Ri(gh)ting a Wrong Rite: The Trial and Death of Jesus as Failed Ritual in the Paradosis Pilatou

Rituals fail when their audiences do not agree that they produce the desired effect. Despite the fact that, from the Roman perspective, Jesus’s trial had the proper outcome, early Christians produced narratives that argued that Jesus’s trial and death represented a case of a lack of proper outcome—a ritual failure. The author of the fifth-century Paradosis Pilatou suggests a ritual solution to the problem caused by the ritual failure of Jesus’s trial and death: the trial and death of Pilate at the hands of an angry emperor and the destruction of the Judean people. For this author it is only through such ritual action that the wrong involved in the ritual failure of Jesus’s trial can be righted, and so the author produces a story to right the wrong of Jesus’s unjust death. The circumstances accompanying Jesus’s death, such as darkness and earthquake, are experienced throughout the entire known world in this text. Only through the trial and death of Pilate and the destruction of the Judean people can the whole inhabited world be restored to order.