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.