The answer
Jews were allowed to enforce the law in their own moral and religious cases, such as the penalty of forty lashes less one.999 But did they have the right to sentence someone to death? John 18:31 tells us that they were not permitted to pass a death sentence upon anyone. Why, then, were they ready to stone the adulterous woman who was caught in fornication [John 8:3–12]? Did they have the right to carry this out? The scholar Origen believes that they were allowed to do so, provided that it was not done in public and that they notified the emperor (or his representative) beforehand.1000
And when St. Paul asked for the man who wanted to marry his father’s wife to be tried (1 Cor. 5:1–5), he did not ask that any judgement be brought down upon him bodily, but for a spiritual judgment — that he be excluded from the community for a period of time. There were ecclesiastical trials, too, in the early Church that brought down ecclesiastic judgments under the supervision of the bishop.
Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty
Notes
999 Josephus, “Jewish Antiquities” in The New Complete Works of Josephus, ed., Paul L. Maier, trans., William Whiston (Kregel Publications, 1999) 4.8.21(238): p. 158; see also Acts 18:14–15; 23:29; 25:19.
1000 Origen of Alexandria, A Letter from Origen to Africanus 14 (ANF 4:392).