The trial of Jesus, historic-juridical analysis

Preface The course of history, even if in his Hegelian continuity, periodically sees happening of events which deeply modify the trend: sharp accelerations or violent steering, such events have the overbearing strength to impose new directions in an irreversible way to the living of humanity. The trial to Jesus of Nazareth represents the event that maybe it weighed more than any other one upon history of the world, above all the western world, and that it underwent more than any other one to ferocious exploitations as of dreary mystification. What happened between Galilee and Judea more than two thousand years ago gave not only life to “a religion which has become the faith of a wide part of the humanity”,1 but it affected in a very determining way the Western culture, in the widest sense of the term, so that paraphrasing Benedict Croce “we cannot not to call us Christians” still today. The process to Jesus was a historical fact to which, however, the contemporary society did not know, or did not want, to pay at once the due attention, or could probably not. Apart from some sign in the works of some Latin historians coeval or a bit later to the events,2 the only sources which can try in some way to rebuild the event of the Nazarene's trial are the Gospels which, although having an intrinsic historical value, were not certainly drawn up for simple and objective chronicle duty but “in order to become 1 S.G.F. Brandon, Il processo a Gesù (Milan 1974) page 37. 2 I refer to Flavius Josephus and Tacitus. I will treat later the question of the sources, which is determining for the rebuilding and the interpretations of the examined events.