own day?
Out of the many things that could be said I want to explore the three themes of my title: Kingdom, power and truth. The opening exchange between Pilate and the Judaean leaders (18.28-32) looks like a kind of shadow-boxing: Pilate, with his own intelligence networks, surely knew what charge they were proposing to bring, but wanted to force them into a concession of their own judicial impotence to deal with what they regarded as a capital charge. Pilate then (18.33-38) asks Jesus directly whether he is ‘the King of the Jews’: this was the substance of the charge, as we see later in 19.12, where the Judaean leaders declare that ‘everyone who makes himself a king is setting himself up against Caesar’, which leads directly to their own counter-victory over Pilate. After a preliminary verbal skirmish, Jesus launches in to a description of his ‘kingdom’, the substance of which is, Yes, I am a king and have a kingdom, but No, it isn’t the sort of kingdom you might imagine (18.36).
This is the point at which semi- or crypto-gnostic readings of the text have held sway for a long time, partly due to the King James Version translation: ‘My kingdom is not
of this world’, which has then been read in the straightforward, but deeply mistaken, sense of ‘My kingdom consists of a place called “heaven” which has nothing much to do with this world.’ But the Greek speaks of the kingdom being not
ek tou kosmou toutou, not
from this world. It comes from somewhere else – as, indeed, Jesus had earlier strikingly claimed about himself (8.23), and then, even more strikingly, about his followers (17.14). Granted all that we know about Jesus on the one hand and about first-century Jewish kingdom-of-God language on the other (begging, of course, several major questions at this point), we must say that the ‘kingdom’ of which Jesus was speaking was not
from this world, but was emphatically
for this world: a kingdom
from the creator, the one Jesus called ‘Father’, and intended as the sovereignty which would replace the usurped sovereignty of ‘the ruler of this world’ and the human agents which that dark power had employed. This is, I think, the first and greatest point to be got across in relation not only to contemporary muddles and misunderstandings but to many generations of misreadings of all four canonical gospels: that, over against all Gnostic attempts, ancient and modern, to make ‘kingdom’-language denote an otherworldly bliss, it stubbornly retains its full Jewish sense, world-affirming and indeed world-reclaiming. God’s kingdom must come ‘on earth as in heaven’, and precisely for that reason it is not ‘from’ this world. That which is only from this world can only imitate the way things are done from within the world; and the key example given by Jesus, presupposing that he is a king but demonstrating the difference between his sort of kingdom and all others, is that if his kingdom were from this world
his followers would fight to prevent him being handed over. This marks almost as radical a departure from normal kingdom-ideas as the gnostic one does, but in a very different direction. In the present world, violence is what kingdoms do: however much they dress it up, sovereignty is enforced, and sooner or later that means restraint, and sooner or later restraint means violence. But, as Jesus said to James and John in Mark 10, ‘It shall not be so among you.’
This point is rammed home with massive though characteristic Johannine irony in the next chapter when Jesus is mocked by the soldiers, crowned with thorns, dressed in purple and hailed as king. The resonances of the next charge – that Jesus made himself to be the Son of God (19.7) – are wider, but in the Roman world amount to the same thing: the phrase ‘son of God’ was of course in regular use as a key epithet for Caesar, Tiberius being the adopted son of the deified Augustus as he had been of Julius Caesar. But Caesar’s divine rule was implemented by threatening and inflicting violence, not by suffering it. Pilate then emphasizes Jesus’ kingship, both in his ironic statement and question to the crowd (19.14-15), and then at last, paying them back, in the inscription on the cross. Earlier, when Caiaphas had predicted that one man would die for the people, John had commented that this was an unwitting prophecy of Jesus’ upcoming redeeming death (11.49-52). John seldom repeats such a hint, and we should be in no doubt what he intends here. When Pilate has the words ‘King of the Jews’ written out and stuck on Jesus’ cross, and when he refuses to alter it, John is emphasizing that Jesus is indeed ‘the king of the Jews’, the only one in fact who had understood, let alone been obedient to, the strange servant-vocation of the ancient people of God, to whom he had come as his own and not been received. And the point about being ‘the king of the Jews’ is that, in ancient messianic expectation reflecting beliefs and poems about David and Solomon, the ultimate king of the Jews will be the ultimate king of the world. His dominion will be from the one sea to the other, and from the River to the ends of the earth. Early Christianity did not have to shed its Jewish Messianism in order to be relevant to the wider world, as so many scholars used to think. It is precisely because they believed Jesus to be the King of the Jews that the early Christians proclaimed him as the true Lord of the world. Pilate, in refusing to change the inscription, has done in his own way, to his own status, what the chief priests had done a few verses earlier to theirs. They had said ‘we have no king but Caesar’, thus stepping down drastically from everything that made Israel Israel (and anticipating the move made by Flavius Josephus a generation later). Now Pilate declares, however unwittingly, that Jesus is in fact ‘the king of the Jews’, and is thereby hailing him as the true king, the reality of which Caesar was just a dull and dangerous parody. (Perhaps this is the moment to acknowledge the ancient legend that Pilate was British, in fact Scottish, in fact from St Andrews itself.)
