How the West Became Secular: A Micro-Review of D.L. Dusenbury's The Innocence of Pontius Pilate

#whatireadovershabbat David Lloyd Dusenbury's The Innocence of Pontius Pilate: How the Roman Trial of Jesus Shaped History (Hurst, 2021)

This is a book everyone should read. At the highest level it is an account of how the West became secular, that is, how it was possible to separate the divine and the worldly in our civic life. That transformation came about, as Dusenbury shows, through twenty centuries of rereading the Roman trial of Jesus. More particularly, it is the ultimate rebuttal of the Christ-killer myth, a ghoulish, un-Christian calumny with no real basis in the New Testament. As ideologues, conspiracy theorists, and propagandists try to falsify and hollow out our histories, we need books like this to take the fight to them and reclaim the past, for the sake of the present and the future.