Pontius Pilate: A Novel
Page 1
Books by Paul L. Maier
FICTION
Pontius Pilate
The Flames of Rome
A Skeleton in God’s Closet
More Than a Skeleton
The Constantine Codes
NONFICTION
A Man Spoke, A World Listened
The Best of Walter A. Maier (ed.)
Josephus: The Jewish War (ed., with G. Cornfeld)
Josephus: The Essential Works (ed., trans.)
In the Fullness of Time
Eusebius: The Church History (ed., trans.)
The First Christmas
The Da Vinci Code—Fact or Fiction? (with Hank Hanegraaff)
FOR CHILDREN
The Very First Christmas
The Very First Easter
The Very First Christians
Martin Luther—A Man Who Changed the World
The Real Story of Creation
The Real Story of the Flood
The Real Story of the Exodus
Pontius Pilate: A Novel
© 1968, 2014 by Paul L. Maier
First edition 1968.
Second edition 2014.
Published by Kregel Publications, a division of Kregel, Inc., 2450 Oak Industrial Dr. NE, Grand Rapids, MI 49505.
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For Joan
Contents
Preface
Preface to the Second Edition
Preface to the Third Edition
Notable Characters
PONTIUS PILATE
Epilogue
Historical Note
Notes
Maps
Preface
The trial would become the central event in history. But for the judgment of one man, a faith shared by nearly a billion people today might not have been born. At least it would not have developed as we know it. The decision of the Roman prefect of Judea on the day called Good Friday may have stemmed from pressures of the moment, but it was conditioned by the turbulent politics of the Mediterranean world at that time. What really happened at that most famous of all trials? Was Pilate’s judgment motivated by cowardice, expedience, or necessity? Where did he come from, and what became of him afterward—this man who unwittingly switched the flow of history into a new channel? This book proposes several answers.
There is too little source material on Pontius Pilate for a biography, yet too much for recourse to mere fiction. These pages attempt a compromise which might be called the documented historical novel. It seemed an appropriate genre for a case, such as Pilate’s, in which much authentic data is available, yet with insurmountable gaps in the information.
In constructing this account, I first searched for all surviving bricks of fact, then cemented them together with regrettably fictional mortar into what I hope is something of an accurate restoration of the original structure of Pilate’s career. As a documentary novel, it differs from regular historical fiction in that no liberties were taken with the facts: the bricks were used as discovered, without alteration. Reference notes on the most significant and controversial points of scholarship are provided at the end of the book. Most of these notes involve original sources, some of which provide new historical data.
To aim for accuracy, I adopted the following rules: (1) All persons named in this book are historical characters; no proper name has been invented—if it is not known, it is not given. (2) No portrayal of any personality, no description of any event, and no episode, or even detail contradicts known historical fact (unless by author’s error). (3) Only where all evidence is lacking is “constructed history,” based on probabilities, used to fill in the gaps. Even here, as much use as possible is made of authentic historical data as ballast, also in dialogue. Important constructed segments have been identified as such in the Historical Note at the close of the book.
The role of the prosecution on Good Friday has, of course, been bitterly debated. I have largely followed the New Testament version of the trial because even Talmudic sources concerning Jesus substantially accord with it, as demonstrated in the Notes. But for later generations to draw anti-Semitic conclusions from Jewish involvement on Good Friday was an incredible blunder. The prosecution, acting in absolute good faith, still represented only a very small fraction of the Jews of the time, and its responsibility was never transferable. Indeed, to be anti-Semitic because of Good Friday is as ridiculous as hating Italians because Nero once threw Christians to the lions.
This portrayal has also tried to tell “the greatest story ever told” from its least-told vantage point, uncovering what may be one of the last aspects of that story which still needs telling. What happened in Palestine in the early first century is usually viewed from a Christian or Jewish—not Roman—perspective. Events in Judea are rarely linked to that larger complex which controlled the province: the Roman Empire. Yet the culmination of Jesus’ career was not a story of one city, but a tale of two—Jerusalem and Rome. This, then, is the other part of the story.
Paul L. Maier
Western Michigan University
January 22, 1968
Preface to the Second Edition
I am pleased that this book has gone through so many printings and translations since its first publication twenty-two years ago. Since that time, archaeological discoveries and historical research have not outdated any of the findings in these pages, and have, in fact, confirmed several of them.
Paul L. Maier
Western Michigan University
March 1, 1990
Preface to the Third Edition
Ever since the first Doubleday edition of this book in 1968, I have been watching for any fresh documentary evidence that might enhance the solid historical record on Pontius Pilate in this book, but have found nothing, so the text stands unchanged.
Surprisingly, however, some very important archaeological discoveries have occurred, all of which directly support the biblical record on which this book is based. In addition to the cornerstone of the Tiberieum in Caesarea with Pilate’s name on it, already covered in these pages, the bones of the first crucified victim ever discovered came to light in 1970 in northeastern Jerusalem. A seven-inch spike was still lodged in the heel bones, thus overturning critical claims that victims were tied to crosses, not nailed as in Jesus’ case.
Even more exciting, the very bones of Joseph Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest who prosecuted Jesus before the tribunal of Pontius Pilate on the morning of Good Friday, were discovered by accident in the fall of 1990. The bones were in a beautifully crafted ossuary inscribed with Caiaphas’s name in a first-century burial site at a park south of the Temple area in the Old City of Jerusalem.
The geographical and archaeological sites in Galilee and Judea associated with both Jesus and P
ontius Pilate also support the New Testament in every instance, and so the hard evidence from both past and present shows that recent attempts to deny that Jesus was a historical figure only advertise the folly of any who make such unsupportable claims.
I am more than grateful to the reading public here and abroad for their generous response to Pontius Pilate for nearly half a century, and commend Kregel Publications for its continued commitment to biblically based resources that inform and inspire readers.
Paul L. Maier
Western Michigan University
November 11, 2013
Notable Characters
ROMAN PREFECTS (YEARS OF RULE)
Annius Rufus AD 12–15
Valerius Gratus AD 15–26
Pontius Pilatus AD 26–36
Marcellus AD 36–37
Marullus AD 37–41
HERODS OF JUDEA (YEARS OF REIGN)
Herod the Great, king of Judea 37–4 BC
Pheroras, tetrarch of Perea 20–5 BC
Herod Archelaus, ethnarch of Judea 4 BC–AD 6
Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee 4 BC–AD 39
Herod Agrippa I, king of Batanaea AD 37–41, king of Galilee AD 40–41, king of all Judea, AD 41–44
Herod Agrippa II, tetrarch of Chalcis AD 50–52, tetrarch of Batanaea AD 52–100
ROMAN EMPERORS (YEARS OF REIGN)
Augustus (Octavian) 31 BC–AD 14
Tiberius AD 14–37
Gaius (Caligula) AD 37–41
Claudius AD 41–54
Nero AD 54–68
OTHER MAJOR CHARACTERS
Procula, Pilate’s wife
Joseph Caiaphas, high priest of Judea
L. Aelius Sejanus, prefect (commander) of the Praetorian Guard
Yeshu Hannosri, Jesus the Nazarene
Cornelius, courier and later centurion for Pilate
Rabbi Helcias, Temple treasurer
Salome, daughter of Herodias
Herodias, wife of Herod-Philip
Herod-Philip, son of Herod the Great
Chuza, chief steward (manager) for Herod Antipas
Annas, father-in-law of Caiaphas
Malchus, servant of Caiaphas
John the Baptizer (John the Baptist)
PONTIUS
PILATE
—— A NOVEL ——
Chapter 1
A salvo of trumpet blasts echoed across Rome, saluting the sunrise on the first of April, A.D. 26. It was the daily signal for synchronizing water clocks with the moment of the sun’s appearance, a courtesy provided by men of the Praetorian Guard, billetted in their new camp at the edge of the city. Rome’s day had begun at least an hour earlier with the first coral glimmer of dawn, when many of the merchants started opening their shops. By the time the sun peered over the hills east of Rome, the city was a raucous symphony of clattering carts, hammer blows, and screaming babies. Some in the leisure class allowed themselves the luxury of slumbering on till seven o’clock, but only those who had wined to excess would rise any later. The citizens of Rome took advantage of every daylight hour, because nights were dark, and illumination poor.
From the commanding heights of his palace terrace on the Palatine Hill, Tiberius Caesar Augustus looked out across his noisy capital with a lethargic stare, half hoping that Rome would somehow vanish along with the morning mist, that all fourteen districts of the city might slowly dissolve into the Tiber and be disgorged into the Mediterranean like so much waste. Tiberius was well through his twelfth year as princeps, “first citizen” or emperor of Rome, that lofty office which he could not enjoy because of its demands, nor yet lay down without shattering precedent and inviting personal peril.
Unbiased voices in Rome agreed that Tiberius was governing surprisingly well, considering his unenviable role of having had to follow the glittering career of his stepfather, the now-Divine Augustus. And Tiberius had come to power under the most unflattering circumstances. Augustus had first appointed others to succeed him, naming Tiberius only after these had died. Now Tiberius nourished an obsessive resentment at having to be “emperor by default,” listening too hard for the inevitable whispered comparisons and brooding too often over his bitter, corrosive memories of Augustus.
A tall, erect figure despite his sixty-six years, the princeps turned back into the palace for a breakfast of wine-soaked bread, pullet eggs, and a brimming cup of mulsum, a wine-and-honey mixture without which no Roman could face the day. Tiberius ate alone, fatedly alone. The joy of family life was denied him. When he was a boy of four, the first tragedy had occurred: his mother Livia divorced his father in order to marry Augustus, a bit of ambitious social-climbing common enough for that era. What scandalized Rome was the fact that on the day of her second wedding, Livia was six months pregnant—by her previous husband. That night, the Statue of Virtue supposedly fell on its face in the Forum, and had to be repurified at great expense. Not until his own happy marriage with Vipsania could Tiberius forget his complicated childhood.
But Augustus doomed that marriage, too. He insisted that Tiberius, as future successor, divorce his beloved wife Vipsania in order to marry his only offspring, Julia, instead—so desperately did Augustus want his personal bloodline to continue. Yet Julia soon became Rome’s civic personification of vice, a woman so adulterous and vile that Augustus himself banished her for life to a Mediterranean island.
Only his son was left to Tiberius, Drusus, the promising heir apparent, but he had died of a strange illness three years earlier. Tiberius Caesar, sovereign of seventy million people in an empire extending from the English Channel to the gates of Mesopotamia, was a man quite alone.
He beckoned to a servant, pondered for a moment, and said, “Send word to Sejanus that I’ll see him this afternoon at the eighth hour.” The domestic delivered the message to one of the praetorian bodyguards, who hurried off eastward toward the mansion of Sejanus on the slopes of the Esquiline.
L. Aelius Sejanus was prefect, or commander, of the Praetorian Guard, that corps of elite troops who protected the emperor and served as Rome’s government police. A swarthy, muscular figure of large build, Sejanus was today flawlessly draped in a white woolen public toga. The prefect was middle-aged—though ageless in the eyes of the women of Rome—and he betrayed Etruscan ancestry in his non-aquiline features, so unlike the typical, high-bridged Roman face.
The inner Sejanus, his real loyalties and true political motives, was a storm center of controversy. Many claimed that Rome never had a more selfless and public-minded official, certainly never a more efficient one. But his opponents hinted darkly that Sejanus was a true Etruscan of old pre-Republic stock, and, as such, Rome’s mortal enemy, a ghost of Tarquin risen up to haunt the Empire.
His rise had been meteoric. Though only of equestrian, or middle-class, status, Sejanus now possessed powers which made blue-blooded, patrician senators scurry to join his following, or sulk jealously outside it. Part of his attainment was inherited. Augustus had named his father, Seius Strabo, prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and Tiberius had appointed Sejanus to the same post, sending Strabo abroad to govern Egypt.
In the decade since that time, Sejanus had gradually enhanced his office; no longer was it merely a steppingstone to authority, but now represented poised, concentrated power itself. His brilliant reorganization of the praetorians had accomplished it. He had proposed to unite the nine praetorian cohorts, or battalions, scattered throughout Italy into one large barracks near Rome, where the elite home guard would be far more readily available to the emperor in any emergency. Tiberius had approved the idea, and a sprawling new Castra Praetoria was erected on the Viminal Hill, just outside the northeast city walls of Rome. But these troops were loyal to their prefect, and when Sejanus spoke, nine thousand guardsmen listened and obeyed.
Too much power in the hands of one man? Tiberius thought not. He needed this instant security, and he had never detected in Sejanus a shred of disloyalty to himself or “the Senate and the Roman People,” as the Empi
re officially designated itself. Tiberius judged that a man like Sejanus was indispensable at this stage of Rome’s governmental evolution. No longer a republic, not yet a fully developed empire, Rome badly needed a strong administrative bureaucracy in place of her hodgepodge of commissions. Tiberius had this problem in mind when he urged Sejanus to serve also as his deputy in supervising the developing civil service of the Empire.
The message from the Palatine was delivered to Sejanus just as the two consuls for the year 26 A.D. were leaving his house. They had come to sound him out on rumors about Tiberius’s plans for an extended vacation away from Rome. Characteristically, Sejanus would neither confirm nor deny the news. As the honor guard of ten lictors quickly shouldered their fasces and rattled to attention to escort the consuls through the streets of Rome, the two could be heard arguing over Sejanus, Calvisius whining his objections to the man, and Gaetulicus just as stubbornly defending him, a mirror in miniature of Rome’s collective sentiments in the matter.
From the library where he conducted his official business, Sejanus looked into the atrium, or entrance court, of his mansion and saw the imperial messenger threading through the crowd of officials, clients, and functionaries, all waiting to see him. Upon reading the note from Tiberius, Sejanus rose quickly from his chair and took a few steps off to one side, turning his back to the noisy throng in the atrium in order to give himself a few moments of concentration. With shoulders hunched and chin to his chest, he remained motionless for perhaps half a minute, gathering together in his mind all the diverse factors bearing upon one of his latest political moves. Yes, he decided, the time was right to approach the emperor. But there was at least one step necessary before that. Grasping a stylus, he inscribed the following on a wax tablet:
L. Aelius Sejanus to Pontius Pilatus, greeting. I should like to see you early this afternoon, perhaps about the seventh hour. Had I not promised lunch to Domitius Afer, we could have dined together. Another time. Farewell.