The distinguished legal theorist Neil MacCormick once wrote that being a critical moralist ‘can be a risky job […] the two most notable in Western history were executed, one by hemlock and the other by crucifixion’ (MacCormick, 1981: 54). If this assessment is right, and Jesus is indeed one of the Western world's leading moralists, it seems reasonable to ask whether his ethics might have something of value to contribute to discussions of criminal justice policies in 21st-century democracies. This chapter will attempt to address that question.

Preliminary issues

The question is intriguing and important, but it cannot be satisfactorily answered without first tackling two other questions. They are: first, whether it is possible to identify with reasonable precision what main ethical principles Jesus embodied and taught; and second, whether the teachings and example of any religious leader can appropriately contribute to the formation of official policies in a modern pluralistic liberal-democratic state that is committed to the principle of the equal treatment of every citizen – of any faith or none. I shall tackle these necessary preliminaries before turning to the substance of the chapter.

Identifying ‘the ethics of Jesus’ is not a straightforward matter, because Jesus wrote nothing, and our main sources for his ethics are the four canonical gospels, which were written some forty to sixty years after his death by four different authors, each with a communicative purpose of his own. Given this, can we reliably uncover Jesus’ own ethical principles? This is a very large question, and not one within the scope of my own academic expertise. The question has, however, been tackled at some length by Richard Burridge (2007) of King's College London, and I shall follow his analysis by focusing on three topics that Burridge identifies as central to (although not exclusive of) Jesus’ ethics. These topics are Jesus’ attitude to law, his call to repentance, and his ‘open pastoral acceptance of sinners, with whom he spent his life and for whom he died’ (Burridge, 2007: 79). As will become apparent, discussion of these matters will require attention both to Jesus’ oral teaching and (especially as regards the third topic) to the example that he gave through the way that he lived his life. A convincing central claim in Burridge's book is that, in seeking to identify the ethics of Jesus, we need to consider both of these matters.