Pontius Pilate Quotes

There was just such a man when I was young—an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm troopers, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people.

Pontius Pilate! God will not let you clean your hands of this!

This hero had gone into the abyss, gone irrevocably, the son of the astrologer-king, forgiven on the eve of Sunday, the cruel fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate.

Pilate's skeptical sneer "What is truth?" was addressed to Truth Himself, standing there right in front of his face. The world's stupidest question was three words; God's profoundest answer was one Word.

God did not choose Herod or Pontius Pilate or Caesar Augustus as His instrument. He chose the unknown son of an unknown carpenter in one of the least important stretches of the Roman Empire.

The narration of the facts is history; the narration of the facts with the meaning of the facts is doctrine. "Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried"--that is history. "He loved me and gave Himself for me"--that is doctrine. Such was the Christianity of the primitive Church.

Pontius Pilate! God will not let you wash your hands of this!

At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” Who was he to judge? Who was he “to have [his] own thoughts in this matter”? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.

You must learn early in life to endure what comes your way. We, as women, have no other choice.

Cruelty comes in many forms,

a criminal who had been put to death by Pontius Pilate.

American Christians especially should keep in mind that we as the modern Romans—the privileged citizens of the world’s lone superpower—have more in common with Pontius Pilate than we do with Galilean peasants.

Listening to the Gospel on Palm Sunday, it struck me that many people criticise Pontius Pilate for his role in the affair while letting the multitude go scot free. Pilate did what little he could to dissuade them from the extremely unpleasant course of action on which they were set, but the multitude kept shouting for a crucifixion. Pilate could not have done more without provoking a riot. The crucifixion when it happened was a victory for direct democracy against the effete, liberal paternalism of Pilate. If I am right, and the crucifixion be seen as an early victory for the principle of direct democracy, then it must follow...that good men should struggle to confound and frustrate the multitude whenever possible.

Christians, for instance, are not, properly speaking, believers in religion; rather, they believe that Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, rose from the dead and is now, by the power of the Holy Spirit, present to his church as its Lord.

Damn her uncle and his lust, damn him and his thirst for power. Yet, he was her kin, and his destruction might mean the destruction of Salome, too, for the triumph of Roman men like Pontius Pilate would mean the inevitable diminishing of her own household.

No one, no one at all, ever set out to torture us on purpose! ... After all, was it because Pontius Pilate wanted to humiliate him that Christ was crucified between two thieves? It just happened to be crucifixion day that day - and there was only one Golgotha, and time was short.

In the Last Days religious seduction will be likewise paralleled with political seduction, and the Church will get double-crossed and betrayed. This is exactly what happened in Israel for placing trust in Pompeii and Alexander the Great. In the end they get an Antiochus Epiphanes, a Pontius Pilate, and a King Herod—all of whom typify and foreshadow the Antichrist. But the worst is yet to come for both Israel and, sadly, for much of the Church. The politicians whom Christians trust will betray them, and the clergy who urge and guide them in this direction will become capable of the most despicable acts imaginable

According to Augustine, “Eve borrowed sin from the devil and wrote a bill and provided a surety, and the interest on the debt was heaped upon posterity. . . . She wrote the bill when she reached out her hand to the forbidden apple.” And in the end, adds the Golden Legend, “Christ took this bill and nailed it to the cross.

The most important moment in religious history was when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus Christ, “What is truth?” This was the ideal opportunity for “God” to finally explain reality and truth to humanity. What, then, was Christ’s answer? Er, nothing. That dreadful silence reveals everything about mainstream religion and its inability to explain anything.

the new system did not replace the former one but, in line with a typically Roman habit, ran alongside and gradually emptied it of significance—

Negrįžtamai pasitraukė, sekmadienio naktį gavęs atleidimą, karaliaus – žvaigždininko sūnus, žiaurus penktasis Judėjos prokuratorius raitelis Poncijus Pilotas

She had dressed carefully in one of her soft blue linen togas.

The Romans may be known for many things, but humor isn't one of them. As usual, this interpretation relies on a prima facie reading of Jesus as a man with no political ambitions whatsoever. That is nonsense. All criminals sentenced to execution received a titulus so that everyone know the crime for which they were being punished and thus be deterred from taking part in similar activity. That the wording on Jesus's titulus was likely genuine is demonstrated by Joseph A. Fitzmeyer, who notes that "if [the titulus] were invented by Christians, they would have used Christos, for early Christians would scarcely have called their Lord 'King of the Jews'."[..] the notion that a no-name Jewish peasant would have received a personal audience with the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who had probably signed a dozen execution orders that day alone, is so outlandish that it cannot be taken seriously.

Rome governed first and foremost through consensus, and, where possible, through integration, cultivating privileged alliances with the different local aristocracies: loyalty in exchange for legitimation of their own privileges.

Jesus appears to have had no interest in one of the world's great, abiding illusions—justice. At various times, Jesus was dragged before the agents of justice—Caiaphas (the high priest), the Sanhedrin, Pontius Pilate (Jesus made little distinction between religious power brokers and secular ones). One of the most noble systems of justice ever devised responded to Jesus by torturing him to death. Worldly attempts at justice always involve the strong imposing their wills upon the weak. In crying for justice, the weak are usually demanding power to work their wills upon the strong. Perhaps that's why, in world history, Jesus is usually on the losing side. After the world's revolutions, it's often difficult to tell the vanquished from the victors, morally speaking. People in power tend to act the same, despite why they got there. All of which explains why Jesus never got along well with potentates, religious or otherwise.

This holy staircase is composed of eight-and-twenty steps, said to have belonged to Pontius Pilate’s house and to be the identical stair on which Our Saviour trod, in coming down from the judgment-seat. Pilgrims ascend it, only on their knees. It is steep; and, at the summit, is a chapel, reported to be full of relics; into which they peep through some iron bars, and then come down again, by one of two side staircases, which are not sacred, and may be walked on.

Who art thou [...] Who layest dead in the grave, and art come down alive to us, and in thy death all the creatures trembled, and all the stars were moved, and now hast thou thy liberty among the dead, and givest disturbance to our legions?

And that is how it would have stayed, had God not taken the initiative to help us. We would have remained forever agnostic, asking – just like Pontius Pilate at the trial of Jesus – ‘What is truth?’ but never staying for an answer, never daring to hope that we would receive one. We would be those who worship, for it is part of human nature to worship someone or something, but all our altars would be like the one the apostle Paul found in Athens, dedicated ‘To an unknown god’.

Pilate also became, in a way, the first priest of the Eucharist of Christ. Christ offered the bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood, but Pilate offered Christ himself. He took him, showed him to the people, proclaimed him and broke him.

Self is the opaque veil that hides the Face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. As well try to instruct leprosy out of our system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Saviour passed when He suffered under Pontius Pilate.

Now he could see with his own eyes and hear with his own ears that not only Hitler, not only Heydrich or the “sphinx” Müller, not just the S.S. or the Party, but the elite of the good old Civil Service were vying and fighting with each other for the honor of taking the lead in these “bloody” matters. “At that moment, I sensed a kind of Pontius Pilate feeling, for I felt free of all guilt.” Who was he to judge? Who was he “to have [his] own thoughts in this matter”? Well, he was neither the first nor the last to be ruined by modesty.

Jesus’ triumphal entry was the anti-military parade. It was a mockery of Rome’s intimidating show of military power. It also presented Jerusalem with a stark contrast between the way of war and the way of peace. At the beginning of Holy Week, Pontius Pilate and Jesus of Nazareth are at the head of two very different parades.  The question for us is which parade are we marching in—the military parade of Pilate that still believes the world is to be shaped by war, or the peace parade of Jesus that understands that with the coming of Christ war has been abolished?

This is perhaps the most chilling moment in Mark’s account. The crowd is asked a simple question, which it refuses to answer, offering only a call for violence. The moment might stand as a warning about all those times when fear, anger, prejudice, blind obedience or blood-lust blank out reason and justice.

Standing in the praetorium, planting the barricades of his awkward questions, Pilate becomes the prototype of every uncertain man or woman forced into a dialogue with God. He asks, only half-believing that he will ever get an answer. What comes back is elliptical, disturbing; but for a moment the heart has been laid open.

himself. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord; Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Maria, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell; the third day He arose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

I am now going to turn to a couple of the ways in which the New Testament depicts significant silence. One of the most dramatic of these moments is Jesus’ silence before his judges, before the High Priest and the Governor. The gospel narratives show us how the High Priest or Pontius Pilate urge Jesus to speak: ‘Why don’t you answer me?’ says Pilate, ‘Don’t you know that I have the power to crucify you or to release you?’ And we’re told in St John’s Gospel that when Jesus gives no answer to the charges made against him, Pilate wonders, he is ‘amazed’. Now the odd thing in these stories is that Jesus is precisely in the position of someone having his voice taken away; he is a person who has been reduced to silence by the violence and injustice of the world he is in. But then, mysteriously, he turns this around. His silence, his complete presence and openness, his refusal to impose his will in a struggle, becomes a threat to those who have power–or think they have power. ‘For God’s sake, talk to me!’ says the High Priest, more or less (‘ I adjure you in the name of the living God, tell us!’). And Pilate’s wonderment, bafflement and fear in the face of Jesus’ silence are a reminder that, in this case, Jesus as it were takes the powerlessness that has been forced on him and turns it around so that his silence becomes a place in the world where the mystery of God is present. In a small way, that’s what happens when we seek to be truly and fully silent or let ourselves be silenced by the mystery of God. We become a ‘place’ where the mystery of God happens.

Now here is exactly the point, I am afraid, where multitudes of English people fail, and are in imminent danger of being lost for ever. They know that there is no forgiveness of sin excepting in Christ Jesus. They can tell you that there is no Saviour for sinners, no Redeemer, no Mediator, excepting Him who was born of the Virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, dead, and buried. But here they stop, and get no further! They never come to the point of actually laying hold on Christ by faith, and becoming one with Christ and Christ in them. They can say, He is a Saviour, but not 'my Saviour,'—a Redeemer, but not 'my Redeemer,'—a Priest, but not 'my Priest,'—an Advocate, but not 'my Advocate:' and so they live and die unforgiven! No wonder that Martin Luther said, "Many are lost because they cannot use possessive pronouns.

The night before flying to New York, I watched Bowie's brief performance as a serene, pragmatic Pontius Pilate in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. 'That's a strange movie to watch before going on a plane flight,' Bowie laughs. 'It's like, shall we find out—is there a God?' Then, as if moving on to the next logical topic, Bowie says, 'I can't wait to see the other 10 percent of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They're in fragments, of course, kind of a Bill Burroughs effect...' and he recounts for me a certain conspiracy theory ('a '70s thing') about a secret section of the Dead Sea Scrolls supposedly written by a Jesus who'd escaped from the cross and ended up dying a revolutionary at Masada. This secret stuff is, according to the theory, held in the Vatican and shown only to each new Pope on the day of election. But what on earth, I ask, could the big secret be anyway? 'Oh,' laughs Bowie, 'that there really was a Brian.

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late. Let’s remember again the radical profession that we Christians make. We confess that Jesus is the world’s true king. We confess that Jesus is Lord...right now. The rightful ruler of the world is not some ancient Caesar, not some contemporary Commander in Chief, but Jesus Christ! Jesus is not going to be king someday, Jesus is King of Kings right now! Christ was crowned on the cross and God vindicated him as the world’s true king by raising him from the dead. This is what Christians confess, believe, and seek to live. We have no king but Jesus. And our king has nothing to do with violent power. Our king has no use for nuclear weapons. Why? Because you can’t love your neighbor with hydrogen bombs. Our king said his kingdom does not come from the world of war, which is why his servants do not fight. Jesus told Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my servants would be fighting.”[9] The kingdom from heaven that Jesus brings into the world does not come riding an M1 Abrams tank. In the kingdom of the Prince of Peace, we study war no more, we turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, we turn tanks into tractors and missile silos into grain silos. Our task is not to turn the world into a battlefield, our task is to turn the world into a garden. Our goal is not Armageddon, our goal is New Jerusalem. We’re marching to Zion, the beautiful city of God. Of course Governor Pilate doesn’t believe any of this.

On the one hand, the creeds do not speak of “the Jews” as responsible for the death of Jesus; he “suffered under” and “was crucified under” Pontius Pilate. On the other hand, the creeds do not mention Jesus’s Judaism at all. With the stress in some churches on Jesus’s divine sonship, the cross, the resurrection, and the redemptory role of saving humanity from sin and death, his historical connection to Judaism gets lost along with his very Jewish message of the kingdom of heaven. The problem is more than one of silence. In the popular Christian imagination, Jesus still remains defined, incorrectly and unfortunately, as “against” the Law, or at least against how it was understood at the time; as “against” the Temple as an institution and not simply against its first-century leadership; as “against” the people Israel but in favor of the Gentiles. Jesus becomes the rebel who, unlike every other Jew, practices social justice. He is the only one to speak with women; he is the only one who teaches nonviolent responses to oppression; he is the only one who cares about the “poor and the marginalized” (that phrase has become a litany in some Christian circles). Judaism becomes in such discourse a negative foil: whatever Jesus stands for, Judaism isn’t it; whatever Jesus is against, Judaism epitomizes the category. No wonder even today Jesus somehow looks “different” from “the Jews”: in the movies and artistic renderings, he’s blond and they are swarthy; he is cute and buff and they need rhinoplasty and Pilates. Jesus and his followers such as Peter and Mary Magdalene become identified as (proto-) Christian; only those who chose not to follow him remain “Jews.

By becoming the aggressor in sharing the good news of Christ with everyone in earshot, I became the one doing the influencing for good rather than the one being influenced for evil. I deduced that my Christianity is not about me but about Christ living through me. Jesus Christ represents everything that is truly good about me. Oddly enough, it started with a prank telephone call when I was seventeen. As I was studying the Bible one night, I had just said a prayer in which I asked God for the strength to be more vocal about my faith. All of a sudden, the phone rang and I answered. “Hello?” I asked. No one answered. “Hello?” I asked again. There was still silence on the other end. I started to hang up the phone, but then it hit me. “I’m glad you called,” I said. “You’re just the person I’m looking for.” Much to my surprise, the person on the other end didn’t hang up. “I want to share something with you that I’m really excited about,” I said. “It’s what I put my faith in. You’re the perfect person to hear it.” So then I started sharing the Gospel, and whoever was on the other end never said a word. Every few minutes, I’d hear a little sound, so I knew the person was still listening. After several minutes, I told the person, “I’m going to ask you a few questions. Why don’t you do one beep for no and two beeps for yes? We can play that game.” The person on the other end didn’t say anything. Undaunted by the person’s silence, I took out my Bible and started reading scripture. After a few minutes, I heard pages rustling on the other end of the phone. I knew the person was reading along with me! After a while, every noise I heard got me more excited! At one point, I heard a baby crying in the background. I guessed that the person on the phone was a mother or perhaps a babysitter. I asked her if she needed to go care for her child. She set the phone down and came back a few minutes later. I figured that once I started preaching, she would hang up the phone. But the fact that she didn’t got my adrenaline flowing. For three consecutive hours, I shared the message of God I’d heard from my little church in Luna, Louisiana, and what I’d learned by studying the Bible and listening to others talk about their faith over the last two years. By the time our telephone call ended, I was out of material! “Hey, will you call back tomorrow night?” I asked her. She didn’t say anything and hung up the phone. I wasn’t sure she would call me back the next night. But I hoped she would, and I prepared for what I was going to share with her next. I came across a medical account of Jesus’ death and decided to use it. It was a very graphic account of Jesus dying on a cross. Around ten o’clock the next night, the phone rang. I answered it and there was silence on the other end. My blood and adrenaline started pumping once again! Our second conversation didn’t last as long because I came out firing bullets! I worried my account of Jesus’ death was too graphic and might offend her. But as I told her the story of Jesus’ crucifixion--how He was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, beaten with leather-thonged whips, required to strip naked, forced to wear a crown of thorns on His head, and then crucified with nails staked through His wrists and ankles--I started to hear sobs on the other end of the phone. Then I heard her cry and she hung up the phone. She never called back. Although I never talked to the woman again or learned her identity, my conversations with her empowered me to share the Lord’s message with my friends and even strangers. I came to truly realize it was not about me but about the power in the message of Christ.

In the centuries that followed, even up to the twentieth, Christians wishing to blame the Jews seized on this single sentence. They include some of the most venerated men of the Church: Augustine, Aquinas, Chrysostom. Even if they conceded that Luke’s grammar was ambiguous, they could nonetheless point to the pressure put on Pilate by the chief priests and the crowd. All the Jews, they argued, had killed Jesus. They had even, in Matthew, explicitly taken his blood on themselves and removed it from the Romans. And they had reaped the whirlwind. Every misfortune that subsequently befell the Jews—from the destruction of Jerusalem to Auschwitz—carried an echo of that invented blood pact from the trial.

in Socrates’ words, he had committed sin by failing to know what was false and what was true.

our modern day when we can neither endure our vices, nor face the remedies needed to cure them.

two hundred furlongs.

And this paradox brings us to the relationship between man andChrist: the tautology “man is man” is to be read as a Hegelian infinitejudgment, as the encounter of “man” with its oppositional determi-nation, with its counterpart on the other side of the Möbius strip. Justas, in our everyday understanding, “law is law” means its opposite, thecoincidence of the law with arbitrary violence (“What can you do?Even if it is unjust and arbitrary, the law is the law, you have to obeyit!”), “man is man” indicates the noncoincidence of man with man,the properly inhumanexcess which disturbs its self-identity—andwhat, ultimately, is Christ but the name of this excess inherent in man,man’s ex-timate kernel, the monstrous surplus which, following theunfortunate Pontius Pilate, one of the few ethical heroes of the Bible(the other being Judas, of course), can be designated only as “Eccehomo”?

. The only difference between the kingdom today and the kingdom that we will know in the future is its visibility. Jesus is King right now. He holds the highest governmental office in the universe because He has been elevated to that position by God, which is at the heart of the Apostles’ Creed: “[He] suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried…. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” To be at the right hand of God is to be in the position of authority, by which He rules not just the church but also the world. That is why the church cries, “Hallelujah!” Our Messiah is not only our Prophet and Priest but also our King.

Restraint allows the tyrant to avoid making martyrs. Martyrs know the truth and, by dying for it, proclaim how strong it is. But if the tyrant toys with the truth, queries it, worries it, refuses to grant its importance and spares men the theatrical satisfaction of dying to uphold it, he remains the strongman and they become the fools.

The problem with planning is always the unknown variables.

Smith and Wesson 357 magnum

hand in my pocket and pull the keys out!

Maldonado said that Christians had a responsibility before God to expose voter fraud because “Jesus Himself was the first politician to walk the earth.” I replied by mentioning how Jesus told Pontius Pilate, before His execution, that His kingdom was not of this world. “No. It is of this world,” Maldonado told me.

Pilate had perfected the political art of compromise.

These days, there are voices in the Church that rise in predictable choruses of denunciation. They delight in decrying the decadence of manners, the breakdown of morals, the frittering away of faith. The Church has a duty to tell right from wrong, by all means. Its words should be ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’. But above all the Church must follow in the footsteps of its Master. It is a moot point whether our times are really so much more depraved than Palestine under Pontius Pilate. Yet nowhere do we hear Jesus upbraid his Father: ‘Why must I be incarnate in the midst of this?

[Pilate] washed his hands when he should have exerted them.

Believers do not shout out like the Greeks, “Great is Jesus of the Ephesians!” in partisan fervor (cf. Acts 19:28). Rather, they proclaim grace. Only one religion offers salvation that is entirely free and received apart from human merit. Only one religion claims that the one God of the universe became a man to die and rise again for His people. If God did become a man, it is not arrogant to proclaim that this one man is Jesus Christ of Nazareth, crucified under Pontius Pilate, and that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by Him (John 14:6), because He alone provides a salvation by grace.

In virtue of the name of Pontius Pilate being connected with Him, the life and passion of Jesus Christ is an event in the same world history in which our life also takes place.

Pontius Pilate is there to remind us that God has acted at a particular moment in human history. The salvation of the world can be dated. Certain people were there when it happened.

The name of Pontius Pilate is a historical anchor. It prevents us from turning the Christian faith into a set of general truths about the world. It reminds us that the gospel is not an idea but a fact.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED BY KATHLEEN MCGOWAN The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity, Jeffrey J. Butz Excellent account of early Christianity and its factions. Rev. Jeff’s understanding of Greek translations was a revelation for me. A rare scholarly work that is entirely readable and entertaining. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, Margaret Starbird A pioneering book in Magdalene research, Starbird was one of the first to assert the theory of Magdalene as bride. Mary Magdalen, Myth and Metaphor, Susan Haskins The definitive Magdalene reference book. Massacre at Montsegur, Zoé Oldenbourg Classic, scholarly account of the final days of the Cathars. The Perfect Heresy, by Stephen O’Shea A very readable book on Cathar history. Chasing the Heretics, Rion Klawinski A history-filled memoir of traveling through Cathar country. Key to the Sacred Pattern, Henry Lincoln Fascinating theories on the sacred geometry of Rennes-le-Château and the Languedoc by one of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Relics of Repentance, James F. Forcucci Contains the letters of Claudia Procula, the wife of Pontius Pilate. The Church of Mary Magdalene, Jean Markale Poet and philosopher Jean Markale’s quest for the sacred feminine in Rennes-le-Château. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and The Gospel of Philip, Jean-Yves Leloup Highly readable French scholarly analyses of important Gnostic material. Nostradamus and the Lost Templar Legacy, Rudy Cambier Professor Cambier explores the prophecies of the Expected One from another angle. Who Wrote the Gospels?, Randel McCraw Helms Fascinating theories from a noted scholar on the authorship of the Gospels. Jesus and the Lost Goddess, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy Well-researched alternative theories, also provides excellent resource list. Botticelli, Frank Zollner The ultimate coffee table book, with gorgeous reproductions of the art and great analysis of Sandro’s life and career.

Restraint in provocation is often not a sign of weakness, It is a great strength. had Pontius Pilate knew this, He would have spoken few words about himself

Everybody here probably thinks the Jews killed Christ. That’s a lie. Read the Book of Acts, chapter 4, verse 27. It’s written by St. Luke. The Romans and Pontius Pilate and Herod and a handful of bums in the Sanhedrin and some loafers in the courtyard were the culprits.

One of the more notable features of the life of our Lord, as recorded in Scripture, is the fact that references to the outside world are overwhelmingly political. When Jesus was born, Augustus was Caesar (Luke 2:1) and Quirinius was governor of Syria (Luke 2:2). Herod the Great was ruler in Judea (Luke 1:5) and wielded his power to the grief of many mothers in Bethlehem. Tiberius was Caesar when John the Baptist began his ministry (Luke 3:1–2), and Luke includes a number of interesting names when he dates the arrival of the forerunner of the Messiah. Tiberius was still emperor when Jesus died, and this political orientation is sealed by the fact that Pontius Pilate was included in the Apostles’ Creed. The New Testament is silent when it comes to the other outside celebrities. We are told very little about their poets, their actors, their singers. We know little of their architects from the pages of the New Testament, even though they had magnificent architects. No, Scripture focuses on the political rulers, and this is because it is where the fundamental challenge was mounted.

I decided that to get at the historical Jesus, one should perhaps start by looking at his background: his parents, his family, the places of his birth and life. The Gospels, of course, contained a lot of that stuff, though they didn’t always agree. But one couldn’t prove the validity of the Gospel story by appealing to the Gospel story. But here was the problem I encountered. Using the Muratorian Project Index and my own search of the non-canonical material I had entered, I could find no references to the names of Mary and Joseph, nor to Bethlehem, Nazareth or Galilee, anywhere in the non-Gospel documents of the first century. I decided to look up the name of the man who one might say was the most crucial in Jesus’ life, namely, the man who had tried and executed him: the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. In the epistles, he appeared only in a single passing reference in 1 Timothy 6:13, at my date of 115. Elsewhere, in all the discussions about Christ’s death and crucifixion, he was nowhere to be found. I could not even locate a reference in Paul or any other epistle writer to the fact that Jesus had undergone a trial! Little did Pilate realize when he washed his hands, that he was washing himself out of the wider Christian record for about 80 years!

It is possible to be outside God’s revealed will—by oppressing the poor, for instance, or rejecting the authority of Scripture—but we cannot, by definition, be outside God’s hidden will. Such a distinction entails both a warning and a promise. On the one hand, God does grant us the freedom to make decisions, and a repeated pattern of active disobedience against God may well result in our final separation from him. Herod and Pontius Pilate acted according to the “will” of God, but we do not want to follow their example (Acts 4:27-28).

If that guy had defended Pontius Pilate, he would have convinced the jury that he was simply assisting a young carpenter who wanted to buy some nails for a cross he was working on.

Fear the people, then, Excellency. They consider John a prophet." Salome now tilted her head upward and stared directly into the eyes of Antipas in an unmistakeably challenging expression. Her mien spoke eloquently what remained unspoken: "I dare you to break your word, Tetrarch Herod Antipas, in front of all your guests." Pilate, at the outer edge of that stare, caught the smirk of success spelled out by Salome's limpid blue eyes and firmly pressing, perfect lips. But he did not intervene. He had overheard Chuza's advice to Antipas, and it was obviously correct. Only a fool would fail to heed it, and the Tetrarch of Galilee and Perea was no fool. But Pilate was a Roman, a practical man who could temper absolutes to suit circumstances, as Rome herself had been doing for the last seven hundred years. Here in the East, however, absolutes were not so easily adjusted, and the spoken word was thought to have a power all its own.

The last judgment is not just a judgment on individuals; it is a judgment on human history. The dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Jesus the Christ in John 18 demonstrates the struggle between the kingdoms (and republics) of this world and the kingdom of God and of his Christ. This gospel, which is not about Christ’s second coming, confronts the believer with a decision about political claims to which we will be answerable at the last judgment. To which kingdom (or republic) do we owe our ultimate allegiance? If we want to get “in” with the coming administration of Christ the King, we had better come to terms with the witness of Revelation: that the one seated on the throne is the Lamb who was slain, and that self-giving love is the agenda throughout his dominions.

Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names—crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That’s concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened ‘once upon a time.

hail, Procurator Pontius Pilate, duly appointed representative of his Imperial Majesty, the Serene Emperor Tiberius, Pontifex Maximus and First Counsel of Rome,

It is not difficult to pretend that Jesus never lived. The attempt to prove it, however, invariably produces the opposite conclusion. In the Jewish literature of the first century the existence of Jesus is not attested to with any certainty, and in the Greek and Latin literature of the same period there is no evidence for it at all. Of the two passages in his Antiquities in which the Jewish writer Josephus makes incidental mention of Jesus, one was undoubtedly interpolated by Christian copyists. The first pagan witness to His existence is Tacitus, who, during the reign of Trajan in the second decade of the second century A.D., reports in his Annals (XV.44) that the founder of the “Christian” sect (which Nero accused of causing the great fire at Rome) was executed under the government of Tiberius by the procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate. Since

Do not make me laugh, stupid Jew.” Pontius Pilate had said upon hearing Anna’s explanation. “Your tribal God, Yahweh. Is a very weak God if he has allowed your people to become vassals of mighty Rome.

Even though some strands and forces in Jewish society—and in Jerusalem itself—were in favor of giving new shape to the religiosity of Abraham and Moses, which had been crystallized by custom and observance, we can confidently say that the two worlds never meshed.

that is, a procedure conducted according to the “order” (ordo) of public laws voted in assemblies or regulated “outside of order” (extra ordinem) by the new praxis of the emperor’s functionaries.

(The concept of “political theology” is not modern, nor does it start with Spinoza, as is usually believed; it is Roman–Hellenistic, and was developed in a cultural environment between the second and first century BC, from the circle of the philosopher Aetius to the jurist Quintus Mucius Scaevola, and the erudite antiquarian Marcus Terentius Varro.)

coup de main,

There was no sound, and this compounded the unreality of the situation. In the course of a raucous evening, nothing is louder than silence.

Splendid work, Malchus!" the high priest commended. "Oh... I'm sorry about the ear, but we'll need you at the trial as evidence that they were armed and gave resistance. Now, go and see the doctor." Still dazed and in semi-shock, Malchus slowly removed his hand and showed Caiaphas a normal right ear, attached where it should be. "Yeshu," he said, "picked it up... put it back... healed—" "Fool!" Caiaphas slapped him. "We have no time for your idle lies. Get hold of yourself! Now take this over to the Herodian palace." He thrust a note into the servant's hand and sent him out, muttering, "A little excitement, and the knave hallucinates.

nomen sanctum…

Emperor Claudius

Claudius

Yosef, the words I have written stay the way I have written them.

The Jewish authorities enjoyed considerable autonomy regarding criminal repression on religious issues, but public security was a wholly Roman affair.

Pax Vobiscum

which has ended up making ambiguity the dominant aspect of his portrait.

The story we are about to tell is also the catastrophe of a hopeless intellectual incomprehension, yielding consequences that still impinge upon us today.

The Gospels are not books of history, nor are they intended to be.

In my interpretation, I have tried to draw fruitfully on both these nuclei: Christian remembrance and imperial history.

Compared to what looks to be the plane of historically ascertained events, religious memory may even resort to seemingly pure invention, if it furthers the pursuit of goals considered to be didactically and theologically essential; and the only coherence we can expect is that which is found within the thoughts, impressions, and behaviors recalled on each occasion.

The death of Jesus comes, in the mirror of all four Gospels, as the culmination of his preaching and testimony—not a trauma that interrupts a path, but an event that completes and perfects it, and projects it toward the eternal.

He also told me to forgive you, my husband, for God has used your weakness to bring about salvation for all.

he

discrete

Here is the man,

In a part of early Christian memory, based on an evident forgery whose genesis cannot be investigated or traced here, a gnawing, corrosive, tenaciously anti-Semitic drive took root, which no exegetic acrobatics could possibly diminish: a deep well of poison that would be transmitted, intact and baleful, down the centuries, preserved in the heart of a memory that became increasingly precious and untouchable.

We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Saviour passed when He suffered under Pontius Pilate. Let us remember: when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.

According to Mark, it was a custom of the Roman governor during the feast of Passover to release one prisoner to the Jews, anyone for whom they asked. When Pilate asks the crowd which prisoner they would like to have released—Jesus, the preacher and traitor to Rome, or bar Abbas, the insurrectionist and murderer—the crowd demands the release of the insurrectionist and the crucifixion of the preacher. "Why?" Pilate asks, pained at the thought of having to put an innocent Jewish peasant to death. “What evil has he done?” But the crowd shouts all the louder for Jesus’s death. "Crucify him! Crucify him!" (Mark 15:1–20). The scene is absolutely nonsensical. Never mind that outside the gospels there exists not a shred of historical evidence for any such Passover custom on the part of any Roman governor. What is truly beyond belief is the portrayal of Pontius Pilate—a man renowned for his loathing of the Jews, his total disregard for Jewish rituals and customs, and his penchant for absentmindedly signing so many execution orders that a formal complaint was lodged against him in Rome—spending even a moment of his time pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser.

For we do continually beseech God by Jesus Christ to preserve us from the demons which are hostile to the worship of God, and whom we of old time served, in order that, after our conversion by Him to God, we may be blameless. For we call Him Helper and Redeemer, the power of whose name even the demons do fear; and at this day, when they are exorcised in the name of Jesus Christ, crucified under Pontius Pilate, governor of Judaea, they are overcome. And thus it is manifest to all, that His Father has given Him so great power, by virtue of which demons are subdued to His name, and to the dispensation of His suffering.

Countless Christians have mouthed these lines in worship for centuries: “Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate…” Look carefully at what separates the birth of Christ from his death. The world’s greatest life is reduced to a comma.

Josephus was considered the main source for the history of Judea and, as a tireless historian, boldly proclaimed he would leave out nothing of consequence to Jewish history in his chronicles. He had served as governor of Galilee, and at the beginning of the Jewish war with Rome, 66 A.D., was a general of the Roman forces in Galilee. A few decades earlier, according to the Gospels, Jesus attracted great crowds to Judea. But Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews did not record the savior story we read in the Christian gospels. He did cover many major and minor details of the period, even reporting a number of deeds and decrees of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect that, according to the gospels, allowed the Sanhedrin to condemn Jesus to death.