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The Green Bag
was deposed for holding an illegal session of the Sanhedrin to pass sentence on the Apostle James, but even if Caiaphas resembled in character this personage we have no right to assume that a gross violation of law and tradition could have taken place under the very eyes of the Roman governor, with his actual consent. The probability is that the trial before the Sanhedrin was regular. We do not feel compelled to agree with Prof. Schmidt, who considers that the pro ceedings before Caiaphas in the night were irregular and that the Pharisees could have cast the responsibility for the irregularities on the Sadducean party (p. 286). For if the calendar of events preceding the Crucifixion cannot be accurately determined, and the duration of the episodes of the Passion is obscure, we cannot rely wholly upon negative evidence to support conclusions like those reached by Prof. Schmidt. The Gospel accounts of Jesus' public career are meager in detail, and the record of the Passion must naturally be supposed to omit a great deal of important matter. The inter val between the arrest and the proceedings before Pilate may have been one of several days, for aught we know to the contrary, and there may have been ample time for a regular trial before the Sanhedrin in which all the technical rules of procedure were observed. Mr. Chandler, in adhering to the view of predecessors that the rights of the accused under Hebrew law were grossly violated, has simply begged the question and has failed to sustain the burden of proof. In the trial before Pilate there is such meagerness of detail that one cannot agree with Mr. Chandler that Pilate's conduct after his acquittal of Jesus, "after a comparatively regular trial," was necessarily marked by unmanliness and cowardice. Pilate would naturally have brought upon himself the condemnation of the early Christians for giving up Jesus to his persecutors, but we cannot assume that in so doing he was acting otherwise than as a dispassionate and honest magistrate. There would have been no cowardice in his permitting Jesus to be tried in the ecclesiastical court, or to be executed after a legal conviction in that court, and just as there is the presumption that the proceedings before Caiaphas were regular, there is also the presumption that Pilate acted properly and consented simply to have Jesus tried on a religious charge by an ecclesi
astical jurisdiction ("we have a law, and by our law he ought to die," John 19: 7) after he had been acquitted of a political charge by the civil jurisdiction. What actually occurred at the trial before Pilate must have been one of these three things: (1) Pilate after acquitting Jesus con firmed a Sanhedrin judgment legally pro nounced before the Roman trial; or (2) the Sanhedrin trial occurred pendente lite, the high priests returning to Pilate to get the con viction affirmed; or (3) Pilate after acquitting Jesus turned him over to the Sanhedrin with full power to try and convict and the San hedrin trial was held subsequently. It would take up too much space to discuss which of these suppositions is the most probable, and it is to be hoped that Biblical scholars in a better position to clear up the subject may shed the light of their authority upon it. The author of the two volumes on the "Trial of Jesus" has brought together a large mass of data about criminal law and proce dure among the Jews and under the Romans, and has compiled much interesting legal and historical information not conveniently acces sible elsewhere. While his application of the principles of Greenleaf and Starkie to the Bible account is misguided, he shows a dis position to investigate historical sources care fully and to review a large volume of evidence impartially. In all fairness, however, it must be said that his work gravely suffers from lack of the methods of modern critical scholar ship and from failure to build its hypotheses upon a sound historical foundation. MORAWETZ ON THE CURRENCY PROBLEM The Banking and Currency Problem in the United States. By Victor Morawetz. North Ameri can Review Publishing Co., N. Y. Pp.119, (tliuf.) THIS writer takes up the problem of the National Monetary Commission appointed by Congress, and a competent critic, Mr. Mayo W. Hazeltine of New York, does not hestitate to say that nothing on the currency problem has been forthcoming which for a moment can be compared with it "as regards breadth of knowledge and depth of insight." Mr. Morawetz opens his discussion at the very threshold of the subject by addressing himself to the reader who has no technical knowledge of finance or economics, and gradually leads him into the mazes of a com plex problem. The result of this method is a clearness and effectiveness of treatment which
