The Banality of Evil

Pastor’s Epistle—September 2024

The first in our series of woodcuts, produced for Le Grande Bible de Tours by Gustave Doré, illustrates John 19:15—

They cried out, “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!” Pilate asked them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.”

Christ stands tall and straight, with the willowy build so characteristic of Western artistic depictions of spiritual people, clearly denoted by His halo. The notion that gods, heroes, and occasionally kings emit a divine light about their heads dates back at least to ancient Sumer, and is found throughout Greek and Persian literature.

Egyptian art would typically place the pharaoh’s head within the sun disk, identifying the ruler with Ra. When Caesar Augustus conquered Egypt for his personal possession, his image took on the pharaonic halo. Christian art thus could be construed as presenting Jesus as the true and rival Emperor, whose Kingdom is not of this world.

Equally striking in the woodcut is the clear division betwixt East and West, with Ionic columns and a Roman governor dominating the upper left, and semitic garb and architecture occupying the lower right. Here stands Christ between the Jewish and Gentile worlds, ruler of Hebrew and Hellenist alike—the interpretive pillar, as it were, supporting both Scriptural Testaments.

Of course, the blending of cultures began long before Jesus: by His time, Judea had been well incorporated into the Greco-Roman for many generations. Christ and Paul, while true and faithful Jews, were also both heavily Hellenized each in his own way.

The mob appears agitated, the Romans blasé. For the latter, this is just another day of occupation in a far-flung corner of the world, necessary for the free flow of merchants and the military. What’s one more would-be Messiah on a Cross for them? The long spear, presumably of Longinus, tilts casually over Christ’s Crown of thorns, a forbidding reminder of what’s to come.

Christ for His part looks neither to the din of the angry crowd nor to the casual cruelty of the occupying army, but upward to His Father far beyond the heavens. Jesus is in the world, but not of it; our bridge between this ephemeral vale of tears and realms of eternal bliss above.

I confess that I cannot read the Passion accounts without an uncomfortable understanding that Rome never truly fell; that we in the West are still sending soldiers to the Middle East for the same reasons that Caesar did so very long ago; still casually stamping out religious fanatics who object to hobnailed boots on holy ground.

This woodcut for me illustrates not simply the banality of evil, but the bureaucracy of it as well. Who killed Christ? We did, all of us, together. And we barely even noticed.