Earlier still, Tacitus, who mentioned Pilate in his famed passage about the Christians (Annals, xv, 44) published in 117 A.D., as well as Josephus, make no reference to any suicide or punishment, though none to Pilate’s death either. Probably most illuminating is the testimony of a contemporary of Pilate who despised him, the Jewish philosopher Philo. In his Embassy to Gaius, which reports his famed mission of 39–40 A.D., Pilate is castigated (xxxviii), but no mention is made of any subsequent suicide or any punishment inflicted on him by Caligula, who certainly either decided Pilate’s case or dismissed it. Though this is an argument from silence, the silence is eloquent, since on other occasions Philo took keen delight in recording the punishments of people he scorned, as witness his In Flaccum (Against Flaccus, xviii, 146ff.).
This raises the final question of whether a reasonable rather than hostile portrait of Pontius Pilate is possible. For the past seventeen centuries, Pilate has had an unusually bad press, and most tend to cloister him next to Judas Iscariot in mind and memory. This view seems unjustified, both by the practice of the early church in its crucial first three centuries, and, more importantly, by the sources themselves. Aside from scattered references in ancient authors, the chief primary sources for Pilate are: Flavius Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities and Jewish Wars; Philo in his Embassy to Gaius; and the New Testament Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Of these seven writings, one is hostile to Pilate, while the other six range from slightly critical to favorable. Philo, the hostile source, has Herod Agrippa write Caligula (in the memorandum cited on page 329 above) of “the briberies, the insults, the robberies, the outrages and wanton injuries, the executions without trial constantly repeated, the ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty” of Pilate (xxxviii; F. H. Colson’s translation in Loeb Classical Library). Nothing in any of the other sources on Pilate corroborates this judgment, and it is doubtful that Tiberius, even with his predilection for keeping his governors at their posts for long terms, would have allowed Pilate a whole decade of administration in Judea if he were such a wretch.
The dissonant source must therefore be examined, and the context may explain Philo’s censure. The Jewish philosopher despised foreign administration of Judea, and in the above citation he seemed to be unloading his holy ire at the loss of Judean independence on the man who represented Rome in Palestine before his beloved Agrippa was made king. Since his account was published after Caligula’s death, he was writing for the benefit of the emperor Claudius, and it would therefore be in the interest of his cause to portray the previous Roman administration of Judea in the worst possible light so that the Jewish homeland would not be returned to provincial status. Accordingly, we look, not for clear history from Philo in this connection, but heavily colored emotion and lyricism, rhetoric and exaggeration. As Stewart Perowne aptly comments on Philo’s reference to Pilate (in The Later Herods, Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1958): “This may be dismissed as just the sort of stuff that is traditional in a region where words have never been regarded as necessarily a reflection of fact, but are held to possess a being of their own, independent and free. The idea is as old as Homer…To call Philo’s rhapsody lying would be a mistake: he was merely conforming to a conception of language which is not that of the modem west” (p. 50). This opinion is largely shared by other commentators, in works cited in the Notes.
Therefore with Josephus recording Pilate’s humanity as well as his blunders, and the New Testament casting him virtually as Jesus’ lawyer for the defense before capitulation to popular pressure, a more balanced portrait of Pontius Pilate is possible, even if he is hardly the saint the Ethiopians would make of him.
Notes
Though Pilate used to delight the morbid imagination in the Middle Ages, there is very little modern scholarship on his life or career. The study by Gustav Adolf Müller, Pontius Pilatus, der fünfte Prokurator von Judäa und Richter Jesu von Nazareth (Stuttgart, 1888) is ably corrected and supplemented by Hermann Peter, “Pontius Pilatus, der Römische Landpfleger in Judäa,” Neue Jahrbücher, I (1907), 1–40. A fair estimate of Pilate and an excellent investigation of his aqueduct to Jerusalem is provided by Frank Morison, And Pilate Said…(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940). Periodical literature concerning Pilate is cited in the notes below. The few historical novels on Pilate have been of minimal historical or literary value.
CHAPTER 1 (PAGES 17–28)
TIBERIUS AND SEJANUS: This and following sketches of Roman politics as of 26 A.D. are drawn from Tacitus, Annals, iv, 1–54; Suetonius, Tiberius, i–xxxviii; and Dio Cassius, Roman History (hereafter merely “Dio Cassius”), lvii.
THE PONTII: For a catalogue of the prominent members of Pilate’s gens, see the article “Pontius” in Georg Wissowa, ed., Paulys Real-encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart: Metzlersche and Druckenmüller Verlag, 1953 ff.).
THE FULVIA SCANDAL: Josephus, Jewish Antiquities (hereafter Antiq.), xviii, 3, 5.
PILATE’S SALARY: A stipend of 100,000 sesterces for the prefect of Judea is posited by Otto Hirschfeld, Die Kaiserlichen Venwaltungsbeamten bis auf Diocletian, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1905), pp. 436 f.; and by H. G. Pflaum, Les Procurateurs Equestres sous Le Haut-Empire Romain (Paris: A. Maisonneuve, 1950), pp. 150 f. Cp. also Dio Cassius, liii, 15, 3–6. Because of the chronic inflation of the American dollar, it becomes very difficult to assign a meaningful value to the sesterce in current terms. The suggested salary of $10,000, for example, would have a far greater buying-power in imperial Rome.
L. AELIUS LAMIA: Tacitus, Annals, iv, 13; vi, 27. and Dio Cassius, lviii, 19.
CHAPTER 2 (PAGES 29–42)
GAIUS PROCULEIUS: Dio Cassius, li, 2; liii, 24; liv, 3; Horace, Carmina, ii, 2; Pliny, Natural History, xxxvi, 183; Plutarch, Antony, lxxvii, 7; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ix, 3, 68; and Tacitus, Annals, iv, 40. While Proculeius is accurately portrayed in the text, his relationship to the wife of Pilate is necessarily only assumed in the absence of other evidence.
THE DEBATE ON GOVERNORS’ WIVES: Tacitus, Annals, iii. 33–34.
HEROD AS MESSIAH: Hermann Vogelstein, History of Jews in Rome (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1940), pp. 28 f.
ANNIUS RUFUS: Josephus, Antiq., xviii, 2, 2.
THE ASS IMAGE: Rome’s information about Judaism was astonishingly inaccurate, considering the fact that a Jewish community had existed in Rome ever since the second century B.C., which grew when Pompey returned with Judean captives in 61 B.C. In a short time, Roman Jews were supposedly so numerous that Cicero once told a jury he would have to speak softly so that the many Jews present would not be able to hear. While this was merely a lawyer’s stratagem, Jews were taking part in public affairs, and Romans should have understood them better. The abhorrent misinformation about the Exodus and the ass image, for example, should have been corrected by Pompey’s experience, and yet the great historian Tacitus, writing as late as 110 A.D., would record the same tired calumny as gospel in his Histories, v, 3 ff.