Easter 2017 - Pilate's Question Revisited
Easter 2017 - Pilate's Question Revisited Their moment had come. The crowd was seething, fired up, shouting, waving placards, emotional. They were the disenfranchised, those left behind. They had lost their country to the global forces that had washed over them. Yet here, in numbers, they seemed to have power to force the Establishment to take this decision, this one decision, on their terms. It was a heady moment. They demanded the death penalty. At the trial of Jesus of Nazareth, Pontius Pilate, the Roman Governor of the Province of Judaea at the time, famously asked the question, "What is truth?" A post-truth moment 2000 years ago? "What is truth?" It is a question that generations of philosophy students have learned to ask from early in their careers - and to toy endlessly with - as they mull over propositional logic, correspondence theories of truth, coherence theories of truth and infinite variations on the like. There have, no doubt, alwa...