The Gospels on Pilate: Not So Wrong After All

With the release of The Passion of The Christ, everyone is weighing in on the accuracy of the Gospels. Newsweek ran a piece suggesting that the movie’s portrait of Pilate, like that of the Gospels, has come in for heavy recasting. Even Katie Couric taught a class in gospel theology on the Today Show, arguing that we know the Gospels are not historical.

Pilate: Powerful but Pressured

So is the portrait of an undecided or conflicted Pilate trying to get Jesus freed a historical distortion? Did the gospel writers, for political reasons, try to deflect blame from Pilate to the less powerful Jews?

Technically and legally, there is no doubt that the major blame for Jesus' death falls with Pilate, since only he could give the order to crucify. But answering the technical question does not exhaust historical inquiry. There are good reasons to believe that the situation with Jesus would have caught Pilate off guard, and that — contemporary media accounts notwithstanding — the Gospels paint an accurate picture of the Roman ruler.

The recent discussion of Pilate's role has tended to understate the nature of Jesus' conflict with the Jewish leadership, especially after Jesus cleansed the temple. In the backdrop there is an internal Jewish religious dispute about who had the authority to speak for God and teach about His ways. Pilate would not have been concerned about a teacher of Jewish religious ideas had not the Jewish leadership — who worked with the Roman ruler to help keep things calm in Judea — not also been concerned about Jesus.

Two early sources outside the Bible mention incidents that illustrate Pilate's personality and the nature of his rule. They show a Pilate who was ruthless and insensitive — as many recent media articles have noted — but also show a Pilate who was forced to back off at points. Although Pilate was the most powerful man in the region because he was connected to Rome, political realities kept him from having an entirely free hand.

Gospels: More Reliable than Newsweek

But there is another take on things, even if the imperial rebuke did not precede Jesus' trial. Initially, Pilate may well have been hesitant to respond to the Jewish leaders' condemnation of Jesus, suddenly sprung on the ruler that morning. Asked to take on this prisoner, Pilate may not have viewed Jesus as much of a threat and may have viewed the morning request as a kind of imposition, since Jesus exerted no obvious political muscle that could threaten Rome.

It was only when Pilate realized how important this was to the leadership that he acted. It appears that the high priest Caiaphas was someone Pilate trusted, as Pilate had the right to appoint a different high priest during his decade of rule, but never used it. Given his history, it's entirely plausible that Pilate's decision about Jesus reflected the gospel view: given the choice between defending someone he did not know and responding to the advice of someone he worked with regularly, he chose to take the view of the one he knew.

Two final points need to be made. First, in contrast to the claims of the recent media-driven articles, the Gospels' portrait of Pilate is not flattering. Here is a judge who does not see someone as guilty of a capital crime, yet sentences him to death. That is not exonerating the ruler. It suggests, as Acts 4:26-27 also does, that Rome failed to do the just thing. Second, the singly-attested Philo story, in the face of the many incidents Josephus raises, reminds us that singly-attested events can be historical. So unique details in a gospel could well reflect awareness of information about the event.

Matthew's idea is not that Pilate be exonerated for his act, even though Matthew has him claim to reject responsibility by washing his hands. Matthew's narrative argues that Pilate failed in his judicial duty, a view all the gospel writers hold. In the Gospels, Pilate is the last one responsible for Jesus' death because he failed to carry through on his initial opinion of Jesus' innocence.

So what does all of this historical discussion mean? It shows that Pilate was ruthless and insensitive, as the Newsweek piece claims, but also that the history is likely more complex than that piece suggests. The ancient texts show that at times Pilate was a realist who had to be aware of and responsive to Jewish reaction.

Theology and history are not necessarily mutually exclusive. These extra-biblical texts suggest that, when it comes to Pilate, the Gospels could have it right after all.

Many Moviegoers will leave The Passion of The Christ with a powerful experience of Jesus' sacrifice but uncertainty about what it all means or what to do next. So be prepared to give them A Guide to the Passion: 100 Questions about The Passion of The Christ, published by Catholic Exchange. Visit www.evangelization.com or call 800-376-0520 to order yours right now! Copies of this remarkable book are available for as little as .90 cents each, so call now!

Darrell Bock is Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and the author of numerous books, including Studying the Historical Jesus and a forthcoming work on problems with The Da Vinci Code.

This article originally appeared on Beliefnet.com. and is used by permission.

Jews: Oppressed but Not Powerless

When Pilate first came to power around AD 27, he had military standards with icons set up in Jerusalem. This offended the Jewish sense that their holy city should not be a place where idols were displayed. The Jews protested, sending many people to Pilate's capital of Caesarea and spending days pleading with him. Finally Pilate plotted to have his soldiers surround and prepare to kill the protesters. At their next meeting, the soldiers surrounded the throng and threatened to kill them if they did not leave the matter alone. The Jewish protesters lay down on the ground, exposed their necks to the weapons, and said they would rather die than transgress their law. Pilate, affected by their conviction, not only did not kill them, he ordered the standards withdrawn (Josephus, Antiquities 18.55-59). Clearly, Pilate could waffle at certain signs of Jewish pressure.

At the end of Pilate's rule — three to six years after the sentencing of Jesus, or around AD 36 — a man claiming to lead a throng to gather vessels Moses had placed at Mount Gerizim (holy to the Samaritans) was overrun by troops sent by Pilate. In the process, both the man's associates and innocents were killed. Jews and Samaritans complained through the chain of command above Pilate, who was then called to Rome to face the emperor. Fortunately for Pilate, Tiberius died before he arrived (Josephus, Antiquities 18.85-89). Again, Jewish pressure clearly had an effect on Roman politics; the Jewish community may have been oppressed, but was not completely powerless.

Somewhere between these early and late incidents fell two other events that show how complex Pilate's position was. First, Pilate took money from the Temple treasury to help build an aqueduct, something the sacred money was not intended to do. This also led to a public protest in the thousands. Pilate dealt with this complaint ruthlessly, slaying many. There was no reprisal from Rome for this act (Josephus, Antiquities 18.60-62). In this case, there was no effective Jewish persuasion. The different results show that sometimes pressure worked; other times it did not.

Second, Pilate sent gilded shields into Herod's palace. This was like his provocation with the military standards at the start of his rule, for there was apparently something in the designs on the shields that Jews found offensive. Philo says Pilate did it “to vex” the multitude (Philo, Embassy to Gaius 38.299-305).

The Jews complained to the sons of Herod, other Roman-supported rulers in the region, who took the complaints to Rome. Discussing the incident, Philo describes Pilate this way: “he was a man of a very inflexible disposition, and very merciless as well as very obstinate.” The text goes on to say that Pilate “feared lest [his Jewish opponents] might in reality go on an embassy to the emperor, and might impeach him with respect to other particulars of his government, in respect of his corruption, and his acts of insolence, and his rapine, and his habit of insulting people, and his cruelty, and his continual murders of people untried and uncondemned, and his never ending, and gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity.”

Philo goes on to note that the Jews hoped that Pilate might change his mind, but were not sure he would. So they wrote a letter to Tiberius, who in anger sent a rebuke to Pilate. According to Philo, Tiberius “wrote a letter, reproaching and reviling him in the most bitter manner for his act of unprecedented audacity and wickedness, and commanding him immediately to take down the shields and to convey them away from the metropolis of Judea to Caesarea.”

These four events show that political realities could make Pilate vacillate. We have the military standards incident, where what he planned and what he ended up doing differed. We also see that the Jewish community threatening to contact Caesar, or actually doing so, could lead Pilate to change his approach. If the votive-related rebuke of Pilate took place before the meeting with Jesus, Pilate may well have been very sensitive to the Jewish leaders' protest or the possibility of invoking the emperor in light of it.

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