I Judge No One: A Political Life of Jesus

Why was Jesus, who said ‘I judge no one’, put to death for a political crime? Of course, this is a historical question—but it is not only historical. Jesus’s life became a philosophical theme in the first centuries of our era, when ‘pagan’ and Christian philosophers clashed over the meaning of his sayings and the significance of his death. Modern philosophers, too, such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, have tried to retrace the arc of Jesus’s life and death. I Judge No One is a philosophical reading of the four memoirs, or ‘gospels’, that were fashioned by early Christ-believers and collected in the New Testament. It offers original ways of seeing a deeply enigmatic figure who calls himself the Son of Man. David Lloyd Dusenbury suggests that Jesus offered his contemporaries a scandalous double claim. First, that human judgements are pervasive and deceptive; and second, that even divine laws can only be fulfilled in the human experience of love. Though his life led inexorably to a grim political death, what Jesus’s sayings revealed—and still reveal—is that our highest desires lie beyond the political.

About the Author :
David Lloyd Dusenbury is a philosopher and historian of ideas, whose books include The Innocence of Pontius Pilate (also published by Hurst) and Platonic Legislations. He is a senior visiting fellow at Budapest's Danube Institute, and he currently holds a joint chair at the University of Antwerp's Institute of Jewish Studies and University Centre Saint-Ignatius. He writes for The Times Literary Supplement, La Lettura, and others.

Review :
'[A] learned and engaging book .... Dusenbury has done another fine job of animating a story that, despite slipping to our cultural margins, retains the power to shock and challenge us today.' 'Dusenbury, like Spinoza, Nietzsche and Kant, considers Jesus to have been an ethical revolutionary. The author's breadth and depth of scholarly research is impressive ... He handles the lack of 'real dissonance' between the gospels by seeking 'deep structure'.' 'Dusenbury's argument is both fluent and thought-provoking... he skilfully draws the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith closer together.' 'An inimitably brilliant fusion of philosophy, theology and history. I can't think of a book that has made the Gospels seem as fresh and strange to me as this one does.' 'A wholly fresh perspective on the story of Jesus, this book argues that the life and teaching of Jesus represent a direct challenge to all our human political agendas. The faith that stems from Jesus' words, acts and sufferings is not one that turns away from politics, but one that exposes the workings of power, and both demands and promises a fuller, more fully communal human experience in love beyond judgement. Radical, learned and inspiring, this is a very important study indeed for our times.' 'With remarkable mastery of scholarship, this fresh understanding of the figure of Jesus shows that traditional interpretations fail to understand the true nature of his activity. In twenty-one tersely-written chapters, which one reads as the unfolding elements of a thriller, Dusenbury succeeds in turning the tables. The work of Giorgio Agamben on Paul is perhaps the closest parallel I can think of.' 'Dusenbury's shrewd, well-written and penetrating analyses of some of the greatest mysteries of Mankind at the time of Christ's Passion deserves a far wider readership than just those interested in theology. What he has to say about the historical and political Jesus, gleaned from a profound knowledge of the Gospels, is as intellectually rigorous as it is spiritually uplifting.' 'Another book about Jesus? Dusenbury's book will be worth your time, even in disagreement.' 'An astonishingly erudite example of a decidedly philosophical commentary on the gospels, this book investigates the unsettling suspension of the "power to judge, compel or fight" by Jesus, the mystical judge. Yet, it does more than that. It shows why philosophical investigations of the gospel are still indispensable if we want to understand the notoriously misconceived roots of our Western civilization.'