[Footnote 1: John xviii. 29.]
The procurator, Pontius, surnamed Pilate, doubtless on account of the pilum or javelin of honor with which he or one of his ancestors was decorated,[1] had hitherto had no relation with the new sect. Indifferent to the internal quarrels of the Jews, he only saw in all these movements of sectaries, the results of intemperate imaginations and disordered brains. In general, he did not like the Jews, but the Jews detested him still more. They thought him hard, scornful, and passionate, and accused him of improbable crimes.[2]
[Footnote 1: Virg., Æn., XII. 121; Martial, Epigr., I. xxxii., X. xlviii.; Plutarch, Life of Romulus, 29. Compare the hasta pura, a military decoration. Orelli and Henzen, Inscr. Lat., Nos. 3574, 6852, etc. Pilatus is, on this hypothesis, a word of the same form as Torquatus.]
[Footnote 2: Philo, Leg. ad Caium, § 38.]
Jerusalem, the centre of a great national fermentation, was a very seditious city, and an insupportable abode for a foreigner. The enthusiasts pretended that it was a fixed design of the new procurator to abolish the Jewish law.[1] Their narrow fanaticism, and their religious hatreds, disgusted that broad sentiment of justice and civil government which the humblest Roman carried everywhere with him. All the acts of Pilate which are known to us, show him to have been a good administrator.[2] In the earlier period of the exercise of his office, he had difficulties with those subject to him which he had solved in a very brutal manner; but it seems that essentially he was right. The Jews must have appeared to him a people behind the age; he doubtless judged them as a liberal prefect formerly judged the Bas-Bretons, who rebelled for such trifling matters as a new road, or the establishment of a school. In his best projects for the good of the country, notably in those relating to public works, he had encountered an impassable obstacle in the Law. The Law restricted life to such a degree that it opposed all change, and all amelioration. The Roman structures, even the most useful ones, were objects of great antipathy on the part of zealous Jews.[3] Two votive escutcheons with inscriptions, which he had set up at his residence near the sacred precincts, provoked a still more violent storm.[4] Pilate at first cared little for these susceptibilities; and he was soon involved in sanguinary suppressions of revolt,[5] which afterward ended in his removal.[6] The experience of so many conflicts had rendered him very prudent in his relations with this intractable people, which avenged itself upon its governors by compelling them to use toward it hateful severities. The procurator saw himself, with extreme displeasure, led to play a cruel part in this new affair, for the sake of a law he hated.[7] He knew that religious fanaticism, when it has obtained the sanction of civil governments to some act of violence, is afterward the first to throw the responsibility upon the government, and almost accuses them of being the author of it. Supreme injustice; for the true culprit is, in such cases, the instigator!
[Footnote 1: Jos., Ant., XVIII. iii. 1, init.]
[Footnote 2: Jos., Ant., XVIII. ii.-iv.]
[Footnote 3: Talm. of Bab., Shabbath, 33 b.]
[Footnote 4: Philo, Leg. ad Caium, § 38.]
[Footnote 5: Jos., Ant., XVIII. iii. 1 and 2; Luke xiii. 1.]