Pontius Pilate: A Novel

by Paul L Maier

  Pilate’s conscience would not allow him to condemn an innocent man, so he now renewed his efforts to release Jesus, despite the uncompromising attitude of the people. He wondered to what extent they were a hired claque rounded up by the prosecution.

  The prefect of Judea cajoled, debated, argued, and finally threatened. The prosecution countered that because this was a case involving religious offense, Pilate need not have reopened the trial. He should simply have countersigned the execution order of the Sanhedrin, for it had supreme jurisdiction over all religious questions affecting Jews. If Rome had not removed the jus gladii from that body, the prefect would not even have had the unpleasant task of trying to fathom Jewish law to understand why such supreme blasphemy could be punished only by death.

  Pilate found it difficult to answer that argument. He had private reservations about the motives which led Caiaphas and the priests to seek Jesus’ death. To what extent were they based on the alleged blasphemy? Or did they stem also from envy at Jesus’ success? Or was this merely a case of retaliation for his attacks on them? But it was impossible to debate such motives publicly, for that would have impugned the veracity of the Jewish authorities before their own people, an offense which would have terminated Pilate’s usefulness in Judea.

  It was while he was hesitating that the leaders of the prosecution pressed their final attack. Rabbi Ananias was chosen to voice the decisive appeal. “Noble Prefect,” he said, “our very beliefs, our way of life, our religious future, are at stake in this trial. If this deceiver is released, he will subvert our nation and also our most holy faith. If such cardinal blasphemy which we have all heard with our own ears is not punished, then Israel is lost. However, Tiberius Caesar has charged you to uphold all our religious customs.” He paused to lend emphasis to what would follow, raising his voice at the same time. “Therefore, if you let this man go free, you are not Caesar’s friend. Furthermore, anyone who would make himself a king treasonably defies Caesar!”

  There it was, a linking of the religious and political charges against Jesus raised to the highest level of appeal, that of the emperor himself. Pilate was beaten. He had lost. The priests were victorious, though it took him some moments to recognize that fact in all its fullness.

  Pilate glanced down at the gold ring of a “Caesar’s friend” which Tiberius had sent him upon embarkation at Puteoli. With his thumb he twirled it round his finger, the symbol of an amicus Caesaris, with all rights and privileges pertaining thereunto. The significance of the ring was not lost on the brilliant Ananias, who had focused on it while making his statement. Release Jesus and the ring would surely be plucked from Pilate’s finger, with all the attendant indignities and loss of status. Yes, that was it. Call it political blackmail or just strategic threat, but Ananias’s statement could be translated in only one way: “If you free this man, the Sanhedrin will send a delegation to Tiberius to bring the following two charges against you: (1) disobedience to the emperor in failing to uphold Jewish law; and (2) criminal neglect of duty for failing to punish someone who committed maiestas in setting himself up as subversive counter-king to the Roman emperor.” Considering Pilate’s probationary status ever since the fall of Sejanus and his various troubles with the Jews, such a dual arraignment before Tiberius could lead to loss of office, political career, or even life itself if the charge of treason were sustained. Fantasy? Hardly. If the Judean authorities had complained to Tiberius about something so minimal as a few gilded shields, they would most certainly appeal to him in a matter they obviously considered of much greater import. The trial was over.

  It was getting late in the morning. The sun was hot. Pilate wanted to have done with the sorry affair. He ordered the prisoner brought out of the palace for sentencing.

  His practical Roman mind did remind him that there was one alternative to sentencing an apparently innocent man to save oneself: acquitting Jesus…and sacrificing himself. Pilate canvassed history to see if any man, were he in this situation, would so immolate himself on the altar of principle. Possibly the blind Appius Claudius, or crusty old Cato from Rome’s heroic past? Perhaps Socrates? No. Even these idealists would have surrendered their lives for some cause higher than one visionary and unfathomable prisoner, a man seemingly so resigned to death that he made no defense for himself.

  Whenever one acts in opposition to conscience, several justifying crumbs are usually thrown in its direction to ensure peace of mind. While preparing as graceful an exit as possible for himself, Pilate gathered his crumbs. The first would be that he would continue to defend Jesus until the end. So when the prisoner, still dressed in purple and thorns, was brought out for the last time, Pilate announced, “Here is your king!” It was more of the same, defensive mockery which might yet wring some kind of sympathy from the people.

  A smallish scribe, hatred twisting his features, clenched his fist at Jesus and cried, “Away with him!”

  “AWAY WITH HIM! AWAY WITH HIM!” the mass responded. “CRUCIFY HIM!”

  “Shall I crucify…your king?”

  “We have no king but Caesar,” the chief priests objected, thus appearing to be even more loyal to the emperor than Pilate, his representative. It was a shrewd underscoring of their latest threat.

  Another self-justifying gesture Pilate found in Roman law. Those who did not defend themselves in Roman trials were usually given three opportunities to change their minds before sentence was pronounced. And so Pilate asked, “Jesus of Nazareth, have you anything to say in your defense?”

  Jesus did not reply. He was bleeding, perspiring, and apparently weakening physically.

  “Jesus of Nazareth, do you have anything to say in your defense?”

  There was no response.

  And a third time Pilate asked the prescribed question, but heard no reply. Legally and juridically, he could now hope to salve his conscience. Since there was no defense, he had no alternative but to convict.

  Pilate’s temporizing was cut short by the multitude. Simmering under the sun, they were restive and impatient by now, each contributing to an aroma of sweat which hovered over the palace plaza. For almost three hours they had stood, watching one man defy their will and that of the Great Sanhedrin. Some young firebrands had started mixing catcalls with the shouts for crucifixion, and several were screaming obscenities at Pilate. Isolated scuffles had broken out between auxiliaries and people at the edge of the esplanade. Demands for crucifixion were droning on to a sickening crescendo, as if the crowd were trying to change Pilate’s mind by the sheer force of sound itself. The palace square was a writhing mass of shaking fists. Some of the people were holding their arms straight out in cruciform fashion while yelling “Crucify!” so Pilate would not miss the message. All the storm flags, indicating the approach of a full-dress uproar, were being hoisted. Pilate eyed his troops. At that moment he did not feel he could take another riot, so he waved his arms overhead to silence the tumult, an indication that he was finally ready to pass sentence.

  He had a golden basin of water brought out to the tribunal. Then he announced, “Hear me, Men of Israel! This court cannot pronounce Jesus of Nazareth guilty, but because your Great Sanhedrin has condemned him to death, and since the Roman prefect must respect and protect Jewish religious law, the prisoner will be crucified.”

  A great roar of approval filled the air. When it finally subsided, Pilate, in full view of the multitude, washed his hands in the basin. “My hands are clean of this man’s blood,” he said.

  “HIS BLOOD BE ON US AND ON OUR CHILDREN!” the people cried, using the words of the Old Testament formula to assume accountability for themselves.

  Pilate dried his hands. With inner revulsion he ordered the release of the murderous insurrectionary, Bar-Abbas. Then he looked at Jesus. “Staurotheto,” he told a centurion of the guard—“Let him be crucified.”

  The soldiers took the condemned into the courtyard, stripped off the purple cloak, and, after additional mockery, dressed him in his own clothes again. Th
en they made him shoulder the patibulum, a wooden transverse beam which, to form the cross, would be fastened to one of the upright stakes already standing at Skull Place.

  A contingent of Pilate’s auxiliaries led Jesus out of the palace esplanade and directly north to Golgotha. The two convicted bandits, whose sentencing had been postponed to that morning, were also marched in that procession of death, since Pilate’s execution detail preferred handling all distasteful crucifixion cases at the same time.

  The route out to the lethal hillock, just beyond the northwestern walls of Jerusalem, was clogged with people lining the streets. Many were part of the crowd which had called for Jesus’ condemnation, and they lavished ridicule and derision on him. But some were admirers or followers of the condemned, who commiserated his fate. Most of them had learned of the trial only after it was over. Clearly, Jesus’ enemies had been organized; his friends had not. Fear of a Galilean-style political rebellion under his aegis had proved a fantasy. In fact, the only finger in all Jerusalem raised in Jesus’ behalf was unintentional. Halfway to Golgotha, he stumbled under the weight of his crossbeam. The execution squad cursed him for clumsiness, then compelled a broad-shouldered bystander named Simon, from Cyrene in North Africa, to carry the beam for him.

  A courier from Pilate ran to catch up with the procession before it reached Golgotha. He bore the titulus or inscription which had to be carried before a condemned man to identify him and the cause for his execution. The sign would then be affixed to the cross. Written with gypsum on a wooden board, the titulus was spelled out in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek so that nearly everyone would be able to read: “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.”

  Pilate had barely returned inside his palace when several of the chief priests asked to see him.

  “What now?” he demanded.

  “The titulus, sir. It should not read, ‘the King of the Jews,’ but ‘He claimed to be king of the Jews.’”

  “What I have written, I have written.” Pilate stalked off, leaving the priests standing at the door. There would be no further capitulation to the Sanhedrin.

  Actually, Pilate had chosen the wording of the titulus for a purpose. There was subtle sarcasm, to be sure, directed less at the crucified and more at the crucifiers: “Jews rate such a king as this” was one clear implication. But there was also a legal consideration. For the record, Pilate wanted a solid reason for conviction. Crucifixion would not be an appropriate Roman punishment for the purely Jewish crime of blasphemy, but it was perfectly proper for high treason perpetrated by a self-styled king.

  In his office at the Herodian palace, Pilate dictated a memorandum to one of his aides which would explain the legality of Jesus’ case for his records:

  Form of trial: cognitio [investigation] of the prefect.

  Advisers or jury: none

  Sentence: crucifixion

  Stated basis of sentence: constructive treason—implied maiestas

  Secondary basis of sentence: endorsement of Sanhedrin’s conviction of Jesus on a capital religious offense.

  Appeal: none. The convicted was not a Roman citizen.

  Chapter 19

  Drained by the events of that morning, Pilate reclined alone for lunch. Procula sent word that she would not join him until dinner because of her indisposition. He drank more wine than usual, since he would not be holding court that afternoon. He drank also to dull the immediate memory of the morning’s ordeal.

  Governing Judea was a corrosive experience, Pilate decided. One day soon he might follow Gratus’s example and ask to be relieved of the prefecture and transferred elsewhere, hopefully back to Rome. Almost seven years had passed since he’d been there. Too long; too terribly long. Seven years of confrontation with the Jews—could anyone really govern them successfully? Except Jews themselves? Perhaps that was the real reason for their agitation. They felt that only they could rule themselves. Though even that was debatable, considering their intense inner rivalries. “Two Jews, three opinions,” went the aphorism, and Pilate thought it sober truth.

  After lunch and a fitful nap, he called for his afternoon bath earlier than usual. He took it outside in the garden pool just off the inner courtyard.

  While splashing about in the crystal blue waters of Herod’s lavish natatorium, Pilate continued his musing…How would Herod the Great have judged the case this morning? He certainly wouldn’t have shied away from it like his son Antipas. Pilate grinned. No, Jesus would never even have come to trial. Very quietly, very efficiently, Herod would have had him assassinated, since he dreaded anyone using the term king…like the time those sages came to Jerusalem asking about a newborn king of the Jews.

  Now there’s a coincidence, Pilate startled…a baby and a man I just condemned to death both called “king of the Jews.” Herod killed the baby, I the man. Does that make me as bad as Herod? No, I was forced into it…I wonder how he’s doing out there—Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews. Probably silent, determined, resigned as ever.

  Why didn’t he make a defense? Why was he so uncooperative? Or too cooperative for his own conviction? I had to act not only as judge, but as his defense attorney too…I wonder if Procula knows. “Have nothing to do with that innocent man,” she wrote. She’ll think I spurned her note, of course…“That innocent man.” Where have I heard that before? Yes, I was reading it in Plato.

  Pilate pulled himself out of the water and walked over to a chair where he had left a scroll of the Republic. Turning back a few sections he found the passage:

  The innocent man will be scourged, tortured, bound, blinded with fire, and finally, after enduring every extremity of suffering, he will be impaled on the cross…

  A strange coincidence, he thought to himself. And how curious of Plato, writing against the background of Socrates’s martyrdom, to use the figure of the cross when Socrates had quietly sipped his hemlock…

  He dove back into the pool and swam its length, then turned over to float. By this time, he noticed, something distinctly uncanny was happening. Shortly after lunch, the sun had started to dim from some kind of overcast, and the sky was now a dreadfully glowering purple. Pilate thought a severe thunderstorm was brewing, but there was no wind, no lightning, no approaching rumbles.

  He slipped out of the pool, dressed, and then climbed to an upper turret of the palace. The sky was blackening more deeply, yet no rain fell. He was startled to see that the entire countryside was darkened—no patch of brighter blue showed anywhere on the horizon. He could barely see across Jerusalem to the cluster of people gathered at Golgotha around the silhouette of the three crosses. Was it a solar eclipse? In the city below, oil lamps were flickering—at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  Suddenly, Pilate seemed to hear and feel it at the same time. A tremor shook Jerusalem, then a moderately severe earthquake filled the air with grinding and buckling, tearing and clatter. Down on the esplanade he watched a fissure yawn open, which seemed to run eastward across the city to the temple mount. Foundations near this crevasse were ripped apart, and there were screams from the city. Pilate heard a creaking from the south and looked in horror as one of the arches of his aqueduct parted and crumbled into the Hinnom Valley. Water cascaded from the ruptured trough.

  Summoning his palace guard, he dispatched them through Jerusalem to report on the damage. Then he ordered the Antonia cohort out of their barracks to patrol the city and maintain order. His engineers were to take a construction detail out to the aqueduct and make emergency repairs.

  It was all very weird. First the mysterious darkness, then the earthquake. But the crisis seemed to pass as quickly as it had come. The sun and a normally bright sky nearly burst upon Jerusalem, and in minutes the heavens resumed their regular blue, the strangest celestial phenomenon Pilate had ever witnessed.

  He was just rearranging his nerves when an aide reported that the high priest’s servant requested a moment of his time. “Will they never leave me in peace?” Pilate fretted. “Let him in…Yes, Malchus?”
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  “Excellency,” he bowed, “since the most solemn Sabbath in the Jewish year begins at sundown, my Lord Caiaphas and the priests request that toward the end of the day you permit the legs of the crucified prisoners to be broken so that they will die and can be buried. Then their bodies will not be left hanging on the crosses to desecrate the Sabbath.”

  Pilate dashed off a note, authorizing the centurion at Golgotha to do as the priests requested, and gave it to Malchus. Breaking the legs of those who were crucified hastened death by suffocation, since the diaphragm and rib cage were severely pressured by being hung from the arms above, rather than resting on the normal support provided by the legs.

  Late in the afternoon, a member of the Sanhedrin requested an audience with the governor. His patience ebbing, Pilate was about to roast the caller when he saw that this one had never bothered him before. “Didn’t I meet you some years ago in Caesarea, Councilor?” he inquired.

  “Yes, Excellency. I am Joseph of Arimathea. I’ll take only a moment of your time. My colleague Nicodemus and I seek your permission to bury the body of Jesus of Nazareth. I have a sepulcher rather close to Golgotha.”

  “Jesus is already dead?”

  “Yes,” said Joseph, lowering his eyes, for he did not want to betray emotion in front of the prefect.

  “When did he die?”

  “Shortly after the ninth hour. At the time of the earthquake.”

  “But men don’t die on the cross that quickly.”

  “If you will pardon, Excellency, very little about this crucifixion was normal.”

  “True. But after the great rebellion under Spartacus, it took days, not hours, for his men to die on their crosses along the Appian Way…Are the other two still alive?”

  “They were when I left.”

  “Did Jesus say anything before he died?”

  “Yes, something quite loudly, which surprised us since we thought he was unconscious. ‘It is accomplished,’ he said. ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.’ With that he died.” Joseph looked down for a moment, then resumed, “The bystanders were already frightened by the intense darkness, but when the earth shook they ran back into the city terrified. Even your centurion was struck by it. He looked up at the body of Jesus and said, ‘Truly this man was a son of God.’”