When governor Pilate asked Jesus:

   "Why are you here ?"

Jesus replied:

   "I came to bear witness to the truth"

Then, logically, Pilate should have asked "What truth ?"

Instead, according to the Roman version of the conversation, he tried to steer Jesus into a philosophical argument about truth itself, by asking him:

    "What is truth?"

However, the probabilities, are very small, that a governor of a military dictatorial empire would start a philosophical argument with a carpenter suspected of being a political instigator. Perhaps what he said was "What truth?". In fact, an intelligent and eloquent individual would have asked: "What truth are you referring to?"

Assuming that he was not familiar with the word truth, I will now answer Pilate, in Jesus' behalf, although I know that Pilate, probably, would not have had the intellectual capacity to comprehend my answer.

"Truth is just a word, a group of five letters. Perhaps you are wondering about the "meaning" or "definition" of the word "truth" and not what "it" is. In that case, I will try to explain it to you, Governor Pilate"

"Truth is the opposite of false. It is used to indicate a fact that has been verified not to be false. However, the verification or validation of it, is dependent on the frame of reference, point of view, or accumulated knowledge (knowledge base) from which it is perceived, observed, analyzed or evaluated. And since that accumulated knowledge might change over time, it can be said that truth can be time dependent. What we believe to be true today might not be true 100 years from now. Therefore, truth can be said to be relative and not absolute."

"Now, governor Pilate, I will give you a usage example:"

"There is no evidence or data that verifies the validity (or truth) of the fact that washing your hands after you send an innocent person to be crucified, will wash away or eliminate any guild or responsibility that you have regarding such injustice"

Perhaps Pilate actually said: "What is the truth?" or "What truth?", and it was improperly translated.

However, we might never know the exact conversation that took place, since Jesus was probably speaking in Aramaic and Pilate was probably speaking in Latin. And they probably had a translator who did not know the proper syntax and semantics of both languages. And we only know the roman version of what was said.

Return to About Religion