Rosadi denies emphatically that Herod had jurisdiction of the offense
charged against Jesus. In this connection, he says: "His prosecutors
insisted tenaciously upon His answering to a charge of _continuous_
sedition, as lawyers call it. This offence had been begun in Galilee and
ended in Jerusalem--that is to say, in Judæa. Now it was a rule of Roman
law, which the procurator of Rome could neither fail to recognize nor
afford to neglect, that the competence of a court territorially
constituted was determined either by the place in which the arrest was
made, or by the place in which the offence was committed. Jesus had been
arrested at the gates of Jerusalem; His alleged offence had been
committed for the most part, and as far as all the final acts were
concerned, in the city itself and in other localities of Judæa. In
continuous offences competence was determined by the place in which the
last acts going to constitute the offence had been committed. Thus no
justification whatever existed for determining the court with regard to
the prisoner's origin. But this investigation upon a point of Roman law
is to all intents superfluous, because either Pilate, when he thought of
Herod, intended to strip himself of his inalienable judicial power, and
in this case he ought to have respected the jurisdiction and competence
of the Grand Sanhedrin and not to have busied himself with a conflict as
to cognizance which should only have been discussed and resolved by the
Jewish judicial authorities; or else he had no intention of abdicating
his power, and in this case he ought never to have raised the question
of competence between himself, Governor of Judæa, and Herod, Regent of
Galilee, but between himself and the Roman Vice-Governor of Galilee, his
colleague, if there had been such an one. It is only between judges of
the same judicial hierarchy that a dispute as to territorial competence
can arise. Between magistrates of different States there can only exist
a contrast of power and jurisdiction. The act of Pilate cannot then be
interpreted as a scruple of a constitutional character. It is but a
miserable escape for his irresolution, a mere endeavour to temporize."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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