I think Zaid Jilani is a little confused. While the details of the arrest and trial of Jesus are a matter of hot dispute, even within the differing accounts in the New Testament, it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t sentenced to die by any Roman court. He was arrested, most likely, on the orders of the High Priest of the Temple. His trial was in front of the Sanhedrin. which was basically occupied-Israel’s Supreme Court. And his fate was decided by the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, who had the ultimate jurisdiction over the case. Maybe none of that is correct, but that’s about as good as we can do with the available sources.
Now, as this pertains to Herman Cain’s argument that Jesus was “a perfect conservative” who was sentenced to die by a “liberal court,” it just proves that Herman Cain is a moron. Insofar as we can take the Gospels at face value, it’s clear that one of Jesus’s core messages was that the religious Establishment in his time was hypocritical and that they ignored the spirit of The Law in favor of the letter of The Law. In standing up to the existing authority, he questioned tradition. Mocking, berating, and humiliating existing religious authorities and questioning long-standing social mores is the opposite of conservatism. And the idea that the Sanhedrin had any liberal impulses just strikes me as ridiculous. They existed to uphold religious law.
Even if there had been a Roman trial for Jesus, that court could not be reasonably described as liberal, either. But, since Pontius Pilate is described as ambivalent about Jesus’s guilt and reluctant to execute him, I guess you could say that he was soft on crime.
