Every Sunday around the world, millions of Christians recite a creed that includes the following proclamation of truth about Jesus: He “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” This Apostles’ Creed, likely going back in some form to the second century AD, has held Jesus’s crucifixion at the direction of Pontius Pilate as a key historical truth and an unquestioned part of the events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.
And yet, in his wide-ranging book, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History, David Lloyd Dusenbury traces a concomitant nearly two-millennia-long tradition that has questioned Pilate’s guilt—and argued, instead, for his innocence in Jesus’s crucifixion.
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