(New York: Random House, 1999) 427 pp., $26.95 (hardback)
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What can be said about Pontius Pilate derives from a few vignettes in the Gospels, several paragraphs in the histories of Flavius Josephus and the seemingly inexhaustible imagination of those who have pondered the New Testament from ancient to modern times. Pontius Pilate made it into the great creeds of Christendom; his story is retold in medieval accounts; and he continues to provide fodder for an impressive array of modern writers of “Pilate Fiction,” including Dorothy L. Sayers, Anatole France and, now, Ann Wroe.
In these elegant, well-crafted pages, Wroe, the editor of the American section of the British newsweekly The Economist, weaves in and out of this vast literature—ancient, medieval and modern—with remarkable dexterity. She deploys a powerful imagination in rendering the historical setting of Pilate’s world and in tracing the development of the ideas and motifs associated with the man who served as Roman prefect of Judea at the time of Jesus’ execution.
Inevitably, there are moments when one wishes for more careful assessments, especially of the earliest evidence.1 For a work that is critical of a flat reading of ancient sources, there is sometimes a surprising naïveté about the Gospels: In Wroe’s uncritical reading, the holy family travels to Judean Bethlehem for the Roman census; the Temple is renovated in exactly 46 years (alluding to John 2:20); Jesus precisely predicts his death on the cross; the Sanhedrin tries him formally; the Jewish people demand his execution; and there is an eclipse when he dies. I offer an alert about these issues not because I regard them as completely closed, but because they are so open.
From the time Pilate’s name entered the Christian creeds, Wroe writes, he has “represented the full power structure of his age and the worst that it could do.” Throughout the book, Wroe wrestles with the issue of how political power (in the shape of Pilate) and love (in the shape of Christ) can be reconciled.
Prior to the rise of the Christian emperor Constantine, scant memories of Pilate (not even the skeleton of a biography) were clung to by Christians who desired to exculpate their movement in the eyes of their Roman masters. So Matthew’s Pilate washed his hands of guilt while the Jews wallowed in Christ’s blood (Matthew 27:24–25). Wroe is well aware that this fomented a hatred of Jews that went well beyond the anti-Semitism of the Greco-Roman world. Even more perversely, after Constantine, Pilate became a saint in the imagination of many Christians, even suffering martyrdom in the Coptic tradition.
With the baptism of Constantine, political power itself was sanctified; Christian magistrates had to struggle to balance the requirements of Christ against the exigencies of Caesar. St. Augustine’s much-tortured conscience is a case in point. And the rise of democracy in the West has given its citizens generally a measure of that authority and that dilemma. That is why, as Wroe brilliantly points out, many modern readers feel closer to Pilate than they do to Jesus and more assured of him historically. We have less data about Pilate and more evidence that his image has been manipulated over time, and yet he is our man, because he is who we have become: vacillating agents with a modicum of power, unsure of what to do with the claims of love.
As she explores the conflict between hegemony and love in this gracefully postmodern book, Wroe is unconstrained by limitation to any one historical period. Her favorite analogies to the Roman empire are with the British versions of empire (down to the time of Tony Blair!), but they easily work for the economic Pax Americana now being extended under the banner of free trade. Sometimes Wroe seems to despair of the whole enterprise of reconciling power 043and love, as when she depicts a group of nonviolent demonstrators at an American abortion clinic as suffused with divine “love, and the glow of the victory” evident on their faces prior to arrest. She compares them to those Jews who, according to Josephus, lay down in front of Roman soldiers in order to protest Pilate’s arrogance in bringing idolatrous images into Jerusalem (Jewish War 2.169–174). If there really has been no substantive change in America’s replacement of Rome, there is good reason to despair. But Wroe puts much greater effort into finding the razor’s edge where the political constraints on Pilate and Christ’s challenge might be kept in balance. She does so by combining a biblical understanding of predestination with the Roman fascination with augury. From the former, she draws a sense of purpose; from the latter, an emphasis on inevitability. Pilate and Jesus both did what they had to do, each for his own reasons. Pilate can ask us at the end of this book, “Are you free now, jumping, shouting, saved, because I sentenced him? Did I do that for you?” If we all do what we must, will some larger divine purpose make sense of our diversity and our conflicts? Perhaps that is as likely as the proposition that power and love are ever truly reconcilable.
What can be said about Pontius Pilate derives from a few vignettes in the Gospels, several paragraphs in the histories of Flavius Josephus and the seemingly inexhaustible imagination of those who have pondered the New Testament from ancient to modern times. Pontius Pilate made it into the great creeds of Christendom; his story is retold in medieval accounts; and he continues to provide fodder for an impressive array of modern writers of “Pilate Fiction,” including Dorothy L. Sayers, Anatole France and, now, Ann Wroe. In these elegant, well-crafted pages, Wroe, the editor of the American section of the British […]
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Wroe implies that all Essenes were celibate (p. 83) and at one point describes the letters of Pilate as medieval (p. 95), although they have been cited since the second century. Referring to the acts and policies of Pilate, she gives scant significance to his insistence on keeping the vestments of the high priest in the Antonia fortress, rather than the Temple (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.88–95). She describes Pilate’s soldiers as exceeding his order when they “slashed and cut” a crowd of Jews, whereas Josephus says that they clubbed them, as instructed, albeit with undue severity (The Jewish War 2.175–177; Antiquities 18.60–62). In a recent article that summarizes contemporary discussion and research, Daniel Schwartz has shown that two very similar vignettes, one sketched by Josephus (War 2.169–174; Antiquities 18.55–59) and one by Philo (Embassy to Gaius 299–305), reflect a single incident when Pilate tried and failed to introduce the imperial insignia into Jerusalem (see his article on Pilate in The Anchor Bible Dictionary [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992], vol. 5, pp. 395–401). Wroe does not refer to that discussion (nor to the actual passages in question), and so she inadvertently makes Pilate into a slow learner, in that he makes the same mistake twice.
