Il processo a Gesù come paradigma giuridico-politico nella Giudea romana

This article examines the trial of Jesus of Nazareth as a paradigmatic case of juridical–political decision-making within the Roman imperial order. Moving beyond apologetic, confessional, or purely procedural interpretations, the study frames the condemnation of Jesus as a rational act of governance grounded in the logic of imperial sovereignty. Through an interdisciplinary approach combining Roman criminal law, legal history, and contemporary theories of risk and emergency justice, the article argues that the charge ultimately brought before the Roman authority—royal pretension—was legally translated into the category of crimen maiestatis. This elastic and preventive offence enabled the penal neutralization of symbolic threats to imperial order, independently of any concrete insurrectional conduct. Particular attention is devoted to the role of Pontius Pilate, interpreted not as a weak or reluctant judge, but as an imperial administrator operating within the discretionary framework of cognitio extra ordinem and oriented toward the anticipatory management of political risk. Drawing on David Garland’s criminology of risk, the article conceptualizes Jesus as a “risk subject” and a potential hostis, whose elimination served the preventive stabilization of public order during a period of heightened symbolic and social tension. The trial of Jesus thus emerges not as a miscarriage of justice, but as an archetype of emergency penal rationality, illuminating a structural tension within law itself between justice, security, and sovereign decision.