Christians say that, at Jesus’ trial, the trial that led to his crucifixion, Pontius Pilate, the man charged with judging him, asks him if he was a King. This was essentially the charge laid against Jesus, so he was asking him for his plea. Is he guilty or not? Jesus’s answer went something like this: ““You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” What Jesus might have meant by this doesn’t seem very clear to us, but it was to Pontius Pilate. He was no fool. He knew the charges against Jesus were trumped up, and he knew that Jesus was no real threat to Rome, which was the only reason it was illegal to call yourself a king. Pilate understood that what Jesus seemed to be saying was this: “That’s not the real question here, is it Pilate? You can call me a king or a prophet or a teacher or even late for supper, but whether I’m a king or not is sort of beside the point. What I’m here to do is to tell people the truth, and a rag man living under a bridge in the Bronx can do that as well as a king. Maybe better.”
Pilate’s response is very telling. “What is truth?” he says.
We’re not sure if this was meant as a rhetorical question or if Jesus just refused to respond. But, sadly for us, if there was an answer, it wasn’t written down in the Gospel of John, or anywhere else for that matter. And we’ve been trying to figure it out ever since.
But, lately, we haven’t been trying very hard.
Pilate’s question is a very modern one. I imagine that Pilate didn’t know what truth was and I also think he didn’t much care. And neither do we. He was essentially the governor of Judea. To him this was a nasty little outpost that no one really wanted to have much to do with and he was stuck with the very practical job of governing it. He was a bureaucrat. His life was filled with practical details of life like policy, public works, keeping the peace and keeping the books. What is “true” is simply what works best. Later on, a philosopher named William James would call this theory of truth Pragmatism. A man named Bruce Kuklick wrote the introduction to William James’ book Pragmatism. He summed up James’ theory this was: “He (James) would seek the meaning of ‘true’ by examining how the idea functioned in our lives. A belief was true, he said, if it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world.” To James, and Pontius Pilate, and a great many of us, truth is a relative concept that we judge for ourselves based on the situation we find ourselves in. One thing can be true for one person but not true for another. My truth may not be your truth. Does that sound familiar? James was a bit more subtle than this. He believed that we all had to more or less agree on the truth and that agreement would make our lives better even if truth, in this sense, didn’t correspond to reality. But the modern world is not. You can hear its more crass definition of truth in any college classroom, board room, conference room, break room or in any place where politicians, professors, PR professionals, or modern people of any sort get together to talk. Truth is what I think it is. Saying everyone has his or her own truth is saying the same thing only announcing that, in addition to believing what you want, you are also going to ignore everyone else.
I imagine that, when Jesus used the word “truth,” he meant something that was a universal reality, that you could take to the bank and wouldn’t change value at someone’s whim. The Jewish prophet Zachariah said “These are the things that you shall do: Speak the truth to one another; render in your gates judgments that are true.“
Buddhism has Four Noble Truths, the first one being, “All life is suffering,” something that the rest of Buddhism needs to be true for it to make any sense. The Hindu Vedas tell us to “strive to move away from untruth toward truth,” something impossible to do if truth is a moving target. In the Hadith, Mohammad says, “”Arrogance means ridiculing and rejecting the Truth and despising people.” You can’t reject something that changes all the time. Taoism is a little suspicious of the idea of truth but only because it’s hard to see. Not because it isn’t there.
Lots of philosophers have taken a stab at answering Pontius Pilate’s question. Not surprisingly, there are quite a few different answers. But all agree that, when you say something is true, you have to mean pretty much the same thing each time you say it. When you use the word “truth” to describe what you heard about the weather or what someone said about the score of a baseball game, you can’t mean something entirely different than when you use the word “truth” to talk about ethics or reason or God.