Pontius Pilate

• 1. Introduction

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  Pontius Pilate is the only person, apart from Jesus and Mary, whose name is spoken aloud in the Christian creeds. The Nicene Creed says that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered death and was buried. The Apostles Creed uses nearly the same words. Many Christians recite them every week. The line pins the crucifixion to a real ruler in a real time, which is why his name was kept in.

  For a name repeated so often, the man behind it is hard to see. A few ancient writers describe him, a broken inscription carries his title, and some small coins bear his office. How much of the real Pilate can be recovered from such scraps? What did he actually do in the province he governed? And why did later generations make him a saint in one tradition and a damned soul in another?

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• 2. A Governor Without a Past

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  Marie-Joseph Ollivier points out that the Gospels of Mark and John call him only Pilate, never Pontius. He takes this as the name by which people knew him in everyday speech. His first name is lost. His family name Pilatus may mean skilled with the javelin, or pilum, which would hint at military service by Pilate or by his father. It might instead refer to the pileus, a Phrygian cap, which would suggest that an ancestor had been a freedman. No source describes his life before he reached Judaea.

  The name Pontius points to Samnium, in central southern Italy. Pilate may have belonged to the family of Gavius Pontius and Pontius Telesinus, Samnite leaders of the third and first centuries BC. Another Pontius, Pontius Aquila, who was one of Julius Caesar's assassins, served as a tribune of the plebs. That suggests the family began as plebeian and later rose to the equestrian order, the middle rank of Roman nobility. All governors of Judaea but one belonged to it. Pilate was probably educated, somewhat wealthy and well connected.

  A single verse, Matthew 27:19, mentions his wife. She tells him to have nothing to do with Jesus after a disturbing dream. Scholars generally treat the scene as legend, although Pilate was probably married. The career path set by Augustus for equestrian office holders called for a military command first. The historian Alexander Demandt speculates that Pilate served with a legion stationed on the Rhine or the Danube. Even his military service is not certain.

  The best written evidence comes from Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary Jewish writer whose Embassy to Gaius dates to after the year 41. Josephus, the Jewish historian, discussed Pilate in The Jewish War, written around 74 AD, and in Antiquities of the Jews, around 94 AD. The four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and the First Epistle to Timothy add more. Ignatius of Antioch names him in letters composed between 105 and 110. Tacitus says only that Pilate put Jesus to death, and two lost chapters of his Annals might have said more. Every author had an agenda, and the gospels in particular offer theology rather than objective history. Even so, Pilate is the best-attested of all the Roman governors of Judaea.

  Josephus says that Pilate governed for ten years, traditionally dated from 26 to 36 or 37 AD under Emperor Tiberius. That made him one of the two longest-serving governors of the province, although the post carried relatively low prestige. Nothing is known about how he won it. Tiberius had retired to the island of Capri in 26, so E. Stauffer argued that the powerful Praetorian Prefect Sejanus, executed for treason in 31, may have appointed him. Other scholars doubt any such link. Daniel Schwartz and Kenneth Lönnqvist argue that Josephus erred and that Pilate began in 19 or in 17 or 18. Few scholars accept those earlier dates.

  His title of prefect suggests military duties, but his troops worked more as a police force than as an army. He headed the judicial system and could order executions. He collected tribute and taxes, paid out public funds and minted coins. Because Rome allowed some local control, he shared limited civil and religious authority with the Jewish Sanhedrin. Like other governors, he lived mainly in Caesarea and went up to Jerusalem chiefly for the major feasts, to keep order.

  Above him stood the legate of Syria, yet Lucius Aelius Lamia was absent from the region for Pilate's first six years. Helen Bond believes this may have caused him difficulties. He seems to have ruled as he pleased until Lucius Vitellius took the Syrian post in 35.

  Pilate had the right to appoint the Jewish High Priest and kept the High Priest's vestments in the Antonia Fortress. Unlike his predecessor Valerius Gratus, he kept the same high priest, Joseph ben Caiaphas, for his entire tenure. Caiaphas was removed only after Pilate himself fell. Scholars read this as a sign that Caiaphas and the Sadducee priests were dependable allies. Jean-Pierre Lémonon notes that the Pharisees are absent from the gospel accounts of Jesus's arrest and trial, and he concludes that official cooperation was limited to the Sadducees.

  Luke 23:12 says Pilate had a bad relationship with Herod Antipas, the Galilean Jewish king, and that it mended after Jesus was executed. Schwartz considers both details possibly historical. John 19:12 hints that Pilate may have held the title friend of Caesar, which Herod Agrippa I and Herod Agrippa II also held. Schwartz and Demandt both think this unlikely. Allies among the priests did not shield him from the anger of ordinary people, and the sources record several outbreaks of it.

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• 3. Clashes with His Subjects

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  Schwartz describes Pilate's whole tenure as marked by "continued underlying tension between governor and governed, now and again breaking out in brief incidents." Joan Taylor argues that Pilate promoted the imperial cult, which would explain much of the friction. The sources are hard to line up, and in some cases it is unclear whether they describe the same event at all.

  Josephus tells of imperial standards bearing the image of Caesar that Pilate brought into Jerusalem. Bond notes that he did it by night, which shows he knew the images would offend. A crowd surrounded his house in Caesarea for five days. Pilate then summoned them to an arena, where Roman soldiers drew their swords. The protesters showed so little fear of death that Pilate gave way and removed the standards. Bond places this early in his term.

  Philo describes golden shields that Pilate placed on Herod's Palace in Jerusalem, in a way that offended Jewish law. The sons of Herod the Great asked him to remove them, and he refused. They then threatened to petition the emperor, and Pilate feared that a petition would expose crimes he had committed in office. He did not stop them. Tiberius received the petition, reprimanded Pilate angrily and ordered the shields taken down. Bond, Schwartz and Warren Carter argue that Philo's account is stereotyped and rhetorical. The shields probably carried an inscription calling Tiberius divi Augusti filius, son of the divine Augustus. Bond dates the episode to 31, after Sejanus died on the 17th of October. The early church historian Eusebius identified the shields with the standards, and Schwartz and Demandt agree, though Lémonon does not.

  Josephus reports that Pilate paid for a new aqueduct to Jerusalem out of the temple treasury, known as the korbanos. Paul Maier argues that he could not have done so without the cooperation of the priests. A mob formed while Pilate was visiting Jerusalem, and he ordered his troops to beat the crowd with clubs. Many people died from the blows or were trampled by horses. Bond argues that the incident must fall between 26 and 30 or 33.

  Luke 13:1 mentions in passing Galileans "whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices." Scholars disagree about whether this refers to an incident Josephus recorded or to one otherwise unknown. Bond thinks the number killed was not especially high and that the mention of sacrifices points to a Passover. She adds that "it is not only possible but quite likely that Pilate's governorship contained many such brief outbreaks of trouble about which we know nothing." The insurrection in which Barabbas was caught up, if it happened, may be another example.

  Modern historians are divided. Some see a brutal and inept governor. Others point to his long tenure as proof of moderate competence. A once-prominent theory that blamed his actions on antisemitism is now largely rejected. The ruling for which he is remembered came at a Passover in Jerusalem, and it is the one event that the gospels, Tacitus and Josephus all attribute to him.

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• 4. The Judgment of Jesus

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  At a Passover in most likely 30 or 33, Pilate condemned Jesus of Nazareth to crucifixion in Jerusalem. Tacitus confirms it when he explains Nero's persecution of Christians: "Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment..." Josephus also mentions the execution, carried out at the request of prominent Jews. Christian hands may have altered his text, but the reference itself is generally thought authentic. Demandt suggests the Romans barely noticed the event, because many people were crucified and forgotten.

  Bond argues that Jesus's arrest happened with Pilate's prior knowledge. She points to John 18:3, where the arresting party includes a Roman cohort of five hundred men. Demandt rejects the idea that Pilate was involved. The charge was generally assumed to be sedition, founded on the claim to be king of the Jews. Pilate may have tried Jesus under the cognitio extra ordinem, a procedure for capital cases against non-citizens that gave a prefect extra flexibility.

  All four gospels say Pilate customarily released one prisoner at Passover. No other source mentions the custom. Historians disagree about whether the gospels invented it, whether it reflects real practice, or whether it records a single amnesty in the year Jesus died.

  The gospels show a reluctant Pilate pushed toward the cross by the crowd and the Jewish authorities. John P. Meier observes that in Josephus, by contrast, "Pilate alone … is said to condemn Jesus to the cross." S. G. F. Brandon concluded that Pilate unhesitatingly executed a rebel. Paul Winter argued that Christians grew keener to present Pilate as a witness to Jesus's innocence as Roman persecution of them increased. Bart Ehrman notes that Mark, the earliest gospel, has Pilate and the Jews agreeing on the execution at Mark 15:15. Later gospels lessen Pilate's guilt step by step, until John 19:16 has Pilate let the Jews crucify Jesus. Ehrman links this drift to rising anti-Judaism.

  Raymond E. Brown held that the gospel Pilate cannot be historical, since Josephus and Philo describe a cruel and obstinate man. He also rejected the hand-washing and the blood curse, which appear only in Matthew. Brian McGing and Bond see no real conflict between the Pilate of Josephus and Philo and the Pilate of the gospels. Carter argues that Mark, Matthew and John show a skilled governor manipulating the crowd, and that only Luke has him pressed into an execution. N. T. Wright and Craig A. Evans propose that Pilate hesitated because he feared a revolt when pilgrims packed Jerusalem. A crowd on a mountain in Samaria would later end his career.

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• 5. Recall and Silence

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  Near a village called Tirathana, by Mount Gerizim, armed Samaritans gathered in the hope of finding artifacts that Moses had buried there, according to Josephus. Pilate slaughtered them. Demandt suggests that their leader may have been Dositheos, a messiah-like figure active among the Samaritans at that time. The Samaritans insisted they had not been armed and complained to Lucius Vitellius the Elder, who governed Syria from 35 to 39. Vitellius had Pilate sent to Rome to answer to Tiberius. The emperor died first, at Misenum on the 16th of March 37, in his seventy-eighth year, so Pilate's governorship ended in 36 or 37.

  The new emperor was Caligula, and it is unclear whether any hearing took place. New emperors often dismissed unfinished legal matters from the previous reign. The only certain result is that Pilate never governed Judaea again. Lémonon argues this need not mean the hearing went badly, since a man who had served ten years might simply have been due a new posting. Taylor holds that Pilate ended in disgrace, and she cites the unflattering portrait that Philo wrote only a few years after the dismissal.

  Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century, reports that "tradition relates that" Pilate killed himself after falling into disgrace following his recall. Eusebius dates the suicide to 39. Maier observes that no other surviving record backs this up, and that Eusebius cites only tradition, which suggests he struggled to document it. Schwartz warns against dismissing the claim lightly.

  Other voices point the other way. The pagan philosopher Celsus, in the second century, asked why God had not punished Pilate if Jesus was divine. That question implies Celsus did not believe Pilate died shamefully. The Christian apologist Origen, writing around 248 AD, replied that nothing bad had happened to Pilate, because the Jews and not Pilate were responsible for the death of Jesus. Josephus, Philo and Tacitus all leave out any suicide. Maier concludes that Pilate most probably lived on as a pensioned former magistrate. Taylor adds that Philo writes about Pilate as if he were already dead. Archaeology has recovered a few physical traces of his rule, starting with a stone found in 1961.

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• 6. Traces in Stone and Bronze

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  Archaeologists working at Caesarea Maritima in 1961 uncovered the so-called Pilate Stone. It is the only inscription about a Roman governor of Judaea from before the Jewish-Roman wars to survive. Jerry Vardaman freely translates the broken text as "Tiberium ?of the Caesareans? Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea ... has given?". Apart from Pilate's name and title, little is clear. The stone confirms his title as prefect and seems to name a building called a Tiberieum, a word found nowhere else. Bond says we cannot know what kind of building it was. Géza Alföldy thought it a lighthouse, while Taylor and Vardaman see a temple to Tiberius. The text once included an abbreviated first name, perhaps T for Titus or M for Marcus.

  A second inscription, now lost, was recorded in Ameria, a village in Umbria, Italy. It was a fragmentary block of marble that once stood outside the church of St. Secundus, copied from a presumed original. Only the name Pilate and the title quattuorvir, a local official who conducted a census every five years, are clear. Around 1900 it was widely held to be a forgery, made to support a local legend that Pontius Pilate died in exile there. Demandt and Henry MacAdam believe it is genuine but names someone else who shared the family name. MacAdam argues that the broken text more likely inspired the legend than that a forger created it.

  The coins tell a more direct story. Pilate struck them in the years 29-30, 30-31 and 31-32, the fourth, fifth and sixth years of his governorship. They are small bronze pieces called perutah, between 13.5 and 17 millimetres across, minted in Jerusalem and crudely made. The earlier issues name Tiberius and his mother Livia, whom they call Julia, in Greek. After Livia died, they name only Tiberius. As usual for Judaea, they carry no portrait of the emperor but do show some pagan designs. Stauffer and E. M. Smallwood argued that the designs were meant to offend and that they changed with the fall of Sejanus. Bond sees nothing offensive in them. Taylor reads them as another effort to promote the imperial cult despite Jewish and Samaritan sensitivities.

  Attempts to identify Josephus's aqueduct began in the 19th century. In the mid-20th century, A. Mazar tentatively named the Arrub aqueduct, which carried water from Solomon's Pools to Jerusalem, and Lönnqvist backed him in 2000. Lönnqvist points to the Talmud, in Lamentations Rabbah 4.4, which says the Sicarii, a group of fanatical Zealots, destroyed an aqueduct from Solomon's Pools during the First Jewish-Roman War, from 66 to 73. If temple money paid for it, that could explain why they chose it. Research published in 2021, however, dates another feeder of Solomon's Pools, the Biar Aqueduct, to the mid-first century, probably in Pilate's time.

  In 2018, modern scanning revealed lettering on a thin copper-alloy sealing ring found at Herodium. It reads ΠΙΛΑΤΟ(Υ), meaning "of Pilate." The name is rare, so the ring could be linked to Pontius Pilate. Its cheap metal makes it unlikely that he owned it. The owner may have been another man named Pilate, or someone who worked for the governor. Long before archaeologists dug, writers were already putting words in Pilate's mouth.

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• 7. Sinner and Saint

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  Eusebius, in his Church History 9.2.5, reports that texts claiming to be Pilate's own report on the crucifixion were circulated during the persecution under the emperor Maximinus II, who reigned from 308 to 313. They denounced Jesus and Christianity. None survive, but Tibor Grüll argues that their contents can be reconstructed from Christian replies. Pilate had become a tool of propaganda for both pagans and Christians.

  The Christian world split over him. Eastern Christianity, particularly in Egypt and Ethiopia, often told positive stories, while the West and Byzantium leaned negative. Earlier Christian tradition is kinder than later tradition. Ann Wroe suggests that after the Edict of Milan in 312, Christians no longer needed to deflect blame from Rome onto the Jews. Ehrman instead sees the earlier kindness as a symptom of growing anti-Judaism. Tertullian claimed to have seen Pilate's report to Tiberius and said Pilate had "become already a Christian in his conscience." Around 160, Justin Martyr referred to Pilate's records of the trial. Grüll thinks this may point to real records, while others think Justin assumed they existed.

  From the fourth century onward, Christians produced one of the largest bodies of New Testament apocrypha around Pilate. The Gospel of Peter clears him entirely and makes Herod Antipas carry out the crucifixion. In the most common version of the Gospel of Nicodemus, also called the Acts of Pilate, Pilate is forced by the Jews to execute Jesus and is distraught afterward. One version says a Jewish convert named Ananias found and translated it as the official Jewish record. Another says Pilate himself wrote it, using reports from Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. Some Eastern versions make him Egyptian by birth, which probably helped his popularity there. The wider Pilate cycle includes at least fifteen texts. Among them are a report from Pilate to Tiberius, a letter to Claudius, an angry reply from Tiberius, and a letter attributed to "Herod" asking Pilate to pray for him.

  The Book of the Cock survives only in Ge'ez, the Ethiopic language, translated from Arabic. In it Pilate tries to save Jesus by sending him to Herod. Jesus cures Pilate's daughters of being deaf and mute, and the family becomes Christian. A furious crowd still forces Pilate to execute Jesus, but Jesus tells him he does not hold him responsible. Ethiopian Christians give the book a quasi-canonical status and read it alongside the canonical gospels during Holy Week. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church believes Pilate became a Christian, and the Coptic Church historically held the same belief.

  Seven texts describe how Pilate died. Three make him a holy figure and four make him diabolically evil. A fifth-century Syriac version of the Acts of Pilate has him pray and convert before his execution, becoming a martyr. In the Greek Paradosis Pilati, a voice from heaven calls him blessed as he is beheaded. The Martyrium Pilati has Pilate, his wife and their two children crucified twice for their faith, once by the Jews and once by Tiberius. In the Western stories, Pilate kills himself. In the Cura sanitatis Tiberii, Tiberius is healed by an image of Jesus brought by Saint Veronica, Nero exiles Pilate, and he takes his own life. In the Mors Pilati, recorded around 1300, his body is thrown into the Tiber, and demons and storms follow it. It is moved to the Rhone with the same results, then buried in an isolated lake near Lausanne, perhaps Lake Lucerne.

  The earliest full legendary biography is the De Pilato of around 1050. It says that Atus, an astrologer king in Mainz, fathered Pilate with a miller's daughter named Pila, and the boy's name combines theirs. Pilate kills his half-brother, is sent to Rome as a hostage and kills another hostage there. He is punished by being sent to the island of Pontius, whose people he conquers, which gives him his full name. He then seizes power from Herod. When the emperor falls ill, Veronica's cloth with the face of Christ comes to Rome. The emperor's anger melts whenever he sees Pilate, until Jesus's coat is taken off him. Pilate kills himself, and his body is moved from the Tiber to Vienne and then to a lake in the high Alps. In the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, written between 1263 and 1273, Pilate is tied to Judas.

  Europe filled with local claims. Lyon and Vienne both say they are his birthplace, and Vienne has a Maison de Pilate, a Prétoire de Pilate and a Tour de Pilate. Mount Pilatus in Switzerland has been linked to him since 1273, and Lake Lucerne has been called the Pilatus-See since the fourteenth century. Mainz, Bamberg and Hausen in Upper Franconia claim his birth, while Saarland claims his death. The first-century Roman tower in Tarragona has been called the Torre del Pilatos since the eighteenth century, possibly from a misread Latin inscription. The Scottish village of Fortingall says he was born there, but this is almost certainly a 19th-century invention, since Rome did not invade the British Isles until 43. In the East, the Byzantine chronicler George Kedrenos wrote around 1100 that Caligula sentenced Pilate to be left in the sun sealed in a freshly slaughtered cow's skin with a chicken, a snake and a monkey.

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• 8. Pilate on Canvas and Screen

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  The earliest known artwork showing Pilate is a Christian sarcophagus from 330 AD, in which he washes his hands without Jesus present. He is absent from the very oldest Christian art. Forty-four depictions survive from before the sixth century, on ivory, in mosaics and manuscripts and on sarcophagi. Artists modeled him as a seated Roman judge, borrowing the raised seat and clothing of emperor portraits. From the eleventh century, he is often shown as a bearded Jewish king in a Jewish hat. The Hildesheim cathedral doors, from the eleventh century, are among the earliest examples, and they also show the Devil influencing him. Despite the veneration of the Coptic and Ethiopian Churches, very few images of Pilate exist in those traditions.

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, painters often dressed Pilate as a Turk in a turban. Tintoretto's Christ before Pilate of 1566-67 gave him the forehead of a philosopher. Gerrit van Honthorst's Christ before Pilate of 1617 was later recatalogued as Christ before the High Priest because Pilate looked so Jewish. J. M. W. Turner's Pilate Washing His Hands of 1830 shows only the back of the governor's chair. Mihály Munkácsy's Christ before Pilate of 1881 made him famous, especially in the United States, where it was bought. Nikolai Ge's What is truth? of 1890 was banned from exhibition in Russia in part because viewers read Pilate as standing for the tsarist authorities. Today the condemnation by Pilate is the first scene of the Stations of the Cross in almost all Catholic churches.

  Medieval passion plays made Pilate more prominent than Jesus himself. The thirteenth-century Ludus de Passione from Klosterneuburg shows a weak administrator who yields to the Jews. In Arnoul Gréban's fifteenth-century Passion, he coaches the men who whip Jesus. In the Wakefield plays he calls himself Satan's agent while plotting the worst torture. In the York cycle he bullies Judas into going through with the betrayal, refuses him a post afterward, and cheats his way into owning the Potter's field. Chaucer parodied the loud, commanding actor who played him in English plays. Colum Hourihane argues that continental plays fed antisemitic tropes. He suggests that in England, where Jews had been expelled in 1290, Pilate may instead have satirized corrupt officials and judges. One fifteenth-century play, La Vengeance de Nostre-Seigneur, has Pilate tied to a pillar, covered in oil and honey and slowly dismembered over 21 days.

  Anatole France's story of 1892, "Le Procurateur de Judée," shows an old Pilate banished to Sicily, living happily as a farmer with gout and obesity. He spends his days at the baths of Baiae and cannot remember Jesus at all. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita in the 1930s, but it appeared only in 1966, twenty-six years after he died. MacAdam calls it the cult classic of Pilate fiction. It contains a novel within the novel, written by a figure called the Master, in which Pilate wants to save Yeshu Ha-Notsri but is too cowardly to do it. Soviet critics attacked the Master for "Pilatism." Critics in the 1960s read this Pilate as "a model of the spineless provincial bureaucrats of Stalinist Russia." The Master frees him from his guilt at the end. Demandt notes that most literature about Pilate appeared after the Second World War, which he reads as dissatisfaction with Pilate's washing of his hands. Friedrich Dürrenmatt published his story "Pilatus" in 1949, and Chingiz Aitmatov's 1986 novel Plakha stages a long dialogue between Pilate and Jesus.

  Film began showing Pilate early. In the 1927 silent film The King of Kings, Victor Varconi plays him beneath a Roman eagle thirty-seven feet high. Christopher McDonough reads the eagle as showing power that possesses him rather than power he holds. The 1959 film Ben-Hur casts Frank Thring Jr. as a bored, sneering Pilate, and Ann Wroe says its chariot race scene seemed modeled on the Hitler footage of the 1936 Olympics. Only one film, the 1962 Ponzio Pilato with Jean Marais, tells the story from his side. In Monty Python's Life of Brian, Michael Palin's Pilate lisps and mispronounces his Rs. David Bowie plays him in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, and Hristo Shopov plays a sympathetic Pilate in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004.

  Matthew 27:24 gave English the phrase to wash one's hands of a matter. Lines from the Gospel of John, quoted in the Latin Vulgate, are famous too: Quid est veritas, "What is truth?", Ecce homo, "Behold the man!", and Quod scripsi, scripsi, "What I have written, I have written." Blaming the Jews for the crucifixion in place of Pilate has been blamed for stirring up antisemitism from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century. The Ethiopian Church keeps Pilate's feast day on the 19th of June, and the Coptic Church historically kept the 25th of June.

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