Why was Jesus, who said “I judge no one” (John 8:15), put to death for a political crime? Of course, this is a historical question—but it is not only historical. Jesus’s life became a philosophical theme in the first centuries of our era, when ‘pagan’ and Christian philosophers clashed over the meaning of his sayings and the significance of his death. Modern philosophers, too, such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, have tried to retrace the arc of Jesus’s life and death. This lecture will introduce a new book, I Judge No One (Oxford University Press, 2023), which offers a philosophical reading of the four memoirs, or ‘Gospels’, that were fashioned by early Christ-believers and collected in the New Testament. By asking why he died on a Roman cross, we can gain new ways of seeing how Jesus lived – and new perspectives on his significance in the history of politics and philosophy.