“Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS…and the sign was written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek. The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, ‘Do not write “The King of the Jews,” but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews.’ Pilate answered, ‘What I have written, I have written’” (John 19:19-20)
Was it just pique, a way to get back at the Jewish religious leaders who forced the hand of Pilate to give in to their demands to put our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ to death on the cross, that he had His inscription written as it had been? In that bit of irony, Pilate proclaimed the very truth that the chief priests called blasphemy. Indeed He is [not just calls Himself] King of the Jews. And so that all who passed by on a major route to the great city could understand His accusation, it was written in three languages.
St. Maximos the Confessor [Chapters on Knowledge, 96] lifts up a deeper meaning of those languages. Obviously everybody at the time—whether of the Roman conquerors then dominating the region, the Greek merchants who were in all major cities of the time, or the inhabitants of Palestine, Hebrews who spoke a dialect of their mother tongue, Aramaic—could easily make out the charge against Jesus.
He explains that Rome was as he understood it the fourth and last of the empires who would conquer the known world and force all its inhabitants into submission, the others being in order: Babylonians, Persians, Medes. However, nowadays all Old Testament scholars concur that the fourth kingdom was the Greeks. St. Maximos thought of Rome as being the mightiest, strongest, most severe of all empires. As a monk, he emphasized the importance of asceticism as the means to begin working out the salvation of a serious Christian. He’s right about that, at least in our Orthodox Christian way of thinking. All of us, even those who are not monks or nuns, fast about half of the calendar year, regimenting our food and drink intake, subduing the body so that the soul may thrive and increase.
He explained the Greek language as referring to natural contemplation, “Because by the Greek nation more than anyone else devoted themselves to natural philosophy.” It’s true that we, as spiritual offspring of the Greek Orthodox, or the Byzantine empire, ourselves are given to meditation, contemplation and speculation, “working out our salvation” by analyzing what we believe and the way we believe in the gospel of Christ. It’s not just natural philosophy if by that we mean learning about God by studying the universe, although that’s a large part of it. We know that faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit. To know that we don’t know and cannot possibly comprehend the mysteries of the Holy Trinity without inspiration is elementary and fundamental.
Then St. Maximos understands by the Hebrew inscription “theological revelation, because this nation was manifestly set up from above by God as our ancestors.” The Bible is filled with ironies, and here’s another: That the very people who alone among the nations should have grasped the meaning of Jesus’ life, actions and words, they who were searching for the long-awaited Messiah, not only failed to recognize Him but put Him to death by demonstrating who He was and why He came to earth. Not for the Romans with their rule, order and authority, not even for the Greeks with their profound intellectual search for truth and understanding of the cosmic wonders, but for the people chosen by God from Abraham to the apostles to recognize, welcome and celebrate the gift of His Son from the Almighty Lord.