PONTIUS PILATE
HIS Name.—The prænomen or first name of Pilate is not known. Rosadi calls him Lucius, but upon what authority is not stated. His nomen or family name indicates that he was connected either by descent or by adoption with the gens of the Pontii, a tribe first made famous in Roman history in the person and achievements of C. Pontius Telesinus, the great Samnite general. A German legend, however, offers another explanation. According to this story, Pilate was the natural son of Tyrus, King of Mayence. His father sent him to Rome as a hostage, and there he was guilty of murder. Afterwards he was sent to Pontus, where he distinguished himself by subduing certain barbarian tribes. In recognition of his services, it is said, he received the name Pontius. But this account is a pure fabrication. It is possible that it was invented by the 22d legion, which was assigned to Palestine at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, and was afterwards stationed at Mayence. The soldiers of this legion might have been "either the bearers of this tradition or the inventors of the fable."
It is historically almost certain that Pilate was a native of Seville, one of the cities of Bætic Spain that enjoyed rights of Roman citizenship. In the war of annihilation waged by Agrippa against the Cantabrians, the father of Pilate, Marcus Pontius, acquired fame as a general on the side of Rome. He seems to have been a renegade to the cause of the Spaniards, his countrymen. And when Spain had been conquered by Rome, as a reward for service, and as a mark of distinction, he received the pilum (javelin), and from this fact his family took the name of Pilati. This is the common explanation of the origin of the cognomen Pilatus.
Others have sought to derive the word Pilate from pileatus, which, among the Romans, was the cap worn as a badge of servitude by manumitted slaves. This derivation would make Pontius Pilate a libertus, or the descendant of one.
Of his youth, very little is known. But it is believed that, after leaving Spain, he entered the suite of Germanicus on the Rhine and served through the German campaigns; and that, when peace was concluded, he went to Rome in search of fortune and in pursuit of pleasure.
His Marriage.—Soon after his arrival in Rome, Pilate was married to Claudia, the youngest daughter of Julia, the daughter of Augustus. Julia was a woman of the most dissolute and reckless habits. According to Suetonius, nothing so embittered the life of the Roman emperor as the shameful conduct of the mother of the wife of the procurator of Judea. He had reared her with the utmost care, had accustomed her to domestic employments such as knitting and spinning, and had sought to inculcate principles of purity and nobility of soul by requiring her to speak and act openly before the family, that everything which was said and done might be put down in a diary. His guardianship of the attentions paid her by young men was so strict that he once wrote a letter to Lucius Vinicius, a handsome young man of good family, in which he said: "You have not behaved very modestly, in making a visit to my daughter at Baiæ." Notwithstanding this good training, Julia became one of the lewdest and coarsest women in Rome. Augustus married her first to Marcellus; then, after the death of Marcellus, to Marcus Agrippa; and, finally, to Tiberius. But in spite of the noble matches that had been made for her, her lewdness and debaucheries became so notorious that Augustus was compelled to banish her from Rome. It is said that he was so much ashamed of her infamous conduct that for a long time he avoided all company, and even had thoughts of putting her to death. His sorrow and humiliation are shown from the circumstance that when one Phœbe, a freedwoman and confidante of hers, hanged herself about the time the decree of banishment was passed by the senate, he said: "I had rather be the father of Phœbe than of Julia." And whenever the name of Julia was mentioned to him, during her exile, Augustus was wont to exclaim: "Would I were wifeless, or had childless died."[51]
Such was the character of Julia, mother-in-law of Pilate. In exile, she bore Claudia to a Roman knight. In her fifteenth year, the young girl met the Spaniard in Rome and was courted by him. Nothing better illustrates the character of Pilate than his union with this woman with whose origin and bringing up he was well acquainted. It was a servile and lustful rather than a noble and affectionate eye which he cast upon her. Having won the favor of Tiberius and the consent of Claudia, the marriage was consummated. After the nuptial rites, tradition has it that Pilate desired to follow the bride in the imperial litter; but Tiberius, who had acted as one of the twelve witnesses required by the law, forced him back, and drawing a paper from his bosom, handed it to him and passed on. This paper contained his commission as procurator of Judea; and the real object of the suit paid to Claudia was attained.
Pilate proceeded at once to Cæsarea, the headquarters of the government of his province. His wife, who had been left behind, joined him afterwards. Cæsar's permission to do this was a most gracious concession, as it was not generally allowed that governors of provinces should take their wives with them. At first it was positively forbidden. But afterwards a senatus consult, which is embodied in the Justinian text, declared it better that the wives of proconsuls and procurators should not go with them, but ordaining that said officials might take their wives with them provided they made themselves personally responsible for any transgressions on their part. Notwithstanding the numerous restrictions of Roman law and custom, it is very evident that the wives of Roman officers frequently accompanied them to the provinces. From Tacitus we learn that at the time of the death of Augustus, Germanicus had his wife Agrippina with him in Germany; and afterwards, in the beginning of the reign of Tiberius, she was also with him in the East. Piso, the præfect of Syria, took his wife with him at the same time. These facts are historical corroborations of the Gospel accounts of the presence of Claudia in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion and of her warning dream to Pilate concerning the fate of the Master.
His Procuratorship.—Pontius Pilate was the sixth procurator of Judea. Sabinus, Coponius, Ambivus, Rufus, and Gratus had preceded him in the government of the province. Pilate's connection with the trial and crucifixion of Jesus will be dealt with in succeeding chapters of this volume. Only the chief acts of his public administration, in a purely political capacity, will be noticed here. One of the first of these acts serves well to illustrate the reckless and tactless character of the man. His predecessors in office had exercised great care in the matter of the religious prejudices of the Jews. They had studiously avoided exhibiting flags and other emblems bearing images of the emperor that might offend the sacred sentiments of the native population. Even Vitellius, the legate of Syria, when he was marching against the Arabian king Aretas, ordered his troops not to carry their standards into Jewish territory, but to march around it. Pilate, on the other hand, in defiance of precedent and policy, caused the garrison soldiers of Jerusalem to enter the city by night carrying aloft their standards, blazoned with the images of Tiberius. The news of this outrage threw the Jews into wild excitement. The people in great numbers flocked down to Cæsarea, where Pilate was still stopping, and begged him to remove the standards. Pilate refused; and for five days the discussion went on. At last he became enraged, summoned the people into the race course, had them surrounded by a detachment of soldiers, and served notice upon them that he would have them put to death if they did not become quiet and disperse. But, not in the least dismayed, they threw themselves upon the ground, laid bare their necks, and, in their turn, served notice upon Pilate that they, the children of Abraham, would rather die, and that they would die, before they would willingly see the Holy City defiled. The result was that Pilate finally yielded, and had the standards and images withdrawn from Jerusalem. Such was the Roman procurator and such the people with whom he had to deal. Thus the very first act of his procuratorship was a blunder which embarrassed his whole subsequent career.
A new storm burst forth when, on another occasion, Pilate appropriated funds from the Corban or sacred treasury to complete an aqueduct for bringing water to Jerusalem from the "Pools of Solomon." This was certainly a most useful enterprise; and, ordinarily, would speak well for the statesmanship and administrative ability of the procurator. But, in this instance, it was only another exhibition of tactless behavior in dealing with a stubborn and peculiar people. The Jews had a very great reverence for whatever was set apart for the Corban, and they considered it a form of awful impiety to devote its funds to secular purposes. Pilate, we must assume, was well acquainted with their religious scruples in this regard, and his open defiance of their prejudices was an illustration not of courage, but of weakness in administrative matters. Moreover, his final conduct in the matter of the aqueduct revealed a malignant quality in the temper of the man. On one occasion when he was getting ready to go to Jerusalem to supervise the building of this work, he learned that the people would again importune him, as in the case of the standards and the images. He then deliberately caused some of his soldiers to be disguised as Jewish citizens, had them armed with clubs and daggers, which they carried concealed beneath their upper garments; and when the multitude approached him to make complaints and to present their petitions, he gave a preconcerted signal, at which the assassins beat down and cut to pieces great numbers of the helpless crowds. Pilate was victorious in this matter; for the opposition to the building of the aqueduct was thus crushed in a most bloody manner. But hatred against Pilate was stirred up afresh and intensified in the hearts of the Jews.
A third act of defiance of the religious prejudices of the inhabitants of Jerusalem illustrates not only the obstinacy but the stupidity as well of the deputy of Cæsar in Judea. In the face of his previous experiences, he insisted on hanging up in Herod's palace certain gilt shields dedicated to Tiberius. The Jews remonstrated with him in vain for this new outrage upon their national feelings. They were all the more indignant because they believed that he had done it, "less for the honor of Tiberius than for the annoyance of the Jewish people." Upon the refusal of Pilate to remove the shields, a petition signed by the leading men of the nation, among whom were the four sons of Herod, was addressed to the emperor, asking for the removal of the offensive decorations. Tiberius granted the request and the shields were taken from Jerusalem and deposited in the temple of Augustus at Cæsarea—"And thus were preserved both the honor of the emperor and the ancient customs of the city."[52]
The instances above cited are recounted in the works of Josephus[53] and Philo. But the New Testament also contains intimations that Pilate was a cruel and reckless governor in his dealings with the Jews. According to St. Luke xiii. 1: "There were present at that season some that told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices." Nothing definite is known of this incident mentioned by the Evangelist. But it probably refers to the fact that Pilate had put to the sword a number of Galileans while they were offering their sacrifices at Jerusalem.
His Character.—The estimates of the character of Pilate are as varied as the races and creeds of men. Both Josephus and Philo have handed down to posterity a very ugly picture of the sixth Roman procurator of Judea. Philo charges him with "corruptibility, violence, robberies, ill-treatment of the people, grievances, continuous executions without even the form of a trial, endless and intolerable cruelties." If we were to stop with this, we should have a very poor impression of the deputy of Tiberius; and, indeed at best, we can never either admire or love him. But there is a tender and even pathetic side to the character of Pilate, which is revealed to us by the Evangelists of the New Testament. The pure-hearted, gentle-minded authors of the Gospels, in whose writings there is not even a tinge of bitterness or resentment, have restored "for us the man within the governor, with a delicacy, and even tenderness, which make the accusing portrait of Philo and Josephus look like a hard, revengeful daub." Instead of painting him as a monster, they have linked conscience to his character and placed mercy in his heart, by their accounts of his repeated attempts to release Jesus. The extreme of pity and of pathos, derived from these exquisitely merciful side touches of the gentle biographers of the Christ, is manifested in the opinion of Tertullian that Pilate was virtually a Christian at heart.[54]
A further manifestation is the fact that the Abyssinian Church of Christians has canonized him and placed his name in the calendar on June 25th.
A still further revelation of this spirit of regarding Pilate merely as a sacred instrument in the hands of God is shown by the Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus which speaks of him as "uncircumcised in flesh but circumcised in heart."
Renan has called him a good administrator, and has sought to condone his brutal treatment of the Jews by pointing to the necessity of vigorous action in dealing with a turbulent and fanatical race. But the combined efforts of both sacred and secular apologists are still not sufficient to save the name of Pilate from the scorn and reprobation of mankind. That he was not a bad man in the worst sense of the term is manifest from the teachings of the Gospel narratives. To believe that he was wholly without conscience is to repudiate the revelations of these sacred writings. Of wanton cruelty and gratuitous wickedness, he was perhaps incapable. But the circumstances of his birth and breeding; his descent from a renegade father; his adventurous life in the army of Germanicus; his contact with and absorption of the skepticism and debauchery of Rome; his marriage to a woman of questionable virtue whose mother was notoriously coarse and lewd—all these things had given coloring to the character of Pilate and had stricken with inward paralysis the moral fiber of his manhood. And now, in the supreme moment of his life and of history, from his nerveless grasp fell the reins of fate and fortune that destiny had placed within his hands. Called upon to play a leading rôle in the mighty drama of the universe, his craven cowardice made him a pitiable and contemptible figure. A splendid example this, the conduct of Pilate, for the youth of the world, not to imitate but to shun! Let the young men of America and of all the earth remember that a crisis is allotted to every life. It may be a great one or a small one, but it will come either invited or unbidden. The sublime courage of the soul does not avoid, but seeks this crisis. The bravest and most holy aspirations leap at times like angels from the temple of the brain to the highest heaven. Never a physician who does not long for the skill that discovers a remedy for disease and that will make him a Pasteur or a Koch; never a poet that does not beseech the muse to inspire him to write a Hamlet or a Faust; never a general of armies who would not fight an Austerlitz battle. Every ambitious soul fervently prays for strength, when the great crisis comes, to swing the hammer of the Cyclop with the arm of the Titan. Let the young aspirant for the glories of the earth and the rewards of heaven remember that youth is the time for the formation of that courage and the gathering of that strength of which victory is born. Let him remember that if he degrades his physical and spiritual manhood in early life, the coming of the great day of his existence will make him another Pilate—cringing, crouching, and contemptible.
The true character of the Roman judge of Jesus is thus very tersely given by Dr. Ellicott: "A thorough and complete type of the later Roman man of the world: stern, but not relentless; shrewd and worldworn, prompt and practical, haughtily just, and yet, as the early writers correctly perceived, self-seeking and cowardly; able to perceive what was right, but without moral strength to follow it out."[55]
His End.—Pilate's utter recklessness was the final cause of his undoing. It was an old belief among the Samaritans that Moses buried the sacred vessels of the temple on Mt. Gerizim. An impostor, a sort of pseudo-prophet, promised the people that if they would assemble on the top of the mountain, he would unearth the holy utensils in their presence. The simple-minded Samaritans assembled in great numbers at the foot of the Mount, and there preparing to ascend, when Pilate on the pretense that they were revolutionists, intercepted them with a strong force of horse and foot. Those who did not immediately submit were either slain or put to flight. The most notable among the captives were put to death. The Samaritans at once complained to Vitellius, the legate in Syria at that time. Vitellius at once turned over the administration of Judea to Marcellus and ordered Pilate to leave for Rome in order to give an account to the emperor of the charges brought against him by the Jews.[56] Before he arrived in Italy, Tiberius had died; but Pilate never returned to the province over which he had ruled during ten bloody and eventful years.
"Paradosis Pilati."—The death of Pilate is clouded in mystery and legend. Where and when he died is not known. Two apocryphal accounts are interesting, though false and ridiculous. According to one legend, the "Paradosis Pilati," the emperor Tiberius, startled and terrified at the universal darkness that had fallen on the Roman world at the hour of the crucifixion, summoned Pilate to Rome to answer for having caused it. He was found guilty and condemned to death; but before he was executed, he prayed to Jesus that he might not be destroyed in eternity with the wicked Jews, and pleaded ignorance as an excuse for having delivered the Christ to be crucified. A voice from heaven answered his prayer, and assured him that all generations would call him blessed, and that he should be a witness for Christ at his second coming to judge the Twelve Tribes of Israel. He was then executed; an angel, according to the legend, received his head; and his wife died from joy and was buried with him.
"Mors Pilati."—According to another legend, the "Mors Pilati," Tiberius had heard of the miracles of healing wrought by Jesus in Judea. He ordered Pilate to conduct to Rome the man possessed of such divine power. But Pilate was forced to confess that he had crucified the miracle worker. The messenger sent by Tiberius met Veronica who gave him the cloth that had received the impress of the divine features. This was taken to Rome and given to the emperor, who was restored to health by it. Pilate was summoned immediately to stand trial for the execution of the Christ. He presented himself wearing the holy tunic. This acted as a charm upon the emperor, who temporarily relented. After a time, however, Pilate was thrown into prison, where he committed suicide. His body was thrown into the Tiber. Storms and tempests immediately followed, and the Romans were compelled to take out the corpse and send it to Vienne, where it was cast into the Rhone. But as the storms and tempests came again, the body was again removed and sent to Lucerne, where it was sunk in a deep pool, surrounded by mountains on all sides. Even then, it is said, the water of the pool began to boil and bubble strangely.
This tradition must have had its origin in an early attempt to connect the name of Pilate with Mt. Pilatus that overlooks Lake Lucerne. Another legend connected with this mountain is that Pilate sought to find an asylum from his sorrows in its shadows and recesses; that, after spending years in remorse and despair, wandering up and down its sides, he plunged into the dismal lake which occupies its summit. In times past, popular superstition was wont to relate how "a form is often seen to emerge from the gloomy waters, and go through the action of washing his hands; and when he does so, dark clouds of mist gather first round the bosom of the Infernal Lake (such as it has been styled of old) and then wrapping the whole upper part of the mountain in darkness, presage a tempest or hurricane which is sure to follow in a short space."[57]
The superstitious Swiss believed for many centuries that if a stone were thrown into the lake a violent storm would follow. For many years no one was permitted to visit it without special authority from the officers of Lucerne. The neighboring shepherds bound themselves by a solemn oath, which they renewed annually, never to guide a stranger to it.[58] The strange spell was broken, however, and the legend exploded in 1584, when Johannes Müller, curé of Lucerne, was bold enough to throw stones into the lake, and to stand by complacently to await the consequences.[59]