Commonly Held Views of the Trial Many believe and try to prove that Jesus was legally put to death. For example, in his 1916 book The Prosecution of Jesus, Richard Wellington Husband, a lawyer, wrote, “The arrest was legal…The hearing by the Sanhedrin was legal…The course of trial in the Roman court was legal…The conviction was legal, and was justified.” Here is how Husband supports his assertions: “The arrest was legal, for it was conducted by the proper officers, acting under instruction from the Sanhedrin. There was no illegality in the circumstances under which the arrest was affected. The hearing by the Sanhedrin was legal, for it was merely a preliminary hearing, and was not a formal trial. The course of trial in the Roman court was legal, for it harmonized with the procedure shown in the sources to be pursued by governors of provinces in hearing criminal cases.” “The conviction was legal, and was justified provided the evidence was sufficient to substantiate the charges, and the records do not prove the contrary.” As you can see, according to Husband, the entire process leading to the death of Christ was legal. And, to him, the Bible does not provide sufficient evidence to indicate otherwise, as he states that other “records do not prove the contrary.” Similarly, Max Radin, a former professor and author of the book The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth, believes the accounts in the Bible are not credible, since Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not physical eyewitnesses to the secretive proceedings. In his book, Radin claims there is “no clear statement of how the knowledge of the trial came to those who reported it.” The author, however, does not take into account the possibility that Christ could have explained everything to His disciples when He was resurrected from the dead. Jesus was a personal eyewitness to the trial and could have accurately conveyed everything to His followers to record in the pages of the Bible. (Of course, the author also does not believe that Scripture is inspired.) Later in the book, Radin provides insight into a common trial in Judea during Christ’s time: “We are, most of us, familiar with the procedure of criminal investigations. The accused person is arrested, arraigned before a committing magistrate, specifically accused and formally tried. He may, and he generally does, appeal to a higher court, if he is convicted. All these things take time, and there is almost necessarily an interval of weeks and months between the later stages of the procedure. But above all, the procedure is strictly regulated by law, and any serious deviation is not merely an irregularity but will probably prevent punishment from being inflicted.” By the above description alone, Jesus’ trial was fraudulent. All of the above-mentioned events take time, and usually lots of it! Radin himself admits this. Yet the trial of Jesus was completed about nine hours after He was arrested. And due to the privacy of the proceedings, there were no witnesses to testify on behalf of Jesus—but there were many witnesses to testify against Him! How many court cases are you aware of that are similar to this? Probably none. Several pages later in the book, Radin attempts to reconcile his description of a lengthy criminal investigation with Jesus’ nine-hour process: “Mark’s version, even by his own testimony, cannot be more than a guess. Instead of a hurried night meeting, a harsh and brief interrogatory, a disregard of established rules of evidence and procedure, the trial may have been formally correct, and the judgment formally correct even from the point of view of an upright judge just though severe.” As is the case with most scholars, Radin dismisses the Bible as a source of historically accurate information. He assumes that Mark guessed what “may have” happened and, as such, believes the investigation could have occurred some other way. Yet the accounts in the Bible are the only sources of information that cover the trial. One cannot justify his position based on another resource; he can merely render a guess or an assumption. When one believes what was written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, only one conclusion can be drawn: Christ’s trial was illegal, even by men’s standards.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 12:00:16 +0000
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