What is truth?
Why Pilate might be the most important person in the New Testament
Earlier in the week, someone responded to my post talking about my faith journey and how I’m mostly avoiding church right now. If you’re interested in the post (it IS freaking awesome), it’s
This person responded, with extreme kindness and graciousness and politely asked me (this is an EXTREME oversimplification; as I stated, this person was kind and gracious and not in any way trying to challenge me with some overzealous ‘Just love Jesus more’ pablum, rather they were an exemplary instance of how kind Substack as a platform can be) if maybe I was allowing ‘my truth’ to substitute for “The Truth”. Perhaps in my grief, I was supplanting what I wanted to hear for what is actually True. It reminded me of Pilate and Jesus back and forth in John 18.
28 Then the Jewish leaders took Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor. By now it was early morning, and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness they did not enter the palace, because they wanted to be able to eat the Passover. 29 So Pilate came out to them and asked, “What charges are you bringing against this man?”
30 “If he were not a criminal,” they replied, “we would not have handed him over to you.”
31 Pilate said, “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law.”
“But we have no right to execute anyone,” they objected. 32 This took place to fulfill what Jesus had said about the kind of death he was going to die.
33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
34 “Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”
35 “Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done?”
36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate.
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
38 “What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him. 39 But it is your custom for me to release to you one prisoner at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release ‘the king of the Jews’?”
40 They shouted back, “No, not him! Give us Barabbas!” Now Barabbas had taken part in an uprising.1
There’s a LOT of detail in this section. John tells us that the leaders weren’t going into Pilate’s palace to avoid uncleanness, he tells us the back and forth between Pilate and those who brought Jesus before him, he tells us why the accusers sought Pilate out in the first place, as well as a pretty detailed back and forth between Jesus and Pilate with some really poignant statements bandied about. And then he just leaves us hanging there when Pilate asks about truth: “With this he went out again…”.
What a bunch of bull-shit. I mean, we’re right on the cusp of something pretty meaningful, and bam, John just let’s us….what, even? Figure it out for ourselves? Couldn’t Jesus just have said, in that moment, I am Truth (it’s not like he never said it before), Pilate, and here’s the meaning of it all? Or maybe John could cut out the extraneous shit (the back and forth or the descriptions of why the leaders wouldn’t go into the palace) and give us the answer to the question that we’re all really seeking to know anyway? Couldn’t we get a bit more from the book we’re all supposed to align our lives to?
I used to think the idea of 'my truth’ was such garbage. Someone can’t back up their assertions with facts and so they just fall back on ‘well, this is what I think and there’s really not anything you can do about it, is there?’. But the reality is we are all living with some version of ‘my truth’. We can dress it up, we can align it to pre-existing dogma, we can point to so-and-so’s interpretation of such-and-such, but at the end of the day, truth has always been subjective, at least from the perspective of beings that are not all-knowing. We say the Bible is the inspired word of God, but other than the text’s claims about itself and some leaders we heard that from, WHY do we believe that? And which Bible, anyway? We can’t agree amongst our faith traditions on how many books the Bible should be made up of, we can’t agree within a faith tradition which translation of the Bible is the one that should be used, we can’t agree on which interpretation of a particular piece of text within the translation we agree on within a faith tradition. The church believed that the planets revolved around the Earth at one point. My own research proves that there were multiple members of the Early Church that believed that Jesus was going to save EVERYONE in human history; lots of people today think this is ridiculous.
My point, friends, is this isn’t ‘settled’ business, by any means.
To return to my friend’s question, then, how am I determining what truth is? First, let me say this is an idea in serious transition for me right now; what you hear from me today may be different in months or years. And I am 100000% aware that my own personal grief is heavily influencing this process. I’ve turned to history, I want to know WHERE these ideas we think are ‘truth’ today came from. Did some brilliant thinker in Church history come up with them? Did church leadership champion them because it benefited them in some way? I’ll go back to my original article laying out the point of this Substack and the brilliant excerpt from
’s book that inspired my ‘new direction’ and the title I chose for the Substack itself:Pretend with me that there was this incredible Lego set. Over the years people added pieces to it—most of them with the best intentions. They were trying to make it look defined, creative, and better designed. But after a while people couldn’t tell what the set originally looked like. It was just a pile of Lego blocks stuck together. This is what has happened with our modern Christianity.
Wood, Christy. Religious Rebels: Finding Jesus in the Awkward Middle Way (p. 11). Credo House Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Every time I read those words, I get inspired again. Thank you,
for that inspiration and for allowing me to borrow the title of this Substack from the brilliant idea you lay out in that powerful imagery.Is history all we have? Absolutely not, there’s still the role of Godly inspiration, the Holy Spirit, the bedrock of thousands of years of other, brilliant women and men who gave us the ideas that we cherish today, the voices of leaders who pray and seek the truth themselves and attempt to impart them to us. Faith traditions are powerful because they’ve been vetted over and over by some really smart people who really love Jesus. But for me, my idea of truth is being developed by taking each brick, picking it up, looking at it from all angles, and trying to understand how it was added to the overall creation. I suppose this answer is my version of John’s “With this he went out again…” and likely just as unsatisfying, but it’s all I’ve got right now and it will have to do until I come up with a better one. Maybe John was hoping that’s what his trailing sentence helps us all do, who knows?
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john%2018&version=NIV