Jesus guilty! A slice of Roman talkback

(Click.)

What's happened there? Line gone dead, has it? We - we've lost him. Oh, well, we'll move on. Caller, hello?

Caller: Psittacus, I'm a civil liberties lawyer -

Aw, here we go!

Caller: Naturally I've been following the process with interest.

Are you a supporter?

Caller: I'm a supporter of natural justice and human rights.

Aw, Gawd. What do YOU want?

Caller: Psittacus, it's my understanding that this process was rigged to get a conviction from the start. First of all, the prisoner was brutally manhandled from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Sanhedrin. At the Sanhedrin, hearsay evidence was used against him, without any proper procedure in place for testing it; the case was heard in a specially convened court in the dead of night, which doesn't correspond to the normal standards usually adhered to in the very best of the Judaic justice system. The Sanhedrin has no law by which he can be put to death, and so what do they do? By an act of extraordinary rendition, they hand him over to an authority who does.

So they take him, without access to his family or to friends or to a defence counsel, directly to the Governor, who had him beaten, flogged and tortured - they gave him a crown made entirely out of thorns and ground it into his skull until he bled profusely. Even then, I understand the charges had to be reconstituted and watered down to something that would stick, and finally the governor only agreed to crucifixion when political pressure was applied to him by the religious authorities to basically come up with a guilty verdict or risk displeasing the emperor. Any confession under this sort of duress isn't worth the paper it's written on. Sham trials produce sham verdicts. Anyway, that's what I wanted to say.

(Psittacus feigns snoring sound)

Is he finished? What was all that about? Caller, hello?

Caller: Mate, I just think we're all giving too much attention to this guy. I mean, we don't want to give him a Messiah complex.

Well, we can't do that now. I've just this second had a note passed in to me, and it says, let me read it: "Jesus Christ, confirmed dead, at twenty minutes past three o'clock, Good Friday, 33 AD." Not a moment too soon. (pause) Who will miss him, eh? (pause) Where are his supporters now?

Egg all around, this Easter.