The Shadow and the Myth

By dint of executing a Jewish prophet 2,000 years ago, Pontius Pilate became the most famous Roman governor in history. Had he known why his name would be remembered in perpetuity, he might have preferred anonymity. But even though his name has survived the ages, Pilate himself is lost to us. He exists purely as a role, a necessary element of the Passion play but no more. No records of his life survive, and were it not for a few coins bearing his likeness, one inscription on a stone found near Jerusalem, some chapters written by historians who lived in the 1st century, and several choice lines in the Gospels, he would not exist at all.

And yet, from these scant traces has grown a tremendous legend. One version, preserved in Christian creeds, is that of Pontius Pilate the Christ-killer. Another is that of an ambitious soldier, an embittered territorial governor in a far-off Roman outpost called Judea. Medieval Europeans regarded him as a wandering spirit of evil. He has even been seen as confessor, as tortured witness to the Crucifixion and, most shocking of all, as Christian saint.

In short, Pilate is the ultimate shape-changer. At the end of three years of research for her book, “Pontius Pilate,” Ann Wroe “emerged with two things: the shadow and the myths” of the man. They did not seem like the stuff of biography. “But biography,” she continues, “is often more speculative, more selective, even more fictional than writers admit or readers suppose.” Faced with the challenge of imagining Pilate, Wroe plunged in, knowing that although a biography of Pilate that stuck to the known facts would consume a few pages, a biography of Pilate as a legend and symbol could be far more significant.

Wroe, an editor at the Economist, uses a wide range of materials to piece together her Pilate, including the Gospels, Jewish histories written by Josephus and Philo, various apocryphal gospels that were not included when the New Testament was compiled centuries after Christ’s death, medieval Passion plays and 19th century Russian novels. Her eccentric and compelling narrative has a linear core, following Pilate’s life from birth to death. She tells three alternative stories about his origins, claiming that he was possibly a soldier from the tribe of Pontii who rose through the ranks and was appointed to the middling post of governor of an outlying province called Judea; or a Spaniard who made his name in Rome as a lackey in the court of the Emperor Tiberius; or a German tribesman who was Romanized.

No matter what his origins were, his life in Rome would have resembled those of others of his class, and for this, there is ample documentation. The denizens of imperial Rome wrote voluminously about their lives and about their foibles. Using the writings of Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, Suetonius and others, Wroe constructs a plausible life for the young Pilate: how he might have jockeyed for promotion through the imperial ranks and how he would have curried favor at the court of the emperor and so been dispatched to a small province on the edge of the Mediterranean. She then uses the same method to imagine what Pilate’s days would have been like as governor in Judea.

“Day by day,” she writes, “this was Pilate’s routine: dictation, scanning, signing, sealing.” Aside from his official duties, he might have had bouts of homesickness: “It was hard to get oysters, chipped ice, or good Falernian aged in a bottle.” He was also deprived of “nut-and-honey pastries bought on the run, hot sausage, Tuscan olives.”

When he wasn’t longing for tidbits, he probably worried about his reputation with the dangerously fickle Tiberius. According to some later sources, Pilate offended the Sanhedrin (the council of rabbis) by ill-advisedly placing gold shields honoring Tiberius in the palace of King Herod in Jerusalem. The rabbis complained to Rome, and when Tiberius learned of the incident, he sternly rebuked the governor. Wroe concludes from this episode that Pilate would have spent the rest of his term trying to avoid doing anything that might sully his name in Rome.

Tiberius was notoriously capricious, capable of rewarding his subordinates one day and brutally executing them the next, and Pilate, like many of his peers, would have done his best to keep a low profile lest he incur the emperor’s wrath. It’s possible, of course, that Pilate was a bold man, but more likely he was a bureaucrat, trying to do a difficult job well enough to please his superiors and advance his career.

And so when Pilate was faced with a controversial preacher who was presented to him for judgment one day during the Passover festival, he had more on his mind than the merits of the case. After all, he was a Roman gentleman. He didn’t want to stay in Judea forever. He wanted to return to the center of the empire with an enhanced reputation and a better salary, and if he mishandled the case of Jesus of Nazareth, his future would be in jeopardy.

That is the primary version of Pilate that Wroe offers, but she also guides us through the shifting sands of Pilate’s image. Because of his role in sentencing Christ, Pilate assumed a stature well beyond his actual standing at the time. For later chroniclers, he became “Everyruler. He was prince, a king, duke, a knight, and the son of the emperor of Rome,” fulfilling subsequent history’s demands that he be more than just a governor of an arid Roman province (just as history demanded that Peter be more than a fisherman and Mary Magdalene more than a reformed prostitute).

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One of the most lasting images of Pilate is that he was an “equivocator” who reluctantly sentenced Jesus to the cross in order to placate the hostile rabbis who made up the Sanhedrin. He didn’t find Christ guilty of anything that would merit his execution, but he didn’t feel comfortable refusing the heated demands of the rabbis that the Nazarene be executed for claiming to be the Messiah and violating various Jewish laws. Instead of telling the rabbis that Jesus had committed no violation of Roman law, Pilate took the unusual step of letting the crowd determine the sentence and then washing his hands (literally calling for a bowl of water) of the affair. “The modern politician,” Wroe observes, “might call this pragmatism. Pilate had taken the middle course.” But the decision also showed him to be a weak man, lacking “both the courage to be good and the boldness to be bad.”

But if Pilate was an equivocator, who is responsible for the death of Jesus? Hold the Jews responsible and we get two millenniums of anti-Semitism. That was the preference of the early Christians. Hold the Romans and Pilate culpable and the process of converting the Roman Empire in the five centuries after Jesus’ death would be much more complicated. The early Church fathers preached to a Roman world, and its citizens had an easier time sympathizing with a son of God executed by his tribe than with a Messiah sentenced to death by a Roman. Though the Nicene Creed, adopted by the church bishops in the 4th century and recited by Catholics worldwide, states that Christ was crucified “under Pontius Pilate,” writers of both the Gospels and later apocrypha attempted to remove the guilt from Pilate and transfer it to the Jewish priests who turned Christ over to the Roman governor for punishment.

Though Wroe emphasizes the dilemma of Pilate the equivocator, she also discusses, but downplays, Pilate the suffering witness who knew that he had to make a terrible choice with the scant consolation that he was helping Christ fulfill his destiny. There are the Pilate of the Christian Copts of Egypt, who made him a saint because he repented his deed and then spread the word of Christ’s divinity and the perfidy of the Jews. And there are the Pilate who incurs the anger of the emperor for killing the Messiah and the Pilate who wonders disconsolately if he is responsible for a great wrong.

Though the book has this narrative core, Wroe departs in surprising and occasionally jarring ways, branching off into tangential essays about Roman customs and mores, meditations on Cicero and such fanciful parallel stories as those of a 19th-century British governor in India and abortion protesters in Buffalo. The effect, as she promises at the onset, can be startlingly poetic, but it is also odd. Wroe wants to create an imaginative link between Pilate and the modern world. But there is an obviousness to some of these digressions that undermines the effect.

So which Pilate should we pick? Do we choose from the elaborate stories of an imagined life presented in the Apocrypha? The literary figure envisioned by such Russian writers as Tolstoy and Bulgakov? Or do we think of Rod Steiger in the 1980s miniseries “Jesus of Nazareth” or of David Bowie in the movie “Jesus Christ Superstar” or of the elliptical Pilate of the New Testament who asks Christ if he is a king and receives the reply, “You say so”? Or do we shrug and let Pilate be undefined, a necessary but not particularly profound character in the Passion play?

Wroe lets that question hang unanswered. Perhaps that is for the best. Pilate can only be an enigma. The book is a dazzling kaleidoscope that refracts the various pictures and combines them in unusual ways. If Pilate, however, is only a construct, it is incumbent on Wroe, acute chronicler of the efforts of others, to depict Pilate herself. The closest she comes is in her case for Pilate the equivocator, but she leaves us to guess what she really thinks.

By not forcefully or explicitly carving a Pilate of her own, Wroe offers us a character like Woody Allen’s Zelig, a figure who has no core, only different miens. Of course, that in itself is a portrait. It is a picture of a man who is important because others have found him important, who is fascinating because he has fascinated. Inadvertently involved in great events, he was rendered less ordinary only because he caught the reflected brilliance of the figure he sentenced to die.