“Truth, what is that?” So the Roman Governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, questioned a rebel brought before him charged with treason, according to the New Testament story. The rebel was Jesus the Nazarene. Pilate condemned him to death. Pilate became the best ever known Roman administrator. The Jewish assembly, the Sanhedrin, had arrested Jesus and convicted him of blasphemy. In Jewish law, the penalty was death, but the Sanhedrin had no power of execution, so took the prisoner to Pilate, accusing Jesus of treason against Rome. Pilate was not convinoed but, under pressure from the Jewish authorities, agreed to pass the death sentence. He disclaimed responsibility by washing his hands in front of a Jewish crowd. This is the Christian myth of Pilate.

• An Enquiry
• Pontius Pilate
• Governing Judaea
• Some Acts of Pilate
• The Trial of Jesus
• Why Crucify Him?
• Myths of Pilate

• Comment

An Enquiry

What of the “myth” of the conversion of Pilate and his wife to Christianity… and their eventual martyrdom? This is somehthing I read in an encyclopedia. It is nowhere found in the Word or the Apocrypha therfore maybe it is historical? I’ve never managed to track down the source of these ideas. Claudia has even be canonised by the Coptic church I believe!

The legend stems from Pilate “washing his hands” of Jesus’s guilt and his apparent assertion in defiance of the Jews that Jesus was indeed “King of the Jews” by putting this inscription on his cross. There is no historical evidence for their conversion.

Pontius Pilate

“Truth, what is that?” So, according to the New Testament, the Roman Governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, questioned an apparent rebel brought before him charged with treason. The rebel was Jesus the Nazarene and Pilate condemned him to death. Thus Pilate became the best-known imperial administrator the Romans ever had. The words “suffered under Pontius Pilate” have for nearly 2,000 years been recited by Christians.

Pilate’s name is of more than creedal importance. It is the only evidence of the date of the crucifixion. Pilate was Governor of Judaea from 26 to 36 AD showing that Jesus was depicted as a real person who taught and died at a definite time.

It is possible to deduce, in outline, the kind of person Pontius Pilate was, in the first place, by looking at the organisation of the Roman Empire.

The outlying provinces, those run by the army, came under the direct authority of the Emperor at Rome. To each province he appointed a Legate, a rich man of Senatorial family who surrounded himself with considerable pomp. The Legates were aristocrats who entered government at the top without passing tbrough subordinate ranks.

Pilate’s territory, Judaea, was part of the Province of Syria and came under the Legate for Syria, who lived at Antioch. Pilate held the subordinate rank of Prefect and was answerable both to the Legate and directly to the Emperor. The rank of the governor of Judaea was reduced to “Procurator” in 41 AD a truth that fooled Christians and historians for many years until the fact of Pilate’s existence and rank was corroborated by a stone dug up at his capital, Caesarea: it is inscribed “PONTIUS PILATUS PRAEFECTUS PROVINCIAE JUDAEAE”.

For appointment as Prefect, family backround was unimportant. Such a man had made his way on his merits and against rough competition. Prefects were selected from regimental commanders and these either belonged to the minor Roman gentry or, in a few cases, had risen through the ranks from private soldier. Standards of efficiency were high and the success of the Roman Empire rested largely on such men. They were allowed absolute and arbitrary powers of life and death over all save Roman citizens.

Thus it can be assumed that Pontius Pilate was an able officer, trusted by the Emperor. The gospels imply that he was a “friend of Caesar”, an honorific designation conferred by the Emperor on favoured officers, and one which could be withdrawn.

According to relatively late legend, Pilate was not in origin a Roman at all but a German. It was said that he was the son of a petty German chief who had sent him to Rome as a hostage. Embellishments suggested he had been illegitimate, and had murdered a legitimate half-brother so as to become heir. Pilate, the story goes, joined the Roman army, fought well and was eventually promoted to govern Judaea. It is unlikely that at so early a date a “barbarian” would have risen in the Roman service, and the name “Pontius Pilate” fits best a natural-born Roman citizen from central Italy.

Governing Judaea

Judaea was an important post because of Jerusalem, the religious capital of the Jews. Scattered over most of the Roman Empire and, according to some computations, forming as much as 10 per cent of the population, the Jews and their converts were dissenters against the Graeco-Roman religious system. Instead of frequenting the public temples to honour the gods, they gathered in thefr own synagogues to worship a single, invisible God and to teach the law they believed that God had given them. At Jerusalem they had a huge temple, staffed by 20,000 priests serving in rotation, to which they went on pilgrimages. Thus, the Prefect of Judaea was responsible to Rome for the good order of the most troublesome religious cult in the Empire.

To make things more difficult, the Jewish faith had political implications. The Jews were expecting their God to send them an inspired leader, the Messiah, who would free their holy land from alien rule, among other things—he would lead them to political independence, would enable them to conquer the world, after it, in its existing form, had ended altogether and been purified. The complex of doctrines meant that the Jews, unlike other subordinate peoples in the Roman system, seethed with rebellious notions. Eventually they twice mounted armed insurrection, in 66 and 132 AD.

For a Roman official to govern such a territory effectively required a superhuman combination of energy and tact. Pilate was strong on energy, weak on tact. His trust, in a crisis, lay in his troops.

How much he knew about Judaism is not clear. Tradition says that he had a Jewish wife, Claudia, but it is impossible to establish whether or not it is true. According to Matthew, she had a dream which resulted in her warning her husband to leave Jesus alone. Pilate’s wife could have been Jewish and she could have advised him on religious matters, but he must have had official religious advisers. The difficulty was that Judaism was less a single, coherent religion than a complex of sects and teachers revolving amund the central ideas of the invisible God and the Divine law: the point of the Dead Sea scrolls, discovered from 1947, is that they show that Judaism in the first century AD was much more fluid than had previously been supposed. The arguments among the Jews were so involved that it was hard for the outsider to grasp what was going on.

In 26 AD, Pilate took up his residence at Caesarea, the administrative capital on the coast, a largely non-Jewish city. According to custom, he would move to Jerusalem for the major religious feasts so as to be on the spot if disorder arose among the pilgrims. He controlled the feasts by keeping the High Priest’s vestments in Roman custody.

Some Acts of Pilate

What appears to have been his first major act was a challenge to the Jews. He sent troops into Jerusalem carrying their standards, which were adorned with figures of the Roman gods. However much or little he knew about Judaism, he must have known that this would cause offence, but it is likely that the true offence was that he took the standards into the temple area. That would have caused the gravest offence. All the Jewish sects were united in hating idols.

The Jews sent a deputation to Caesarea to demand the removal of the standards. Pilate at first was obstinate. He said the demand was an insult to Rome, punishable by death, and called in his soldiers. The members of the deputation lay upon the ground and said they would rather be killed than sanction idols in Jerusalem. Pilate had over reached himself. He had either to slaughter the deputation, and provoke a Jewish uprising, or climb down over the idols. He chose the latter course, and the Pagan emblems were removed.

A few years later, Pilate attempted another trial of strength. It centred on the temple. As the heart of a cult that spread right across the Empire and beyond, the temple was an organisation of great wealth. There was a temple tax paid by every devout Jew and there were freewill offerings from worshippers who came to make their ritual sacrifices. By Jewish law, the funds were to be used both to maintain the temple and for general social purposes.

Pilate decided that Jerusalem needed an improved water supply. This was a typical scheme for a Roman administrator. The Romans believed in sewerage and piped water and many officials sought to make their names with engineering projects connected with water. Pilate decided on a plan for a 25 mile aqueduct to bring water to the city.

To pay for it, he arbitrarily seized some of the temple treasure. He could argue that the treasure was intended for such a project and was better being used for an aqueduct than lying idle in the vaults. But the Jews regarded his action as robbery. Bands of resistance fighters, supported by crowds of ordinarily peaceful people, sabotaged the project by getting in the way of Pilate’s workmen. Pilate, angry, sent soldiers in plain clothes among the crowds with instructions to kill saboteurs. The soldiers got out of hand and the result was a bloody slaughter of hundreds of Jews, many of them entirely innocent.

In 36 AD, Pilate’s term of office was ended and nothing more is known of him save legend. He was remembered by the Jews as an unpopular and harsh governor.

The Trial of Jesus

At some time during his 10 years in office, according to the Christian gospels, there came before him on trial the Galilean, Jesus the Nazarene.

Each gospel has a differing version of what happened, but there is a common outline:

Jesus had been arrested by the Jewish governing assembly, the Sanhedrin, and convicted of blasphemy, for which the penalty was death. The affair of Pilate’s standards had shown how strict the Jews were on blasphemy. The Sanhedrin, it is said, lacked the power to execute a death sentence and so took the prisoner to Pilate, who was in Jerusalem for the Passover Feast, and accused him of treason against Rome. Pilate was by no means convinced of the guilt of the prisoner but, under pressure from the Jewish authorities, agreed to pass the death sentence. According to Matthew’s gospel, he disclaimed responsibility by washing his hands in front of a Jewish crowd, saying: “I am innocent of this man’s blood. It is your concern”.

For centuries, theologians, historians and lawyers have disputed over what really happened, but it is hard to tell because the gospel story is, plainly, incomplete.

What Pilate must have seen before him was a Jewish holy man, supposedly from Galilee, a troublesome territory outside his jurisdiction, but more probably seen as a member of the insurgent band called the Galilaeans after Judas of Galilee its founder. Such independent or semi-independent leaders, with their own groups of followers, were characteristic of the Jewish scene. Religion and politics were so intertwined that any religious teaching was potentially treasonable, especially such as that of Jesus, which referred to a new “kingdom” and apparently stirred up the people.

One document, almost certainly a medieval forgery, gives a description of Jesus supposedly based upon that given in the warrant for his arrest.

He is, in stature, a man of middle height and well proportioned. He has a venerable face, of a sort to arouse both fear and love in those who see him. His hair is of the colour of ripe chestnuts, smooth almost to the ears but above them waving and curling, with a slight bluish radiance, and it flows over his shoulders. It is parted in the middle on the top of his head, after the fashion of the Nazarenes. His brow is smooth and very calm, with a face without wrinkle or blemish, lightly tinged with red. His nose and mouth are faultless. His heard is luxuriant and unclipped of the same colour as his hair, not long, but parted at the chin.

That the prisoner before Pilate was so handsome is improbable. The earliest Christian traditions were that Jesus was an ugly, deformed person, but even they were based at least as much upon Old Testament prophecies as upon real memories. Even the age of the prisoner is uncertain. According to the gospels it could have been anywhere between 30 and 50. It is reasonable to guess, though, that, in view of the exceptional devotion the prisoner had won from his followers, he must have been a man of compelling personality. So shrewd an official as Pilate would have recognised this instantly.

The tenor of the prisoner’s teachings had been that he was heralding a “kingdom”, in the gospels, a spiritual one. Whether it was to come immediately or gradually is not clear from the New Testament, but the likeliest explanation is that Jesus expected it then, and later Christians had to keep postponing it. If the kingdom was merely a notional “spiritual” kingdom, Jesus could have defended himself against a charge of treason against Rome. Why, then, did Pilate condemn him to be crucified?

Why Crucify Him?

The gospel accounts, which reached their present form many decades after the event, are not concerned with legal detail. They were written and edited at a time when Christianity was becoming a separate religion fom Judaism and in constant controversy with orthodox Jewish rabbis. The gospels sprang from Christianity, not Christianity from the gospels. It is plain that the gospel writers were eager to stress what Jewish role there was in the condemnation of Jesus and to minimise Pilate’s role. They imply that Pilate acted unwillingly and under Jewish pressure. Jewish accounts have shown an opposite bias, minimising the role of the Jewish authorities and insisting that the crucifixion was a Roman form of punishment inflicted for an offence against Rome. If the accuracy as well as the completeness of the gospels is challenged, interesting questions can be asked.

For example, is it correct that the Jewish Sanhedrin had no power to inflict the death sentence? The only evidence, apart from the gospels, that it did not exercise such power is ambiguous. Certainly Jewish religions law specified death by stoning as the penalty for a variety of offences, including blasphemy. Chronology is difficult but it does appear, according to the Acts of the Apostles, that soon after the crucifixion the Sanhedrin condemned the martyr Stephen to death by stoning—without calling in the Roman authorities. The Sanhedrin had the notional power to execute people—even Roman citizens—who polluted the temple.

Assuming that the Sanhedrin was exercising its full customary powers, why did it not use them against Jesus? The answer must be that either he did not appear before it at all, or else he did appear and was found innocent. Was the procedure a trial at all? It took place at night, which would be an extraordinary time at which to hold a formal trial. Could it be that the Sanhedrin assembled in emergency session to inquire into the prisoner because he was already due for trial before Pilate in the morning?

Although official Jewish leaders may have found some aspects of Jesus’s teaching uncongenial, they would not, in the ordinary course of events, have wanted him to be executed by the alien Roman Power. The crucifixion by the occupying Power of any Jewish praacher was bad for Jewish prestige.

The Sanhedrin might have been actually trying to rescue Jesus. Knowing that he was about to be tried for treason, the Jewish authorities seized him and held a special night-time Sanhedrin session to probe his case.

Jesus irritated the Sanhedrin by claiming to be the Messiah. This was, under Jewish law, at most a minor blasphemy which should have been dealt with either by a flogging or by being left to the judgment of God.

The point about the claim to be the Messiah was that, at least potentially, it was a capital offence against Roman law. By sticking to the claim, Jesus was risking his own execution and so discredit to Judaism. This was why the Sanhedrin became so heated and the High Priest tore his clothes, a Jewish sign of mourning which still continues.

This theory stands up at least to the extent that nothing Jesus said, according to the gospels, constituted grave blasphemy. He did not claim to be God but, at most, to be the Christ Messiah) and the Son of God. In Jewish terminology of the time “Son of God” was a title applied to holy men. It was used roughly how modern Christian use of the word “saint” and did not imply divine status. The suggestion in the gospels that the Sanhedrin wanted to execute him because he had used such words is simply not in accord with Jewish practice of the time.

On the other hand, there is nothing inherently impossible in some Jews of that period being prepared to kill for religious reasons. Indeed, a disposition to settle religious difference by violence has always been part of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition. In Jesus’s own day, members of the party of Zealots were happy to kill fellow Jews who did not adopt their religio-political ideas. Some Jews were collaborators with Rome and unpopular enough to be targets for religious murder, and might themselves have “betrayed” a Jewish rebel for Pilate to execute.

On each interpretation, it comes back to Pilate. The death sentence was his responsibility.

He was acting against the background of Judaea being a troublesome province. He was accustomed to passing death sentences. Executions of rebels were a routine occurrence, which needed no precise legal framework.

Jesus appeared before him as a troublemaker. It was the difficult season of the Passover when Jerusalem was overcrowded and liable to break out in disorder. The prisoner made little attempt, according to the gospels, to deny the charges made or to plead for mercy. He talked of theological matters which to Pilate were abstruse and provoked from him the impatient question: “Truth, what is that?”

The gospel story is that evidence for his guilt was weak, and Pilate, for a moment, could not decide what to do. Then, although he liked the look of the prisoner (an extremely doubtful notion), he decided to give the benefit of the doubt to the accusers rather than the accused. Politically it was the safest thing to do—it was better to carry out a doubtful execution than risk the idea getting around that he was tolerating an enemy of Rome.

Myths of Pilate

At the time, the episode must have seemed routine. Perhaps, Pilate never thought of it again. Or he may have speculated about strange stories that Jesus had been seen alive by his followers after the execution. By the third century Tertullian was saying Pilate was a secret Christian…

…a Christian in his convictions.

Pilate may well have died a proud, prosperous self-made man without realising that one execution out of the hundreds he had ordered was going to make his name live down the ages. Historically, Pilate was exiled to Vienne in Gaul where he is supposed to have died or, some say, committed suicide, in poverty.

Of course later legends do not let the story end so simply. In their most elaborate form, they tell of the Emperor Tiberius falling ill and being told of a miraculous healer, Jesus, who could make him better. Tiberius wrote to Pilate to send Jesus to Rome. Pilate replied that he had just been crucified and sent a picture of him instead.

The picture cured Tiberius who, furious about the crucifixion, recalled Pilate to Rome. Pilate appeared before him wearing Jesus’s seamless coat and the Emperor found it impossible to be angry with him. As soon as Pilate had gone, the Emperor’s wrath boiled up again. He sent for Pilate, who again appeared in Jesus’s coat and again the Emperor found it impossible to be angry. Then the Emperor realised it was the coat which was abating his anger and he had Pilate stripped of it and thrown into prison. Pilate killed himself in prison and his body was thrown into the River Tiber. But it was so evil that it caused storms in the water. It was pulled out, taken to Vienne and dumped into the River Rhone. Again, evil spirits disturbed the water. Eventually it was taken to Switzerland and put into Lake Lucerne, where he remains, though still not at rest. Every Good Friday demons pull him out and put him on a throne, where he sits washing his hands.

There is a tradition that Pilate was beheaded by Tiberius, a possibility, though there was little time between Pilate’s recall and Tiberius’s death for a trial. Beheading was, though, the proper punishment for Roman citizens given a capital sentence. In Christian tradition, as his head fell off, it was caught up by angels and a voice declared:

All generations will call thee blessed… for under thee all these things were fulfilled.

Martyrdom became a Christian convention. Saints, church fathers, Popes and early Christians in general had to have been martyred. The word is simply the Greek for a witness, so it simply means that they were indeed Christians—witnesses to Christ, but even if Pilate was beheaded by Tiberius in 37 AD, it can hardly have been because he was a Christian. Of course, that would not stop Christians from claiming him. They have never been noted for their regard for historical accuracy.

Most legends have in common the assertion that Pilate died by suicide and that his burial place is lake Lucerne. The jagged mountain overlooking the lake is to this day named Mount Pilatus after him. Nowhere else has ever been claimed to be the resting place of Pontius Pilate.

His wife was assumed to have been a Christian because of her defence of Jesus in Matthew 27:19 when she warns Pilate she had dreamt that Jesus was an innocent man.

She was said to have been the illegitimate daughter of Julia, Augustus Caesar’s extremely loose daughter. Claudius was the name of a family of Roman nobles, to which belonged Tiberius. If she was indeed the adopted daughter of Tiberius, it might explain why Pilate remained in office so long when Tiberius was Emperor.

Tiberius had been obliged by Augustus and Livia to marry Julia when her husband Agrippa died. If Tiberius adopted Julia’s illigitimate daughter, she would have been given his family name, Claudia for a woman. Tiberius naturally hated Julia whose scandalous life forced him to go into exile on Rhodes, and later Augustus undid the wrong by punishing Julia for her indiscretions and allowing Tiberius to divorce her. Perhaps though Tiberius liked or pitied Julia’s daughter and continued to act as a father to her. As her husband, Pilate would therefore have been in a favoured position with Tiberius. Speculation but interesting.

Some Christians say she is the Claudia of the salutation to 2 Timothy 4:21, though there are vague grounds for British Christians to think that this Claudia was a British woman.

The Ethiopian Church (the Coptic Christians) canonized Pilate as a saint in the sixth century because he absolved himself from guilt in the crucifixion. His holy day is 25 June. The Greek Orthodox church canonized his wife, Claudia Procula or Procla.

Comment

Yoleena Behira writes: First, sorry for my poor English… it is but my 3rd language. In your article, you say:

Most legends have in common the assertion that Pilate died by suicide and that his burial place is lake Lucerne. The jagged mountain overlooking the lake is to this day named Mount Pilatus after him. Nowhere else has ever been claimed to be the resting place of Pontius Pilate.

This is not true. According to my country’s (France) tradition, but also to my family’s tradition and to searches my ancestors did, he was buried in Vienne, France, where he was exiled after 36. You can still see his tomb there, the “vault of Pilate”. From what I know he never became a Christian and was not executed. Also, his wife Claudia wasn’t Jewish, but definitely of Jewish blood, since she was a grand daughter of King Herod through her father, and a 3rd great grand daughter of Caius Julius Caesar through her mother. The funniest is that it was Pontius Pilatus who had a Jewish mother, who was related to the High Priests in Judaea (sanhedrin), and also to the royal family of Judah (davidic lineage). Also, his real name at birth was Lucius Publius Pontius, and Pilatus was added way later, for military exploits. I hope it helped a litle bit!

James Forcucci adds—You might be interested in a book on this subject entitled Relics of Repentance: The Letters of Pontius Pilate & Claudia Procula. The book can be found at “amazon.com” or by visiting the publisher’s website.