For the Prosecution

030

Professor Maier’s extensive rebuttal of my earlier essay is a most welcome engagement from an authority who has written widely on the figure of Pilate.¹ I am happy to offer a reply.

First, however, a word on name-calling. Professor Maier’s repeated reference to my remarks as “revisionist” history is intended, I assume, to cast a shadow of political correctness over my views, and to suggest that I hold them for reasons other than their historical plausibility. That’s no way to begin a conversation. All historians have personal histories to which their work is related. I am a liberal Christian who does not believe in the inerrancy of scripture. Paul Maier is a Missouri Synod Lutheran for whom the inerrancy of scripture is basic. These differences will affect how we each approach the Bible as a source for doing historical work. Fair enough. At the end of the day, however, our work must be judged on its historical merits, not on some unstated theological subtext about which the reader is left only to guess. So let us dispense with tags like “revisionist” and “fundamentalist” and simply look at how we view the evidence differently.

Maier is of course right in arguing that the evidence against Pilate from Philo and Josephus must be evaluated in view of these authors’ respective interests. But I would read the record a bit differently. Philo wrote the Embassy to Gaius not to argue for Jewish home rule in Judea, but to decry the treatment he and his fellow ambassadors received at the hands of Emperor Gaius Caligula when they went to Rome to plead the case of the Alexandrian Jews after the infamous anti-Jewish riots in 37 C.E. that took place in Alexandria under the local Roman governor Flaccus. His point in retelling the episode of Pilate and the shields is to contrast the behavior of Tiberius, who reprimanded Pilate for doing something so foolish, with that of Caligula, who insisted Petronius, his prefect in Judea, go forward with a similarly offensive act, even when Petronius could see that it was wrong. His subject is not Pilate’s barbarity, but Caligula’s folly. In any case, these were well-known public events, difficult for Philo to falsify very much even if he had wanted to.

The same is true for Josephus’s accounts of Pilate. He does indeed mean to show the incompetence of both the Roman leadership in Jerusalem and its Jewish collaborators. That is, in part, why he narrates the episodes of the standards (yes, in the Fortress Antonia, thus, the Temple Mount, not the Temple itself) and the protests over the aqueduct. Nonetheless, his audience was Roman, and he could only go so far without risking the loss of its sympathies. For this reason I doubt that he denigrated Pilate’s character much more than the historical record would bear. Incidentally, Professor Maier should clarify whether he is doubting the aqueduct incident at all, or just my infelicitous choice of words (Pilate “took” funds) in describing Pilate’s action. Indeed, Josephus says simply that he “spent” the money (probably with the full approval of his Jerusalem collaborators). The point, though, is that this called forth popular protests, which were put down with violence, resulting in the deaths of “many.” Whether this was “excessive” or not depends, I suppose, on one’s perspective. Again, however, these were well-known public events, and not easily falsified.

One should contrast these very public events with the sort of “events” by which Pilate is exonerated in our Gospels: private conversations between Jesus and Pilate, a trial at which there are no Jesus partisans present to report the facts, even a private communiqué between Pilate and his wife. How might we suppose the gospel writers came by these intimate details? Divine inspiration is an answer, but not a very good historical explanation. 031The only public event in question is the so-called Privilegium Pascal, wherein the Jewish crowd chooses to have Barabbas released to them instead of Jesus, a very unlikely event that is without parallel and without any external corroborating evidence.

Maier also believes that Pilate’s unusually long tenure would likely have been due to his sagacity and geniality as a ruler. But this benevolent view of Roman provincial politics has long passed from historical credibility. Romans ruled their provinces with an iron fist for the sole purpose of extracting the tribute and exercising other means of profit-taking. Pilate’s success was no doubt due to his competence at this sort of hard-ball politics. If it can be demonstrated that Tiberius showed special concern to root out incompetent or excessively brutal governors in the provinces, it should then be noted that Pilate was removed from office by the Syrian Legate, Vitellius, in the final months of Tiberius’s rule—for excessive brutality in putting down the Samaritan rebellion.

All in all, one may perhaps not single out Pilate as extraordinarily vile within a system of imperial rule that was by its very nature harsh. When Luke mentions the otherwise unknown incident of the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices (Luke 13:1), it is as an illustration of the sort of random violence that might befall anyone in Judea. Pilate, and the empire he represents, are random violence. They just blend in with other examples of “when bad things happen to good people.”

But it is not so much Pilate that Professor Maier wishes to defend, as the historical reliability of the Bible. What, then, of the gospel accounts? Are they historical fact? Maier is convinced that they are by the (apparent) similarity of the gospel trial scenes to actual Roman provincial trials, and the fact that Pilate and Caiaphas were actually real people who lived in Jesus’ day. But this shows only that Mark (or whoever created the trial scenes) had a good idea of how a Roman trial should proceed and that he knew the identity of two key figures in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ death. It does not show that Pilate (or Caiaphas) said and did certain things, entertained particular attitudes, or held particular conversations, etc. Historical verisimilitude is not the same as historical accuracy.

The martyrdom of James adds nothing to the case for the historicity of the Christian Passion accounts. Maier thinks that the Jewish execution of James shows that Jews could indeed be responsible for an execution, even under Roman rule. But he fails to appreciate the significance of the fact that James was martyred in 62 C.E., after the Roman procurator, Festus, had died, and before his successor, Albinus, had taken office. The high priest, Ananus the Younger, apparently seized the opportunity posed by this interregnum to settle scores with several of his foes, among them James. When Albinus did take office, he did not simply wink at the action of Ananus and the Sanhedrin, as Pilate is said to have done in the case of Jesus, but removed the high priest from office as punishment for having taken advantage of the situation.²

That very plausible scenario represents quite a different situation from the presumed trial of Jesus in our Gospels. Consider: in spite of the fact that Jesus enters Jerusalem and symbolically destroys the Temple, the center of religious and political life in Jerusalem, thus committing an act of effrontery to both Roman and Jewish authority alike; in spite of the fact that he comes to Jerusalem proclaiming the arrival of a new empire (basileia), implying, of course, that the current empire might leave something to be desired; and in spite of the fact that he does all of this during Passover, the annual celebration of Jewish liberation from Egyptian bondage, thus, a time of great tension between Jews and their Roman occupiers—in spite of all this, Pilate evidently harbors no suspicions about Jesus whatsoever and regards him as an innocent victim of the chief priests and the Sanhedrin. Pilate tries to release Jesus but is bullied by a small number of priests and scribes into an execution that he truly regrets.

As an historian, this just doesn’t seem very plausible to me. Nor did it to the author of Matthew, who therefore added to Mark’s basic story a large chanting crowd of Jews to sway Pilate’s decision with those infamous words: “His blood be upon us and our children” (Matthew 25:25). I am not convinced that any of this is history. But that, of course, is a subjective judgment, as all historical judgments are.

But for many believers, the gospel accounts of Jesus’ death are accepted as factual, as are all other things found in the Bible. It is the Bible, after all. For many, the Bible’s accuracy in all things is the first article of faith. Such a person, I suppose, will take great comfort in Professor Maier’s historical judgments, and rest secure in the knowledge that their faith in the Bible is confirmed by such an eminent historian. But I must confess my own discomfort with this outcome, whether it comes from the historian or the believer. The assumed historicity of our gospel accounts of Jesus’ death has for centuries played a key role in fanning the flames of Christian anti-Semitism, an unfathomable evil that has claimed the lives of millions of innocent Jews. That doesn’t make the Gospels anti-Semitic. But it does make them dangerous in the hands of Christians who are led to believe that what they are reading is simple 032historical fact. We should not think that we are immune from the kind of passions that the Passion of Jesus has aroused in generations of Christians before us. The death of Jesus was a history worth revising, for it has spawned a history we cannot risk repeating. As millions of Christians flock to theaters this year to view Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, let us hope that the price to be paid for simple faith in the Bible’s accuracy is not a return to the dark days of a simpler time, when Pilate was still a saint, and the Jews were still “Christ-killers.”

Professor Maier’s extensive rebuttal of my earlier essay is a most welcome engagement from an authority who has written widely on the figure of Pilate.1 I am happy to offer a reply.