What Is Truth? A Question that Will Reveal More about You than Truth
By: Quincy Bingham
Tags: Empiricism, Bias, Jesus, Partisanship, Conspiracy Theories

What Is Truth? A Question that Will Reveal More about You than Truth

The story of Jesus’s last night before his death is one of my favorite stories in the Bible. I know religion is a “taboo” subject nowadays. But it doesn’t matter if you are a religious person or if you “believe” in Jesus or not. For all we know, this story could be patently false. The fact remains, this story is powerful. It encapsulates a variety of human experiences that bear striking resemblances of our modern-day world.

The last supper is an iconic moment in the Bible. But few know that night featured Jesus’s last meal with his twelve disciples, his betrayal by Judas, interrogations, gruesome floggings and mocking at the hands of the Roman overseers to quarrel the mob of scribes, Pharisees, and other elitist religious leaders who wanted him nothing short of dead.

This was the culmination of hatred for a man that dared to go against the current establishment. At this time, around 30–33 AD, Judea was under the rule of the Roman Empire. The elite religious class of the Jewish society hated the Roman imperialists, but they hated Jesus more. Jesus had no plans to overthrow the Romans, but he frequently spoke of a “kingdom, not of this world” during his travels throughout Judea. The scribes and Pharisees used this to their advantage, making the case to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea at the time, that Jesus’s talk of a “kingdom” was a direct insult to the Roman emperor Caesar.

That night was long, with most of the events happening between 12 am and 6 am. Jesus was taken from one authority figure to another in a quest to legally end his life. Most of his disciples had either abandoned him or hid among the crowd as not to be identified as a companion of Jesus. They feared for their life as they watched their teacher being humiliated.

It was well into the night when Jesus was sent back to Pontius Pilate. All Pontius Pilate wanted to do was sleep and not execute a man he knew was innocent. Pilate, half curious, but more so searching for an end to this fiasco questioned Jesus about the accusations laid upon him asking him to clear his name of treason against Caesar. Jesus spoke of God’s kingdom and spoke of himself as “the way, the truth, and the life… and that, no one comes to the Father except through me”.

Pilate knew Jesus was an innocent man, innocent of the charge of sedition against the Romans, the other charges meant nothing to Pilate. He was at an ideological impasse with the Jewish high priests. Jesus never refuted being “King of the Jews”, but he also never made a claim to a real kingdom that would challenge the Romans. Yet after being brutally beaten, mocked, and spit upon, the Jewish high priests still wanted blood. What did this man do to incur so much hatred from Jews that they would seemingly do whatever it took to see his death, to the extent that they sought the aid of their oppressive occupiers, the Roman authorities in this mission? This brought about what seemed to be a mostly rhetorical question from a perplexed Pontius Pilate:

What is Truth?

Later on, the crowd went as far as to warn Pilate if he releases Jesus even after Jesus’ brutal punishment, then Pilate is “no friend of Caesar” along with making the shocking proclamation that they, the Jews “have no king but Caesar”. How could Pilate risk the thought of not being an accomplice to treason?

The truth, it seems for Pilate, is that he could not risk the political backlash and rebellion of the Judaean province. Jesus was finally sentenced to death.

How would you have responded as a secular Roman politician attempting to ease tensions between a religious mob and a man many downtrodden Jews considered to be a messiah?

Most of us are Pontius Pilate, caught between angry mobs, ideologues, believers, radicals, and would-be martyrs. We want to go to bed and live our lives, but this pandemic, election, and social unrest has forced us to answer a simple question: What is truth?

That question seems odd since most of us would approach these situations with the question of “What is true?” I’m going to challenge that notion because we all assume that answering the question about what is true is synonymous with answering what is objectively true.

Does the brain naturally seek objective truth? I think not. Your brain’s goal is to ensure the safety, survival of its owner and its owner’s genes. The brain can accomplish this goal without any consideration of objective truth. How did society survive millennia while worshipping celestial objects as Gods that determined their fate? We honestly used to believe that celestial objects such as the North Star had a “moral” hand in occurrences of our daily lives despite the lack of objective truth. In a lot of ways we still do.

Think about it. If you believed your entire life that the North Star is responsible for the peace and prosperity of your tribe, then your world, your paradigm, and your belief system would be destroyed with the objective truth that the North Star, Polaris, is JUST another burning hot ball of hydrogen and helium much like the Sun and it only appears small in the sky because it’s over 433 light-years away.

Wouldn’t your mind fight this idea to the bitter end?

According to the New Testament, Jesus challenged the scribes and Pharisees mentally, emotionally, morally, and spiritually in a way they have never been challenged before. He disrupted their world, introduced a new way to worship that required less control of the ruling class.

So the question “What is truth?” is crucial because you are essentially asking, “What is truth for me?” and what is “truth” for you will determine what you consider to be true or not true. Were the Jewish religious ruling class just in their denunciation of Jesus? Were they justified in their outing Jesus as an affront to Caesar and the Roman Empire?

Jesus defied long-held Jewish religious laws, disregarded their customs, and had grown powerful by way of drawing large crowds gathering just to hear him speak on a regular basis.

I’m sure the religious leaders felt they were more than morally just in having Jesus executed. However, like Pontius Pilate in the middle, the question was “whose truth represented the truth?”

Your truth may not be an objective truth. Liberals and conservatives can live in different words with different versions of “true” because their idea of “truth” is partisan.

This is why I why you’ll find conspiracy theory galore on both sides of the aisle. This is why any news outlet can make an outlandish claim about a particular politician’s moral fortitude, and that claim is accepted without hesitation. This is why there are people who still loudly believe that Trump will remain president come January 6th.

My preference is that everyone’s version of the truth is an objective one. I know that’s not possible. Seeking objective truth is hard work. Your brain and every piece of physical matter in the universe prefers less work and a state of rest. What is a more attainable goal is making sure as many of us as possible are aware of our bias, inclinations, and motivations that shape how we see the world. We should know when we are seeking confirmation rather than information.

It should NOT take a pivotal movement in life, such as weighing whether someone lives or dies, to ask ourselves the question Pontius Pilate asked Jesus on that long dreadful night.