Abstract
This article explores the biopolitical dimension of the trial of Jesus in John 18:28–19:16a from the Agambenian perspective of “bare life.” According to Giorgio Agamben, bare life, namely, life at risk of death through sovereign power, operates in the “state of exception.” The state of exception is a state wherein the threshold between the juridical order and anomie, or that between an insider and outsider of the juridical order becomes blurred as a result of a law that is suspended from its effectiveness yet is effective in its suspension. Jesus can be interpreted as a bare life in a zone of absolute undecidability in which both the Jewish and Roman laws simultaneously are operative and ineffectual. More specifically, Jesus is an insider in both the Jewish and Roman worlds on the grounds that he is subject to both the rules of Judaism and the Roman Empire. But at the same time, Jesus is an outsider from both the Jewish and Roman worlds explicitly because his kingship goes beyond both earthly rules (18:36; cf. 8:23; 17:14, 16). Paradoxically, Jesus is simultaneously an insider in and an outsider from each of the Jewish and Roman sovereignties. That is to say, Jesus lives in both of the sovereignties, while at the same time belonging to neither of them. It follows from this that Jesus resides in an in-between zone between insider and outsider. My contention, therefore, is that Jesus is such a liminal character—an unfixed and unfixable character in a zone of uncertainty—that he subverts the sovereign power and hierarchical dualism of the Jewish and Roman worlds.
Keywords
1. Introduction
This article explores the biopolitical dimension of the trial of Jesus in John 18:28–19:16a. From an Agambenian perspective, Jesus can be interpreted as a “bare life” in a zone of absolute undecidability in which both the Jewish and Roman laws simultaneously are operative and ineffectual. 1 More specifically, Jesus is an insider in both the Jewish and Roman worlds on the grounds that he is subject to both the rules of Judaism and the Roman Empire. But at the same time, Jesus is an outsider from both the Jewish and Roman worlds because his kingship goes beyond both earthly rules (18:36; cf. 8:23; 17:14, 16). Paradoxically, Jesus is simultaneously an insider in and an outsider from each of the Jewish and Roman reigns. That is to say, Jesus lives in both of the reigns, while at the same time belonging to neither of them. It follows from this that Jesus is located in a liminal zone between insider and outsider. My contention, therefore, is that Jesus is such a liminal character—an unfixed and unfixable character in a zone of uncertainty—that he subverts the sovereign power and hierarchical dualism of the Jewish and Roman worlds.
2. Agamben’s Biopolitics
Let us briefly take a closer look at the political theory of Agamben with particular attention to a “zone of indistinction.” Specifically, Agamben in his book Homo Sacer attempts to highlight the political paradigm defined as a “zone of indifference or undecidability” wherein the distinctions between sovereign rule and its exceptions become indiscernible. 2 Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower and biopolitics, Agamben analyzes how sovereign power engenders homo sacer or “bare life” in the “state of exception,” where sovereign power is momentarily suspended within the juridical order that it itself sets up. 3
It is worthwhile to elaborate his use of “bare life”. Agamben turns his attention to a pivotal differentiation in Greek between zoe (natural or biological life) and bios (political life) as Aristotle constructs them. To Aristotle’s categories for life, Agamben adds a third type of life, which he calls “bare life.” “Bare life” is an original production of sovereign power, paradoxically both inside and outside the juridico-political sphere in the form of exception. It is thus neither zoe nor bios, but rather a life deprived of human rights, the very condition of life. Human beings in the modern era have often been reduced to “bare life”, for instance, in the concentration camps during the Second World War. Agamben articulates it thus:
[T]he decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life—which is originally situated at the margins of the political order—gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction. At once excluding bare life from and capturing it within the political order, the state of exception actually constituted, in its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire political system rested.
4
Here, Agamben explains how “bare life” operates in the “state of exception”. The “state of exception” is a state wherein the threshold between the juridical order and anomie, or that between an insider and outsider of the juridical order, becomes blurred as a result of a law that is suspended from its effectiveness yet is effective in its suspension. 5 As Kalpana Seshadri suggests, “For Agamben, such a typology of the law enables the acknowledged and extreme right of law not only to enforce the rule of the law, but also to suspend its own application, thereby rendering the inside and the outside of law absolutely undecidable”. 6 To illustrate, Roman law placed a “bare life” outside of the Roman legal system under its realm in the form of exception. To put it otherwise, a “bare life” was excluded from the Roman sovereign system, while simultaneously being included in it; therefore, a “bare life” could stand both inside and outside the sovereign law simultaneously. For Agamben, the emphasis here is that the sovereign power to control the natural life of its population in the form of “bare life” is an operative paradigm across temporal and spatial constraints. If such is the case, the powerless in the ancient Roman Empire, notably, the colonized subjects, were made all the more vulnerable to the highest risk of becoming “bare life” under Roman imperial sovereignty. 7
With this in mind, I will interpret Jesus as a “bare life” between the Jewish and Roman worlds as well as between the heavenly and earthly realms. I assert that Jesus, particularly in the trial scene, can be understood as destabilizing and undermining the binaristic worldview constructed in John’s Gospel. I go further and affirm that Jesus is such a liminal character subverting the hierarchical sovereign power of the Jewish and Roman worlds that he becomes an unfixed and unfixable character in a zone of undecidability or uncertainty.
3. Interpreting Jesus as a Liminal Character between Heavenly and Earthly Kingship
The scene centers on the sovereignty of Jesus as a king, not of this world but in this world. Importantly, John’s Jesus actively engages with Pilate’s questions as to whether he is “the king of the Jews (ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων)”, whereas the other Gospels do not include this conversation. More importantly, Jesus, the interrogated, goes even so far as to interrogate Pilate (v. 34). It seems highly likely that the power balance once, if not for all, shifts between the two characters. 10 Pilate attempts to determine whether Jesus is “the king of the Jews” in particular (v. 33) or a king in general (v. 37). When asked if he is “the king of the Jews” (v. 33), Jesus hints at the heavenly origin and character of his kingship, thereby rebuffing the claim to Jewish kingship alone and thus refusing any constraints on his kingship in racial-ethnic terms (v. 36). This also suggests that Jesus’ kingship is not restricted by the Roman world or the Jewish world (v. 36). 11
Thus, Jesus clarifies his kingship as not deriving from this world, but existing in this world. Cornelis Bennema is correct in interpreting Jesus’ kingship as one that “is ‘from above’ but it exists and operates in this world”.
12
That is to say, the origin of Jesus’ kingship is not from this world, neither from the Jewish world, nor from the Roman imperial world. At the same time, the impact of his kingship may nonetheless exist in this world, whether Jewish or Roman (see 17:13–18).
13
In the words of David Rensberger:
Jesus’ declaration about his kingship is not a denial that it is a kingship, with social consequences. Rather, it specifies what those consequences are. It is not a question of whether Jesus’ kingship exists in this world but of how it exists, not a certification that the interests of Jesus’ kingdom are ‘otherworldly’ and so do not impinge on this world’s affairs, but that his kingship has its source outside this world and so is established by methods other than this world’s.
14
Jesus’ kingship is neither Jewish nor Roman in that its origin is from heavenly kingship, but its effect echoes around the world in that it exercises its authority over this world. As a consequence, Jesus characterizes his kingship as existing outside the Roman imperial world as well as the Jewish world, but still applying to both worlds.
To make matters more complicated, this power dynamic demonstrates that, although heavenly sovereignty, as represented by Jesus, does not belong to earthly sovereignty, as represented by Pilate, the former still operates over the latter. To put it otherwise, at the ‘this-worldly’ level, the sovereignty of Jesus, an agent of God, is governed by the sovereignty of Pilate, an agent of Rome, while, at the ‘other-worldly’ level, heavenly sovereignty governs earthly sovereignty. Jesus’ kingship is in force in both political and religious dimensions. To illustrate, in verse 12, the Jews hint at the political dimension of Jesus’ kingship in connection with the Roman Empire by stating, “Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.”
As a consequence, Jesus is situated on the historical threshold of the Jewish and Roman contexts and, more fundamentally, on the threshold of this-worldly and other-worldly levels. In this redoubled position, Jesus becomes a resistant character against the colonial power of Pilate, causing Pilate’s anxiety about Jesus’ identity as both imperial and anti-imperial at both the this-worldly and other-worldly level.
Furthermore, the death of Jesus as the Passover lamb has both religious and political overtones of deliverance. 19 In the religious realm, as Bart Ehrman aptly suggests, “Jesus’ death represents the salvation of God, just as the sacrifice of the lamb represented salvation for the ancient Israelites during the first Passover.” 20 In the political realm, the death of Jesus as the Passover lamb indicates a sacrifice for liberation from Roman colonizers in exactly the same way that the first Passover lamb symbolized deliverance from Egyptian oppressors.
In the Johannine trial narrative, when Pilate presents Jesus as the king of the Jews (v. 14b–15a), the high priests respond, “We have no king but Caesar (oὐκ ἔχομεν βασιλέα εἰ μὴ Καίσαρα)” (v. 15b). This announcement suggests that the high priests turn their back on the kingship of Jesus and, more importantly, on the kingship of God, who is the only king of Israel according to Jewish creed (cf. Judges 8:23; 1 Samuel 8:7; Psalms 2:7; Isaiah 26:13). 21 The Gospel of John places the high priests in a trap, whereby, in repudiating Jesus’ kingship, they end up adopting Roman sovereignty.
Thus far, we have interpreted Jesus as an elusive character in the uncertain zones between the Jewish and Roman worlds, and, moreover, between the earthly and heavenly realms in his ongoing interactions with Pilate and the Jews. Jesus’ heavenly sovereignty subverts earthly sovereignty. In the indistinguishable zones between the Jewish and Roman worlds, and between the earthly and heavenly sovereignties, Jesus becomes an ambiguous but resistant character who undermines earthly powers. To begin, Jesus causes Pilate’s anxiety because he cannot fully understand Jesus’ ambiguous identity, both imperial and anti-imperial. Furthermore, the Gospel of John depicts the Jewish high priests as self-contradictory in their ostensible adherence to Jewish law yet adoption of Roman law.
Conclusion: The Implications of Biopolitics
With Agamben’s framework in mind, we have thus far analyzed how Jesus is paradoxically both “both a Jew and a colonized subject of Rome” and “neither a Jew nor a colonized subject of Rome”. It is my contention that the death of Jesus can be traced back to the fact that (1) Jesus is subject to neither the Jewish nor Roman law, in that the Roman law is sovereign but finds no problem with Jesus’ action and the Jewish law finds cause for the death penalty but has no sovereignty, and (2) he is subject to both Jewish and Roman laws, in that a combination of both laws leads to the death of Jesus. 22 In this light, a “zone of indistinction” could be reformulated as a zone of both “neither … nor” and “both … and” as it relates to Roman and Jewish laws. In the case of Jesus in the trial narrative, a blurred zone operates both between overlapping laws and within neither law. Jesus finds himself to be located both within and beyond the distinction between the Jewish and Roman worlds.
Therefore, Jesus can be interpreted as a “bare life” in a zone of absolute undecidability and uncertainty between Jewish and Roman jurisprudence. According to the Johannine trial narrative, Jesus belongs to the Jewish legal system in the sense that he is a Jew to whom Jewish laws are applicable. At the same time, he belongs to the Roman legal system in the sense that he is a colonized Jew under the Roman imperial system. But, when the Jewish leaders try to impose a death penalty due to religious and political affairs surrounding the suspicion that Jesus is “the king of the Jews”, they have no means to do so because the power to enact the sentence of life/death belongs to the Roman legal system. At the same time, the Roman governor, Pilate, finds no charges with Jesus such that he even attempts to release him. This being the case, the Fourth Gospel’s narrative implies that, arguably, both the Jews and Romans should take responsibility for the death of Jesus and, at the same time neither the Jews nor Romans are to blame for it. In the final analysis, Jesus belongs to a “zone of indistinction” in which both the Jewish and Roman laws simultaneously are operative and are ineffectual. In this regard, Jesus stands within the limits of the Jewish and Roman laws and at the same time goes beyond them.
In addition, Jesus becomes a liminal character in terms of his sovereignty. 23 Most importantly, Jesus claims not to belong to this world (κόσμος) (18:36). One should keep in mind that God’s sovereignty is hidden within the discourse of the Jewish leaders, which runs counter to Roman sovereignty. This suggests that Jesus is, by nature, both subject to earthly sovereignty in that he is the one sent from heaven to the world by the Father (3:17; 4:34; 5:36; 6:29, 57; 7:29; 17:3, 8; 18, 23, 25; 20:21) and is not constrained by it in that he is fundamentally subject to heavenly sovereignty. Jesus transforms himself into an ambivalent character on the grounds that he is both the insider and outsider of the earthly world; Jesus belongs to the religiopolitical zones of the Jews and Romans, while, at the same time, he transcends them. Thus, Jesus is presented as destabilizing the sharp (insider/outsider) binary of John. As a liminal character, Jesus undermines the sovereign powers, Jewish and Roman, in a zone of undecidability.
Footnotes
*
This essay is a condensed and revised version of a chapter in my doctoral dissertation “Jesus and the Others: Otherness and Identity in the Gospel of John” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 2015).
1
2
Homo Sacer, 32. Agamben states that “the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence.”
3
On the concept of biopower and biopolitics, see Michel Foucault et al., The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 140; Michel Foucault et al., Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977–78 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan: République Française, 2007), 1–4. Michel Foucault defines the term “biopower” as a diversity of technologies exercising power in such a way as to subjugate bodies and govern the entire population in the modern nation state and capitalism. That is, the natural life of each individual is integrated into the sphere of the political power of the nation state. Elaborating on his notion of biopower, Foucault goes on to understand “biopolitics” as a technical apparatus to exercise control over the physical bodies and the political bodies of the population in its entirety. Consider, for example, birth and reproductivecontrol in the form of biopolitics. In the above example, the nation state exercises biopower over its population through the mechanism of biopolitics. Following in the footsteps of Foucault, Agamben espouses his concept of biopower and biopolitics, albeit with some modifications. Whereas Foucault understands biopower and biopolitics as the product of modernity with a focus on historical discontinuity, Agamben sees them as a transtemporal and transpatial paradigm beyond modernity. Cf. Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte, The Agamben Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
), 36–39.
4
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9.
6
7
Tat-siong Benny Liew, ‘Not Just Peace: Living and Giving Life in the Shadow of Imperial Death’, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion (
): 10. Tat-siong Liew points out that the colonized subject lives in “a death zone—a state of ‘living within death’ that is also a liminal space between life and death” (32).
8
9
The Greek term βασιλεὺς recurs nine times within the narrative (18:33, 37 [twice], 39; 19:3, 12, 14, 15 [twice]), whereas it occurs at sporadic intervals four times (1:49; 6:15; 12:13, 15) before the narrative and twice (19:19, 21) immediately after the narrative. This implies that the trial narrative revolves around the motif of Jesus’ kingship. On the prophet-king on the basis of the typology of Moses, see Wayne A. Meeks, The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology, Supplements to Novum Testamentum (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
).
10
11
In a bid to further cement his heavenly kingship, Jesus emphasizes that his kingship is fundamentally different from the earthly kingship replete with violence. The Roman imperial world as well as the Jewish world is a subset of this world, which preserves its oppressive societal structures through cruelty. Jesus repeatedly affirms that his kingship does not derive from this world replete with fighting (ἀγωνίζεσθαι) (v. 36b). Jesus’ kingship has nothing to do with the violent world of the Jewish, and, by implication, Roman rulers (in the sense that Pilate allows the Jewish authorities to exercise violence).
12
Cornelis Bennema, Encountering Jesus: Character Studies in the Gospel of John (Milton Keynes, UK ; Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2009), 185. Contra Raymond Brown’s theological interpretation of Jesus’ kingship, see Raymond Edward Brown, The Gospel According to John, 2 vols., The Anchor Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
), 855–56.
13
14
Ibid.
15
16
Compare this trial account of John with those of Matthew and Mark. In the case of Matthew and Mark, the Roman soldiers put Jesus’ own clothes on him immediately before the crucifixion (Matt 27:31; Mk 15:20). In John’s Gospel, the mockery of Jesus is placed in the middle of the trial account rather than its end as with Matthew and Mark. The Gospel of Luke does not even have the scene of mockery by the Roman soldiers.
17
Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971), 664, n. 5; C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
), 545; Brown, The Gospel According to John, 3: 895.
18
19
As Jesus becomes a sacrificial lamb for the Passover, he has the potential to become a liminal character in the indistinguishable zones between humanity and animality, especially in the subsequent scene of crucifixion. In these blurred zones, Jesus’ humanity and animality no longer exist in a binaristic manner; instead, the one exists in the other, and vice versa. Through the metaphor of a Passover lamb, one can see Jesus’ humanity in the animal realm and at the same time his animality in the human realm. Therefore, the human and animal realms are merged into the so-called ‘humanimal’ realm, which justifies the violence imposed on the colonized subject by the Roman Empire. In the final analysis, Jesus as an abandoned king remains none other than a Passover lamb.
20
Ehrman, The New Testament, 64–65.
21
On the messianic kingship, Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 665; Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St. John, 3 vols., Herder’s Theological Commentary on the New Testament (London; New York: Burns & Oates; Herder & Herder,
), 266; Brown, The Gospel According to John, 3: 894–95.
22
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 15. Agamben correctly claims: “The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order.”
23
On the ambiguity of the sacred, see Homo Sacer, 77. “The analysis of the ban—which is assimilated to the taboo—determines from the very beginning the genesis of the doctrine of the ambiguity of the sacred: the ambiguity of the ban, which excludes in including, implies the ambiguity of the sacred.”
