Portrait of a Busy Man

What is truth?” So questioned the Roman Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, of a strange prophet brought before him charged with treason. The prophet was Jesus of Nazareth and Pilate condemned him to death.

Because of this episode, Pilate became the best-known imperial administrator the Romans ever employed. The words ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate’ have been recited in Christian Creeds for 2000 years. A snap decision in a minor case ensured that his name would live as long as history.

For Christians, Pilate’s name is important because it provides evidence of the date of the crucifixion. The fact that Pilate was Governor of Judea from 26 to 36 AD helps to establish Jesus 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. This can be done, 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 the government at the top without passing through the ranks.

Pilate’s territory, Judea, 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 (this title was changed to Procurator in 41 AD), and was answerable both to the Legate and directly to the Emperor. The fact of his existence was finally corroborated by a stone dug up at his capital Caesarea: it is inscribed: Pontius Praefectus Provinciae Judaeae.

For appointment as Prefect a man’s family background 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 Pilate was an able or even brilliant officer, trusted by the Emperor. The Gospels imply that he was a `friend of Caesar’; this is an honorific designation conferred by the Emperor on favoured officers, and one which could be withdrawn. The name Pontius Pilate fits a natural born citizen from central Italy.

Judea was an important post because it contained 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 their 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 Judea was responsible to Rome for the good order of the most (to the Romans) troublesome religious cult in the Empire.

To make things yet more difficult for him, the Jewish faith had political implications. The Jews were expecting their God to send them an inspired leader a ‘Messiah’ who would free their holy land from alien rule. Some thought he would merely lead them to political independence; others that he would enable them to conquer the world; yet others, that the world in its existing form, would be ended altogether. The whole complex of doctrine meant that the Jews, unlike other subordinate peoples in the Roman system, seethed with rebellious notions. They did eventually twice mount armed insurrection in 66 and 132 AD.

For a Roman official to rule such a territory effectively required a superhuman combination of tact and energy: Pilate appears to have been strong on energy but weak on tact. His trust in a crisis lay in his troops.

How much he knew about Judaism is not clear. At any rate, he must have had religious advisers. The difficulty was that Judaism was less a single coherent religion than a complex of sects and teachers revolving around the central idea of one invisible God, and the Divine Law. The arguments among the Jews were so involved that it was hard for the outsider to grasp what was going on.

In 26AD Pilate took up his residence at Caesarea, the administrative capital on the coast. This was 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.

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 Roman gods. However much or little he knew about Judaism, he should have known that the proximity of such things to the temple of the Living God would cause the gravest offence. All Jewish sects were united in hating idols.

The Jews sent a deputation to demand the removal of the standards. Pilate said the demand was an insult to Rome 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 in so doing provoke an uprising of a serious nature, or else climb down over the matter of the standards. He chose the latter and the standards were removed.

Some years later Pilate tried another trial of strength, centred on the Temple. As the heart of a religious belief that was spread right across the Empire and beyond, the Temple had great wealth. There was a Temple tax paid by every devout Jew and there were freewill offerings from worshippers. By Jewish law, the funds were used to maintain the Temple and for general social purposes.

Pilate decided that Jerusalem needed an improved water supply. This was typical of a Roman administrator. The Romans were very keen on sewerage and piped water and many a man endeavoured to make his name and leave his mark with an engineering feat connected with water. Pilate decided on a 25-mile aqueduct to bring water to the city.

To pay for it, he seized arbitrarily some of the Temple treasure. Pilate’s argument was that the treasure was intended for such a project, and was better used for the aqueduct than lying idle in the vaults. The widows and fatherless just did not come into the scheme of things. But the Jews regarded his action as outright robbery. Resistance fighters, supported by crowds of ordinarily peaceful people, sabotaged the project by getting in the way of Pilate’s workmen. Pilate, furious, retaliated in similar vein, sending his soldiers in plain clothes among the crowds with instructions to kill all saboteurs. The result was a slaughter of hundreds of Jews, many of them entirely innocent.

In 36 AD, Pilate’s term of office came to an end and nothing more is known of him. He was remembered by the Jews as an unpopular and harsh Governor.

At some time during his 10 years in office, according to the Gospels, there came before him on trial the Galilean preacher, Jesus of Nazareth.

Each Gospel has the same story to tell in broad outline, but with variance of light and shade and amount of detail. 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 sticky 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 at 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. Matthew’s Gospel says he disclaimed responsi­bility by washing his hands in front of the Jewish crowd saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves” (Matt. 27:24).

For centuries, theologians, historians and lawyers have disputed over what really happened, unable to be content with the main details and simple account in the Gospels.

What Pilate must have seen before him was a Jewish holy man from Galilee, a troublesome territory outside his jurisdiction. Such independent teachers, with their own groups of followers, were characteristic of the Jewish scene.

It is quite possible that Pilate had never even heard of Jesus, whose public teaching had lasted at most three years.

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.

Through the centuries, artists have painted pictures of Jesus Christ, drawn from their own conceptions of Christ from the Old Testament and the Gospels. Whatever the prisoner before Pilate looked like, he must have been a man of compelling personality; so shrewd an official as Pilate would have recognised this instantly.

It can be assumed that Pilate was aware that some Jews of the period were prepared to kill for religious as well as political reasons. Indeed, a disposition to settle religious difference by violence continued for many centuries in the Jewish — Christian — Islamic triangle. In Jesus’ own day members of the party of Zealots were certainly willing to kill fellow Jews who did not adopt their religio-political ideas. Also some were collaborators with Rome and it is not incredible that they might curry favour by finding a ‘Rebel’ for Pilate to execute.

Jesus had irritated the Sanhedrin by claiming to be the Messiah, thus giving them the excuse to take him before Pilate, instead of actually killing him themselves by stoning, for blasphemy. The point about the claim to be the Messiah was that, at least potentially, it was a capital offence against Roman Law.

However, the tenor of the prisoner’s teaching had been that he was heralding a spiritual Kingdom rather than political at this time. Thus on any straight-forward interpretation, Jesus could have defended himself against Rome. Pilate was not interested in one Jew’s accusations of another Jew’s blasphemy. Why, then, did Pilate condemn him to be crucified? For on any interpretation it came back to Pilate. The death sentence was his responsibility.

He was acting against the background of Judea 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 into disorder. The prisoner made little attempt to deny the charges or to plead for mercy, finally provoking from Pilate the impatient question, “What is truth?”

Evidence for his guilt was weak and Pilate, for a moment, genuinely could not decide what to do. Then, 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 something doubtful rather than risk the wrong ideas getting wound about him.

Perhaps Pilate never thought of it again; never realised that one execution out of the hundreds he had ordered was going to make his name live down the ages.

Pontius Pilate’s personality flashes across the pages of scripture and history as that of a busy man who tolerated something that he thought might have been wrong and then tried to disclaim responsibility.

There have been and are many others like him