It was another of the items which reminded Pilate of that fateful Passover, but in this case he merely felt vindicated. “See, Procula,” he contended, “if I hadn’t been in Jerusalem for that Passover, they would have stoned Jesus in precisely the same way as this Stephen and called it a mob action which could not be prevented.”
Her answer was unbending. “But you were in Jerusalem.”
A shock in Pilate’s private life at Caesarea was what he called the “spiritual defection” of Cornelius. Responding to his wife’s genuine Judaism, the centurion had had their first child, a boy, circumcised. And now he himself became a near-convert to the Jewish faith. Indulging a traditional Roman prejudice, Pilate found it difficult to accept Cornelius’s new religious allegiance. The centurion tried to explain that he was not a full proselyte; he just admired and shared the Jewish belief in one God. He claimed it was a magnificent substitute for the gods and goddesses of Roman paganism which Pilate himself despised. But his interest in Judaism should in no way affect their close friendship, Cornelius insisted.
But it did. With regret, Pilate noticed the beginnings of a change in their relationship. The old camaraderie had waned when Cornelius became a family man, which was understandable. But beyond this was the man’s new religiosity: he attended worship in the local synagogue and soon began contributing to its support. He was even known to pray privately on occasion. It was all very un-Roman, a bitter disappointment to Pilate. On the other hand, the Jewish community in Caesarea was pleased that a highly placed Roman in the provincial capital should follow their faith, even if he had not become a full proselyte. This might well diminish future friction between Pilate and the Jews.
But there was less chance of such abrasions now. The Sanhedrin, in full alarm at the growth of the Nazarene movement, had no time for any further tilts with Pilate. A general persecution against the sect was instituted, a house-by-house search for adherents of Jesus, who now fled Jerusalem and scattered across the country districts of Palestine. An ardent young student of Gamaliel named Saul was serving as zealous inquisitor in ferreting out any who remained and packing them off to prison. Finally, only the disciples stayed in Jerusalem, and even they left periodically to spread the rapidly growing new faith.
Pilate had no time to plumb the theological niceties of the movement, nor did he concern himself with any of the journeying apostles. His total attention was now claimed by the arrival of the new governor of Syria, Lucius Vitellius, fresh from his consulship at Rome. He had had a highly successful administration, and Tiberius placed such great confidence in Vitellius that he came armed with an extraordinary command to settle all affairs in the turbulent Roman East, not just in his appointed province of Syria.
The Near East was in turmoil because the Parthian Empire, that perennial dagger in Rome’s eastern flank, was now making a renewed twist. Convinced that Tiberius was an unpopular old man who would do nothing to oppose him, King Artabanus III of Parthia moved to control Armenia, which was Rome’s protectorate. But by building disaffection inside Parthia and allying with her enemies, Tiberius resisted. The capable Vitellius was dispatched to carry out this policy, and his intrigues with leading Parthian magnates to replace Artabanus so rattled the king that he was ready to talk terms. Vitellius marched his Syrian legions to the banks of the Euphrates and negotiated a settlement with Artabanus in the middle of a specially constructed bridge spanning the river. They agreed that Rome would recognize Artabanus in Parthia, while he would recognize Rome’s control of Armenia. It was an astute diplomatic coup for Vitellius, who had triumphed without shedding a drop of Roman blood or spending a needless sesterce.
And Pontius Pilate had watched it all happen with a good deal of chagrin, because Vitellius’s assistant at the negotiations was none other than the sometime foe-and-friend, Herod Antipas. Friends they might he, ever since the reconciliation in Jerusalem, but rivals they would remain, and each had sought an opportunity to pay court to Vitellius upon his arrival in Syria. Antipas had won—handsomely. Vitellius had taken the tetrarch with him to the Euphrates parley because he could speak Aramaic, the diplomatic language of the entire Near East. And Antipas made the most of this foray into international affairs. He entertained the negotiating parties at a sumptuous banquet in a pavilion pitched on the bridge itself, and immediately afterward wrote Tiberius a glowing account of the whole affair. While this annoyed Vitellius, whose official report to the princeps arrived later as old news, Antipas’s stock was never higher in Rome.
Just when Herod Antipas was looking his best, events in Samaria were daubing an unflattering portrait of Pilate. Samaria comprised the northern third of his province, a hilly country peopled by half-breed Israelites of mixed Semitic stock. The Jews despised these neighboring cousins, and were despised by them, not merely because of racial but also religious differences. Pilate had paid scant attention to the Samaritans, but when rumbles developed among them, he turned to his advisers for a briefing.
The Samaritans, he was told, recognized only the five books of Moses as true Scripture, banning all the other Hebrew prophets from their canon. They had even erected a rival temple to counter Jerusalem’s on Mount Gerizim, which lay south of their capital, Sebaste, but a Jewish prince had destroyed the temple a century and a half ago, and it was never rebuilt. Mount Gerizim, however, remained sacred to the Samaritans, so holy in fact that an unscrupulous demagogue who specialized in mendacity was now using the mountain as his prime prop in a mass religious confidence game. For weeks he had been advertising himself as the long-awaited Messianic Taheb or “Restorer,” and many credulous Samaritans believed that he was truly the prophet Moses had predicted when he had said, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your midst, from your brethren: him you shall heed.”
And the people were certainly paying heed to the counterfeit holy man. Fresh information reaching Caesarea told of a mass movement developing under his aegis. As proof for his claims, the would-be Second Moses now promised to perform the gesture expected of the Samaritan Messiah: he would lead them up Mount Gerizim and unearth the sacred vessels from the Ark of the Covenant which Moses had secretly concealed in a cave somewhere in the mount. After that, Pilate’s council advised, the Samaritan masses would probably hail the man as the Restorer and inaugurate his rule by rebuilding their temple and fortifying Gerizim. In Samaritan beliefs, it would be the beginning of the millennium, when the holy mount, which had once been the site of the Garden of Eden, so they taught, would again constitute Paradise.
The tragic deception in all this was not merely that the imposter himself had most likely hidden bogus vessels in a spot on the mountain where he would “discover” them, but that the people did not catch the glaring error in Samaritan belief itself. Not only had Moses never hidden anything on Mount Gerizim, he had never even set foot in Palestine west of the Jordan. Pilate recalled that item from Antipas’s travelogue at the Dead Sea.
But sober historical fact could never stand in the way of the promised spectacular. A date for the great event was finally announced, and the multitudes were to assemble at the village of Tirathana near the base of Gerizim. The men were to bring weapons, for the ministry of the Restorer also had military implications. Many Samaritans believed he would conquer eleven nations and eventually triumph over the whole world.