Pontius Pilate is one of the most intriguing figures in history. Many people place him squarely in the villain category, but he also happens to be one of the most quintessentially human figures in the Bible.
Pilate played a pivotal role in human history and is mentioned in all four gospels, yet the only day of his life that gets biblical ink is the one morning that Jerusalem's religious leaders caught him off guard by bringing him a prisoner and demanding he sentence him to death.
That morning is the only reason anyone still knows about him today. Since it was destined to be commemorated as Good Friday and today happens to be Good Friday 2023, it seems like an ideal time to think about this man who appeared and vanished in a flash from the pages of history.
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The thumbnail sketch of Pilate's role in the Bible is that he was the Roman Empire's governor of the province of Judaea; was therefore powerful; presided over the final trial of Jesus; and had doubts as to whether Jesus was guilty, yet ultimately agreed to consign him to death.
That is all true, but of course it only scratches the surface.
The average term of office for provincial governors was two years. The fact that Pilate held that office in Judaea for a full decade (26 to 36 A.D.) tells us he was strong, effective, and trusted by Caesar's cronies as well as Caesar himself.
When it came to Rome's interests in Judaea, Passover was the tensest time of year. It was when Jewish pilgrims from far and wide descended on the capital city of Jerusalem to memorialize an event that evoked both religious and nationalist passions. With upwards of 100,000 celebrants gathered on the Temple Mount to honor their ancestors' liberation from Egypt, might they become inspired to focus some ire on their present Roman occupiers who were in their very midst, and might their celebration suddenly transform into a revolt?
To project its authority, each Passover Rome stationed additional troops in Jerusalem while Pilate took up residence in the Antonia Fortress. A military edifice on the Temple Mount itself, overlooking the temple's open, bustling, outermost area, the so-called Court of the Gentiles, this fortress is where Pilate was when the chief priests and elders arrived in the early morning with Jesus in shackles. (For ease of communication, from here on out I will use the word "Pharisees" to describe those priests and elders, even though there might have been some particular individuals for whom that word did not technically apply.)
We know from all four gospels that Jesus was arrested at night and taken to the high priest Caiaphas, either at his own house or at that of his father-in-law Annas. There, he was questioned by Caiaphas and whichever other religious officials were able to hastily and sneakily assemble in the dead of night.
The questioning was largely for show. They already wanted him dead in order to protect their prestige, and Caiaphas had already given them cover when he declared it "better that one man should die" rather than "the whole nation" (John 11:50), so when they accused Jesus of claiming to be divine and he not only didn't deny it, but flatly affirmed it, they instantly considered him worthy of death according to the Levitical rules of their faith. They figured that would squash his movement in its tracks by dramatically demonstrating he was no Messiah. Surely that would send his followers fleeing to the hills in fear.
Their plan faced a major obstacble, however: Judaea was ruled by Rome, and Roman law forbade anybody but Romans from imposing a death sentence. One of the ways Rome managed to keep Pax Romana going for 200 years was by giving people in its provinces some degree of latitude to practice their own religions and follow their own customs, so long as it didn't interfere with the empire's ability to control the big things and collect its taxes. As such, Rome was happy to let Jews adhere to their weird rules about things like not eating pork and not wearing a garment made of two fabrics. The death penalty, on the other hand, was a bridge way, way too far -- allowing Jews to wield that kind of power within Rome's official borders would undermine the empire's authority, especially if Jewish leaders got too big for their britches and started executing the wrong people.
The only way for Caiaphas & Co. to have Jesus executed without brining Rome's fury down on themselves was to convince the Romans to do the executing themselves. And they needed to move fast because the sun had yet to rise and the execution needed to be underway before news of Jesus's captivity could get out and trigger a riot. This is why the Pharisees arrived at the Antonia Frotress seeking to see Pilate so early. According to John 18:28 "it was early morning," and according to Mark 15:1 they met "as soon as it was morning" and "led him away and delivered him over to Pilate."
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The governor awoke that Friday having no idea what was going to happen. Little did he know that so many nuances of human nature were about to be tweaked and manifested that folks like me would be sitting around 2,000 years later referring to him as "one of the most quintessentially human figures" in something we call "the Bible."
Passover was to begin at sunset and Pilate's Jewish subjects, their numbers swollen by pilgrims, were to eat the sacred Seder feast when it did. The few hours prior to sunset were to be consumed by the obligatory slaughtering of countless paschal lambs (one for each family) in the Temple's court.
It was the busiest day of the entire year in Jerusalem, especially on the Temple Mount where Pilate needed everything to go off off without a hitch. Surely he wasn't pleased to have religious authorities show up at dawn demanding he kill a holy man who, according to them, was becoming dangerously popular among the commoners.
Pilate was a powerful man who dealt with powerful men, with men whose egos needed managing. He knew how to read a room and his shrewdness for doing so came to the fore that morning. Two of the gospels explicitly state that he realized what the Pharisees' real reason was for hauling Jesus in: According to Matthew 27:18 "he knew that it was out of envy," and according to Mark 15:10 "he perceived that it was out of envy."
Knowing he couldn't send a man to death simply because the holy hoity toity wanted him to, and keenly aware that sending a man to death could inflame the streets if he was beloved by a large following, Pilate demanded to know the charges against Jesus and why they warranted death under Roman law. The Pharisees, apparently having expected Pilate to simply do what they wished, were caught by surpise and had no good answer to give.
This caused the red flags in Pilate's mind to flap even harder, and he pushed back. All four gospels are clear that Pilate knew Jesus was innocent of violating any Roman law, and that he strongly suspected Jesus was not even guilty of violating Jewish law. On three occasions (once in Luke, twice in Matthew) Pilate is recorded as speaking the words "I find no guilt in this man" or "I find no guilt in him."
Wanting to get to the bottom of things, he questioned Jesus directly, and those conversations show him to be genuinely curious. Yes he wanted to keep the local populace at bay and maintain Rome's power and prestige, but that was not all he wanted. Yes he played for the bad team, but we're all sinners and, at his core, was he any more of a bad guy than your average Joe?
Pilate was used to seeing defendants feverishly proclaim their innocence in order to avoid conviction and escape punishment. But Jesus, faced with a litany of serious charges and knowing his accusers wanted him killed, responded with tranquility. He either said nothing, or spoke in ways that seemed riddling and showed no urgency to avoid death. Matthew and Mark tell us this caused Pilate to be "amazed," with Matthew beefing it up by saying "greatly amazed." I find myself wondering how many different wrinkles of amazement we're talking about and how deep they run. I wonder if the Koine Greek word rendered here as "amazed" might be one of those words that doesn't have an exact counterpart in another language?
Many people today don't realize that in ancient times it was almost unheard of to doubt or deny the existence of other people's gods. Nation X worshipped certain gods because it believed it had been assigned those gods, while Nation Y worshipped others it believed had been assigned to it. Maybe each nation thought its gods could whip yours if ever the twain should meet, but it still presumed your gods were as real as its. I believe this is why Pilate responded fearfully, not angrily, when finally told that Jesus claimed to be divine. He believed in supernatural beings and knew they were not for humans to trifle with; and now, suddenly, he was in the presence of someone who claimed to be supernatural and behaved like no human he'd ever seen, and he was being asked to pass judgment on him.
Also, ancient people placed great importance on dreams and believed the gods communicated to them in dreams. This probably explains why Matthew informs us that Pilate, while in the middle of adjuctaing Jesus's trial, received word sent by his wife that warned him to "have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much because of him today in a dream."
The wives of Roman officials weren't wont to send them urgent messages in the middle of them performing official duties. That a courier bearing a message showed up, ostensibly out of the blue, must have felt strange to Pilate in the first place; and it must have felt indescribably stranger when the message conveyed that his wife had dreamt of the man he was currently being asked to judge. Pilate himself had not even heard of him before. What kind of thoughts rippled through his mind when the message came?
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For my money, the most intense indicator of his humanity is how he responded "late in the game" when chips started falling in ways he didn't like. That is when his actions reflected the influence of two instincts that weigh most heavily on human beings: fear and self-preservation.
Pilate knew the Pharisees were envious of Jesus, that they wanted his followers to be shown he was not who he claimed to be. He could live easily with that, but killing Jesus was a step he did not want to take.
Pilate was not a scrupulous, ahead-of-his-time proponent of modern due process. But he was a man of law who knew the importance of evidence and rules, of staying within guardrails and holding to standards. With all that in mind, he knew Jesus was not accused of breaking any Roman laws (especially any that called for capital punishment) -- and he sensed it would not go over well with his superiors for him to use Rome's imprimatur to sentence an innocent man to death in a province where that man was popular among the non-Roman locals.
Yet, here he was being asked to do just that. Early on the morning of the most important day of the locals' year. By the locals' own religious leaders, whose alliance he needed if he was to maintain Pax Romana and keep his bosses happy. In his mind, Pilate sought escape hatches and thought he found some.
Surely if Jesus were to be beaten, bloodied, and pilloried, in public view, without being able to stop it, that would show his followers he wasn't divine. Right? Surely that would sate the Pharisees without him having to impose the death penalty. Right? Surely that would shame Jesus's followers into stumped silence, without running the risk of turning him into a martyr around whose memory they might rally. Right?
It was Pilate, not the Pharisees, who came up with the idea of beating and mocking Jesus in lieu of killing him (Luke 15:16, John 19:1-4) but the Pharisees were not mollified. They liked the beating/mocking idea, of course, but wanted that plus death. If they couldn't have both, they wanted death alone. Anything short of death was not on their agenda.
And the Pharisees specifically wanted Jesus's death to be by crucifixion. Crucifixion was considered the most disgraceful way for a person to die. Its purpose was not "merely" to kill, but to shame and humiliate a man in such a way that his reputation would be permanently destroyed through the end of time. Only the absolute worst of the worst were subject to crucifixion.
Both the Jews and Romans had an honor/shame culture, and like Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou has explained, "honor and glory were so highly valued that preserving personal honor and avoiding shame were considered more important than money and even more important than life itself...The humiliation that accompanied crucifixion was one of the primary reasons it served as a deterrent -- people did not fear the pain alone...[a crucified man] is isolated, displayed without the dignity of clothing, as one who has violated the law and is now literally exposed as a wrongdoer for all to see. Therefore, obviously (in the Jewish mind), all crucifixion victims were cursed by God himself...Nothing surpassed crucifixion as a statement of culpability and rejection by God."
Undeterred by Pilate's unambiguous determination to bludgeon but not crucify, the Pharisees entrenched themselves and kept demanding crucifixion. Even when Pilate broached the Passover custom of releasing to the Jews "any one prisoner whom they wanted" and assumed they would choose the peaceful Jesus over the only other option, a violent criminal named Barabbas, the Pharisees shocked him by demanding that Barabbas be the one set free. According to Mark 15:9 Pilate did not even mention a choice between the two, but rather said simply "Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?" only to have them respond by asking him to release "Barabbas instead."
Because in some passages English translations of the Bible refer to the audience before Pilate as a "crowd," modern readers often picture a large mob consisting of normal Jews as well as Pharisees. However, historical and linguistic context are important and they tell us this picture is not correct. Jesus was brought to Pilate very early, before people were up and about, precisely because the Pharisees wanted his crucifixion to be a fait accompli before the hoi polloi could get wind of it and try to stop it. Also, it is exceedingly doubtful that the Romans would allow a rabble of common folk to gather in front of the governor, especially during a compressed time of religious fervor. Thus the crowd in question would have consisted only of men who had cause to be present, namely religious officials and political figures.
It's almost certain that English phrasing like "the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and destroy Jesus" (Matthew 27:20) would have been understood, by the original culture speaking the original language, to mean that the strongest people in Caiaphas & Co. used their power to convince any of their uncertain brethren not to go wobbly.
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It was a delicate and precarious position in which Pilate found himself as the sun rose higher that morning. But he represented the rulers, not the ruled, and could not let the Pharisees forget that. Plus, he had that little "what if?" birdie singing in his brain and reminding him that Jesus might very well be divine, so he kept refusing to grant the Pharisees their wish.
Luke 23:5-16 even recounts that Pilate, upon detecting Jesus hailed not from Jerusalem but from Galilee, attested that he had no jurisdiction over Galilee. Therefore he sent him over to Herod, the Jewish ruler of Galilee who happened to be rignt there in Jerusalem that morning because of Passover. Unfortunatey for Pilate, however, Herod found him innocent even of violating Jewish law and sent him right back to Pilate, making the horns of his dilemma even sharper.
Ultimately the Pharisees broke the stalemate by playing their trump card: Seeing that Pilate would not yield to their demands, they resorted to human politics and "cried out, 'If you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend'."
The Roman Caesar at the time was Tiberius, and, like all dictators, he had trust issues. People he suspected of not being his friend saw their life expectancies plummet, and one of those people, a man named Sejanus, happened to have been the man who appointed Pilate governor of Judeea in 26 A.D. Sejanus was considered Tiberius's closest friend back then, but things had since changed. Reportedly tipped off that Sejanus wanted to take his place on the throne, Tiberius had him arrested and executed for treason, then had his corpse thrown down the Gemonian Stairs and paraded through the streets.
Naturally, anyone appointed to office by Sejanus had to assume his actions were now under the microscope; and although a half-decade passed between Pilate's appointment and Sejanus's execution, the association was still there. Pilate knew he could not afford to be fingered as "not Caesar's friend," so when the Pharisees used that phrase he would have understood it as a threat: It meant they would tell Rome he was "not Caesar's friend" if he failed to do what they wanted.
He knew the threat was not idle, and that it would put his life in jeopardy if the Pharisees carried it out, so the impulse to save his own skin kicked into overdrive and he acceeded to their demands. But the "what if?" birdie must still have been singing, for the Bible tells us Pilate still tried to portray himself as innocent. Luke records that on three occasions he refused to give the death sentence before ultimately delivering Jesus "over to their will," while John says he "delivered him over to them" at the end of the proceedings, and Matthew affirms that he "washed his hands before the crowd, saying, 'I am innocent of this man's blood; see to it yourselves'." (emphases mine)
We all know verbal sleights of hand like these cannot slip past the Almighty. Nevertheless, we have all tried them at one time or another.
Pointius Pilate, human to the core, tried them too. He was pagan, but he knew divinity is out there and he responded accordingly.
Every human responds to divinity, even if many humans refuse to admit it.
To be continued...
