Biblical scholars, one of the greatest of them once remarked, go looking for Jesus only to find themselves staring at their own reflection down the bottom of a very deep well. As with scholars, so with cultures. The Victorian Jesus was meek and mild and proper and principled. There’s a rather good sketch of ‘GOP Jesus’ doing the rounds on Twitter in which Our Lord tells his followers: ‘I was hungry and you gave me something to eat… And behold, now I’m all lazy and entitled.’ In our own politically troubled times, however, it is Jesus the zealous revolutionary who has risen.

There is much to recommend this intense, radical figure. The political Jesus is not just a product of the disappointed ex-Marxist imagination, but reflects our growing understanding of the poor, febrile, violent, despotic, colonial world of first-century Palestine. It was never very likely that the Romans would have crucified someone for being spiritual and nice, and so it is we have learnt to read words such as ‘peace’, ‘repentance’, ‘kingdom’ and ‘salvation’ in their true political register. The result is a Jesus who attempted a Galilean coup on behalf of the suffering poor, and whose gasp of desperation on the cross marks his mission’s abject failure.

The problem with this, as David Lloyd Dusenbury observes in his learned and engaging book on the ‘political life’ of Jesus, is that it swings the pendulum too far. I Judge No One is an attempt to fight the ‘modern tendency to reduce [Jesus] to his milieus’ – and, we might add, ours. Just because Jesus was political and revolutionary, that doesn’t mean he was a revolutionary in the familiar 1st-century, or indeed 21st-century, sense of the word.

Dusenbury is as happy circling around Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche as around Josephus, Celsus and the gospels. He is aware that Jesus is ‘a philosophically intriguing’ figure, and compares his teaching with that of obscure philosophers of the ancient world without ever reducing one to the other. He is also highly sensitive to the legal cultures of the time – the focus of his previous book, The Innocence of Pontius Pilate. The Jesus he finds in the gospels is, accordingly, bigger than ‘mere’ revolution.

Jesus is in – but not of – the Roman and Judean jurisdictions. (Dusenbury helpfully uses the term ‘Judean’ throughout, to rescue the gospel narrative from misleading, because now anti-Semitically poisoned, talk of ‘the Jews’.) Both Rome and Jerusalem judge him, but neither comprehends him. Rome and Judea were ‘temple states’, in which cultic, political and legal authorities were tightly interconnected and mutually reinforcing. The boundaries of their jurisdictions were messy, made more so by the fact that Jesus was from Galilee, a Roman client state ruled by the puppet king Herod. The Good Friday confusion around who had the right to execute him and on what grounds is entirely credible.

That confusion was compounded by the fact that Jesus himself, while clearly speaking and acting ‘as one who had authority’  (something on which pretty much everyone agreed), decouples that authority from the power to judge, compel or fight – in other words, from the kind of power ‘that makes political order possible’. His provocative teaching, and even more provocative action, renounce and relativise earthly power. ‘It is Jesus’s resistance to the political which makes his life and death… redemptive.’

The result is a Jesus who, although zealous, is not a Zealot (as Dusenbury observes, ‘no one ever accused the Zealots of fraternising with tax collectors’); someone who, although revolutionary, reconceives the idea of revolution. His simultaneous affirmation of and challenge to Judean law, ‘implies that… even divine law can be a cover for darker impulses and brutal calculations’. In a similar way, his stubborn silence at his trial provokes Roman judgment by undermining it. His politicised death, Dusenbury argues, quoting the German literary scholar Erich Auerbach, is ‘world-revolutionary’ because it inspires ‘a universal movement of the depths’, challenging not only the manifest injustices that cripple and dehumanise, but the orders of judgment that repeatedly fail to bring justice.

I Judge No One doesn’t quite have the coherence of Dusenbury’s previous book on Pontius Pilate, and the 21 short chapters, while always easy to read, can feel a bit staccato by the end. Nevertheless, given how well ploughed this terrain is, 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.