Jesus, Barabbas and the Good Thief

74 Chapter 4

Chapter 4 Jesus, Barabbas and the Good Thief

At the dawn of Christian history we encounter the prototype of that contradic- tion destined to mark centuries of thinking and imagining about justice: the sentencing to death of the Just One, of the Son of God, as the necessary passage to open for mankind the door of superior divine justice. The trial of Jesus, a necessary and inexhaustible theme in a long Christian tradition of commen- taries, meditations and interpretations, has left a profound mark in the con- cepts and in the exercise of the power to judge. The interweaving between the judicial culture of the Roman tradition and the mysterious theme of the reve- lation of a divine message, through the agency of a hidden God whose death is the condition of life, has laid the foundation for myriad developments which it would be difficult to categorize, even if only indicatively. It is enough to reflect how the meaning of words have changed that constitute the basic vocabulary used in speaking about the concept of the trial. Let us look at some that come to mind: guilt, punishment, confession, reparation, ransom, pardon, absolu- tion, judgment. From this simple listing the immense subject matter covered by the words appears as if suspended between the religious sphere and the concrete dimension of judicial practice. The theological problem, whether man can ever be without sin, becomes conjoined with the experience of the accused, of any accused, in court. Mankind, heir of original sin, will be able to turn to the figure of the man-God, condemned even though he is without sin, only with the prayer of the Good Thief. As for the judges, the problem they face in regard to any of the accused has been fixed once and for all in the question which closes the colloquy between Jesus and Pontius Pilate: “What is truth?” Even antiquity had its hero in a condemned innocent man: Socrates. Not for nothing did Marsilio Ficino in 15th-century Florence see in the Greek philoso- pher a precursor of Christ and in the next century Erasmus of Rotterdam pro- posed to venerate him as a Christian saint. But the prophecy which Plato in the Apologia has Socrates utter against the judges who have condemned him (“Af- ter my death an even greater punishment will befall you”) remains in an urban milieu; the ancient horizon of the question of truth and justice which crops up in a famous fragment of the Sophist Antiphon is confined to the relationship between the laws of the city and the norms of nature.1 In the Christian tradi-

1 Text and Italian translation in I sofisti, ed. Mauro Bonazzi (Milan: Rizzoli, 2007), pp. 308-363: 337-341.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004368675_005 Jesus, Barabbas And The Good Thief 75 tion, guilt and innocence found a radically different measure in the figure of the man-God unjustly condemned. From that time on at the center of the judicial machinery of the trial we find the person of the judge, a terrestrial instrument, and the anticipation of that unveiling of hidden sins and of the exact retribution for the just and the unjust that only God will be able to fulfill in a perfect way. It is with Christianity that the link between death and justice, al- ready known to ancient Egyptians, has resurfaced in a new form. Human life now appeared as the brief and painful phase of preparation before the justice of the divine tribunal, gateway to the true life. Consequently the justice of the earthly tribunal is placed in immediate relationship with divine justice, in re- spect to which the Christian judge has assumed the role of honest if imperfect servant. Once again let us turn to the educational representations of the Gothic cathedrals, those places where Gregory the Great’s idea of images as books for the illiterate took place (“quod legentibus scriptura, hoc idiotis praestat pictu- ra cernentibus”).2 The frequency with which the figure of Christ as judge appears on the facades or apses of the great cathedrals is the clearest evidence of that culture’s constant concern. In the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, for example, Christ the judge is presented accompanied by two angels, ministers of his ire and his forgiving. The symbol of justice is the sword, that of mercy is the cross. But the sword which had expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is vanquished by the cross which becomes consequently the symbol of justice in its perfectly Christian form. Here once and for all the significance of the cross as a symbol was established: as such it was to long endure, even if generalized diffusion contributed to its employment in the specific judicial context passing almost unnoticed. The transformation of the cross from ordinary instrument of death to religious symbol of salvation was the first and most important among the meta- morphoses induced by the centrality and by the absolute exceptionality of the trial of Jesus in Christian culture. To wish the evil cross on someone had a very specific meaning in the ancient world.3 The bifurcated tree was the symbol

2 Greg. Ep. 11:13. 3 “In malam crucem” (Plautus, Cas., 978). Partially correcting, on the basis of new documenta- tion, the thesis of Theodore Mommsen, Römisches Strafrecht (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1899), Jean Christian Dumont has documented the especially ignominious and terror-inspir- ing punishment of the cross, reserved exclusively for slaves (“Le supplice de la croix,” in La Croce, Iconografia e interpretazione, secoli I-inizio XVI. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Napoli 1999, a cura di Boris Ulianich [Naples: Elio da Rosa editore, 2007], I: 89-96).