What is Gegrapha?

The word Gegrapha is Greek, and means "I have written." It comes from the New Testament (John 19:22) when Pontius Pilate is defending the inscription that he ordered fastened to the cross upon which Jesus was crucified: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS.

David Aikman reflects on the deeper meaning for journalists that is implied in the term Gegrapha...

Gegrapha Explained

Gegrapha is a word that in classical Greek means literally "I have written." That is something every reporter, editor, producer and columnist can honestly claim to have done.

But why use a Greek word for "I have written" as the name of a fellowship of Christians in journalism?

There are some good reasons. The first is that the quote is from the Bible even though it was made by a man who doesn't have a very high reputation in Christian history, namely Pontius Pilate. The scripture is: "Pilate answered, 'What I have written I have written'" (or in New Testament Greek, ho gegrapha, gegrapha) (John 19:22).

Another reason is that most of us who have had fellowship with each other over the years didn't want to be identified by a Christian label that said we were "International Christian" this or that. But in my view some of the most compelling factors in calling ourselves Gegrapha have to do with the character and behavior of Pontius Pilate himself.

What is quite striking in the New Testament accounts of Pilate's conversations with Jesus is that, in many ways, Pilate was a postmodernist. His understanding of the word "truth" would fit nicely into course catalogues on many major U.S. college campuses. But in another way, he was the quintessential journalist. He was fascinated by the "story" of Jesus and his arrest by the Temple authorities. He wanted to find out what was at the bottom of it all. He asked Jesus exactly the sort of questions that a TV reporter would ask if confronted by a major public personality whose fame rested largely on the claims he made about himself.

Pilate is often referred to in scriptural commentaries as a cynic. I don't know whether he was joking or not when he asked Jesus "What is truth?" yet Pilate's relationship with Jesus can shed very interesting light on our own relationship to the Kingdom of God, and indeed to the world in which we are placed. Pilate, after all, was primarily concerned with only one issue, was Jesus a "king"?

Today, both as journalists and as Christians, we are almost constantly forced to address the same question: is Jesus not just a "king," a religious authority among others (including Buddha, Mohammed, etc.) but our particular king? For Pilate, the issue was crucial, because it affected the way he looked at his own authority.

Pilate, of course, didn't share any of the Jewish worries about the claim of Jesus to be the promised Messiah, and he was clearly quite indifferent to them. In fact, Pilate was cynically amused that the Temple religious authorities had come to him, a Roman, to perform a judicial execution of someone on purely (Jewish) religious grounds (Matthew 27:18). When Pilate, probably sleep-deprived and grumpy on being woken up early in the morning to examine some Jewish criminal or other, asks the Temple authorities why they are bothering him with this case, they simply reply with a tautology, "If he were not a criminal we would not have handed him over to you" (John 18:30). This irritates Pilate, who responds promptly and contentiously: "Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law" (John 18:31). You can almost hear Pilate griping to a centurion standing by, "For crying out loud, they have this interminable list of regulations of do's and don'ts, so why on earth can't they sort this one out by themselves?"

But then it becomes ominously clear why Pilate has been approached by the Jewish religious authorities: they don't want Jesus just punished, they want him killed. It's the "we have no right to execute anyone" (John 18:31) that makes this point. Pilate is now in a fix, so he retreats back into the palace, knowing that the Jews will not follow to avoid getting defiled by stepping inside a Gentile's home, above all in the week of the Passover.

It's intriguing that Pilate doesn't raise with Jesus at all the issue of Jesus's claim to be Messiah, the thing that most infuriated the Temple authorities. What he's really interested in is the kingship of Jesus. No fewer that five times in chapters 18 and 19 of John's Gospel we find Pilate bringing up the kingship issue, whether in questions to Jesus himself or in conversations with the Jews. Pilate has obviously heard a lot about Jesus, as had his wife, who was so troubled by a dream about Jesus that very night that she tries to stop Pilate from proceeding any further with his investigation of Jesus (Matthew 27:19).

What is striking about the Gospel accounts of the encounter of Jesus with Pilate is that fact that the issue of Jesus' alleged kingship preoccupied and fascinated Pilate more than any other single issue. Quite obviously, in Pilate's view, this was not a criminal matter at all, but in a very deep sense, a philosophical or metaphysical issue: who really rules the world? It is also clear that Jesus himself was willing to respond to Pilate on this issue only if he was satisfied that Pilate's question derived from genuine interest and was not a lazy inquiry based on someone else's views (John 18:34). What is fascinating is that we can almost hear the note of triumph in Pilate's voice -- a sort of 60 Minutes "gotcha!" -- when Jesus explicitly refers to his kingdom (John 18:36) and Pilate responds, "So you are a king, then!" (John 18:37).

Of course, Jesus confirms the correctness of Pilate's suppositions, but he also adds important qualifications. First, his kingdom is not a worldly kingdom at all. Second, it is a kingdom in which the purpose of the king himself -- of Jesus -- is to "testify to the truth." Anyone on the side of truth, Jesus adds, will listen to him (John 18:37).

It is at this point that Pilate asks the famous question, "What is truth?" (John 18:38). But it's almost a throwaway line. As far as Pilate is concerned, Jesus is entirely innocent, and his kingship, moreover, devoid of any threat to the authority of Rome.

In looking at the way Jesus responds to Pilate, two things are striking. One is the determination Pilate demonstrates to get to the bottom of the kingship issue of Jesus. He is the New Testament investigative reporter par excellence. The second is that, once Jesus is sure that Pilate is genuinely interested in the kingship issue on its own terms, he honors Pilate with both the dignity and the profundity of his response: "Everyone on the side of truth listens to me" (John 18:37).

Pilate now does everything in his power to have Jesus released altogether, and even when this proves impossible, he hopes that simply by having Jesus flogged he can avoid ordering his execution. But it is too late, above all for someone whose priorities are maintaining law and order, not ensuring that justice is done at all costs.

Moreover, the Jews have subtly blackmailed Pilate by publicly warning him that permitting an unauthorized kingship claim to go unpunished is a direct act of subordination against the Roman emperor himself, Tiberius (John 19:12). Exasperated by both the insistence of the Jewish authorities that Jesus be executed, and by Jesus's own refusal to defend himself or plead for mercy, Pilate confronts Jesus one more time. He really does have the authority to crucify him or free him, he says. Jesus's final response to Pilate is to remind Pilate that even Pilate's own authority derives from a kingship that he himself is quite unaware of, namely that of Jesus as Son of the Most High King of all (John 19:11).

What is so interesting about this preoccupation by Pilate with kingship is that we can begin to see Pilate's worldview undergoing an extraordinary change. He starts off as an irrritable administrator annoyed with a law-and-order problem raised by the Jewish leaders with whom he has to deal. Though he ends up giving in to the demands for Jesus' execution, he is so dazzled by the nature of the kingship claimed by Jesus and that he stubbornly insists in making it clear to both the Temple authorities and their rent-a-crowd supporters that he has no problem at all with the kingship thing.

Did Pilate undergo a conversion? We don't know, though it's certainly possible at some later point in his life. What we do know is that, after demonstrating remarkable persistence as reporter to get to the bottom of a story he had not initially wanted to deal with, Pilate at the very end of the dramatic Passion story gets the headline right: "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews" (John 19:19).

It is, of course, the most important headline in history, and he keeps it by brusquely dismissing efforts by assistant editors to get him to add an "allegedly" to the headline. Then he responds with a line that almost every print reporter would like at some point or other to lay on a fussy editor, "What I have written, I have written."

Pilate's postmodernism (of course, we are using the term anachronistically) derived from a Roman world in which administrators had no interest in philosophical or religious issues, but in power, just as postmodernists today often seem obsessed with power. But even as Pilate understood power, so he quickly grasped the implications of a philosophically and metaphysically different concept of kingship. Even though he could not cope with the issue of "truth" as a concept, he intuitively accepted the notion that the kind of kingship of which Jesus spoke had to do with the deepest possible issues of truth and justice. In short, Pilate might not have been able to define truth, but he recognized it when he saw it, and he was uncomfortable condemning to death a man he knew deep down was entirely innocent.

As journalists all over the world, many of us operate in cultures which also either do not acknowledge truth to exist or are hostile to those who claim that it both exists and can be known. In this climate, we need to remind ourselves that we serve a King who embodies both truth and justice, and who indeed is the truth (John 14:6). Jesus responded to the postmodernist inquiries of Pilate with dignity and compassion, and set an example for those of us who must at times face similar skepticism from editors and readers. The very dignity and compassion of his reply to Pilate convinced the Roman, against all his earlier prejudices, that Jesus was exactly who he claimed to be - leaving aside the enormous implications of this -- and that the inscription he ordered tacked up on the Cross, "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews" expressed not so much an administrative point -- after all, Pilate rejected the insertion of "allegedly," -- but that Jesus was neither more nor less than the One whom he claimed to be.

Pilate wasn't even sure that truth existed, but in his questioning of Jesus, he slid around to the view, as reporters often find themselves doing, that in a strange sort of way that he certainly couldn't quite grasp, what Jesus said about himself was really true. We often work with colleagues who are similarly agnostic in the abstract, but demonstrate admirable truth-seeking integrity in practical terms. Without having any intention of doing so, Pilate set an example of admirable reporting skills even while demonstrating abysmal administrative ones.

When a journalist says "gegrapha," he or she at one level refers to a simple physical act: "I have written." But at another, far profounder level, the journalist who is a Christian says that he knows of a real kingship that itself testifies to truth. Pilate had no idea what kind of story he was getting into. But in the end, at least with his main lead, he got the story right.

We journalists often get things wrong. We get rushed at by deadlines, stressed-out because of editors, or producers, or colleagues, or sometimes because of pugnacious or deceitful sources. But we are who we are because we recognize a story when it's a story. Those of us who are Christian believers think we've hit upon the story to end all stories. When Pilate said ho gegrapha, gegrapha ("what I have written, I have written") he certainly got the headline right. But we think the sad thing is, he buried the lead.

We hope to change that among journalists.

Washington D.C., July 2000