Pontius Pilate: The Man Who Killed Christ
The real history behind the Roman prefect of 1st-century Judea.
The year is 26 AD. The Romans have sent over a soldier to restore law and order in a quarrelsome Jewish province of the Empire, called Judea. His name was Pontius Pilate.
For a decade, Pilate policed a volatile situation, suppressing revolts and crushing riots. But for most people, this Roman governor is best known for a single event: the trial and execution of Jesus.
According to the four canonical gospels, Pilate condemned Jesus based on the accusations of the Jews, and then washed his hands of the whole affair. But the reality of Roman rule in Judea was much different than the Scriptures claim, ignoring Pilate’s own motives for getting rid of Christ. The Gospels misrepresent Pilate as a weak Roman ruler, one easily persuaded by mob intimidation. But the Greek and Roman sources present a much different picture.
Here is the real history behind Pontius Pilate, the man who killed Christ.
The Trial of Jesus
Jesus was executed in the city of Jerusalem, located in the then-Roman province of Judea. The Gospels lay the blame of Jesus’ death on the Jews. In their account, it was the Jews who surrounded Pilate’s palace and pressured him to kill the messiah.
“What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ,” Pilate asked the Jewish crowd. “Crucify him!” They yelled back.
The theology of deicide, which blames the Jews for murdering Jesus, comes straight out of the New Testament itself. The Gospels portray the Romans as just rulers who were unwillingly coerced into executing Christ. The blame is instead cast on the Jews, and this is the root cause of Christian anti-Semitism. The pogroms of medieval Europe, even the Holocaust itself, could be traced to Matthew’s Gospel, which presents Pilate as washing his hands of the affair.
“I am innocent of this man’s blood,” Pilate allegedly told the crowd of Jews. “It is your responsibility!” “His blood is on us and on our children!” the Jews replied.
Power to the prefect
Pilate, when reconstructed from Greco-Roman sources, appears to have been a ruthless but effective administer. Even some Roman writers were very suspicious of the cruelty and brutality imposed by the Empire on foreign peoples. “The Romans make a desert, and they call it peace,” the Roman historian Tacitus wrote scornfully.
By 26 AD, Judea had been under Roman occupation for over two decades. It was still in a brutal state of colonization. Tax revolts had plagued the reigns of Pilate’s predecessors. A generation later, Judea erupted in open revolt against Roman rule. Pilate led a military intervention in Judea to restore Roman peace and order.
Pilate was quite benevolent compared to the prefects of Judea that preceded him. There are only three known crucifixions that took place under Pilate’s reign. Pilate’s immediate predecessor, Valerius Gratus, crucified at least 200 people.
The prefect was a primarily military role, designed to pacify a certain region. Many of the Roman soldiers were seasoned veterans from other theaters of war, such as Germany.
Caesarea
Caesarea was built by King Herod the Great on Judea’s Mediterranean coast. The Romans annexed Judea after Herod’s death, and became the new imperial headquarters. Baths, temples, and marbled terraces adorned the area. It was an oasis of Roman civilization in a hostile foreign land.
Pilate lived in his palace at Caesarea, far removed from the Jews. He probably encountered Jews before his time in Judea. There was a Jewish ghetto in Rome. To his enlightened Roman mind, many Jewish practices would have seemed very weird and barbaric. Women were kept hidden from public views. Jews refused to eat pork. Nor did they work on the Sabbath, which the Romans regarded as a sign of laziness. Weirdest of all, from the Roman point of view, the Jews practiced circumcision. Someone like Pilate probably would have simply laughed at the peculiarities of the Jews. But now, he was forced by necessity to actually work with those people.
There was a famous story that the Romans told about Jews. When Pompey captured Jerusalem a century before, the Roman general boldly marched into the Temple of Solomon. He entered into the Holy of Holies, against Jewish prescription. Looking for treasures to loot and statues to demolish, Pompey found nothing. Literally nothing. Just an empty space. Pompey was in utter disbelief how the Jews could worship an invisible god.
“No King but Caesar”
Religion was a central part of Roman life. As prefect of Judea, Pilate was the high priest of Imperial Rome’s state cult. Religious and political power were closely linked in the Roman mind. The Romans attributed their political success to their piety. They worked vigorously to keep the gods pleased, as a way maintain their good fortune.
The only material evidence of Pilate’s reign, apart from a sporadic few coins, is an inscription from Caesarea that records the dedication of a temple to Emperor Tiberius, who was regarded as a living god.
The imperial cult of the Romans clashed with the theologically exclusivism of the Jewish religion. The freethinking Romans allowed for the existence of other religions, and they syncretized their deities with those of other people. The austere Abrahamic faith of the Jews, by contrast, permitted no god but Yahweh.
Pilate had underestimated just how weird the Jews were from the other peoples of the Roman Empire. Elsewhere, the Emperor of Rome was worshipped alongside other local gods. There was no religious conflict. But the Jews insisted on worshiping Yahweh alone, and obstinately refused to assimilate into Roman culture.
Judea’s new governor
Josephus, a Jewish historian, is a key source about Pilate’s life. He wrote about 40 years after the events recorded. According to Josephus, Pilate’s first move as prefect was to immediately pour more troops into Jerusalem. This was immediately seen as a unprecedented provocation.
The Roman standards bore the image of Emperor Tiberius, breaking both the First and Second Commandments of Mosaic Law. The First Commandment forbids the worship of any other gods except Yahweh, in flagrant contrast to the Roman tradition of tolerance and syncretism. The Second Commandment forbids the making of graven images, or idols of worship.
Right away, Pilate made it abundantly clear that he wanted to Romanize the Jews. Josephus recounted the popular outrage by the Jews against Pilate. Word spread from Jerusalem to the countryside. Angry rural Jews marched to Caesarea to protest Pilate. For six strenuous days, the standoff continued. Jews swarmed around Pilate’s palace.
In the face of Jewish mobs, Pilate was thrust into a precarious situation. If he backed down, it would be an insult to the Emperor himself. So Pilate summoned the crowd to a stadium. He sat upon a throne above, ready to answer their petitions. On Pilate’s signal, Roman troops surrounded the angry Jews in a bold display of power. Pilate hoped that this would diffuse the situation, but it sharply backfired. The Jews refused to back down, even under the threat of death. They were ready to die, rather than transgress their religious rules. Pilate, fearing a bloodbath, restrained himself.
It was a terrible start for Pilate’s governorship. The first task of a Roman governor was to keep the peace. But with the entire Jewish populace threatening to revolt, Pontius was forced to back down. He must have felt wounded by the inability to placate the Jews. He came to the bitter realization that he would have to craftily negotiate with the Temple authorities and the strange sensitivities of the Jewish population.
The standoff at Caesarea taught Pilate an indispensable lesson. He now had to navigate carefully along the minefield of Jewish religious scruples, in order to ensure peace and order.
Jesus in Galilee
In 29 AD, Judea was fiercely opposed to Roman occupation. The Jews invoked a divine prophecy, alleging that they would be freed from the yoke of foreign occupation and taken under God’s direct care.
The Jews had a long history of being oppressed by other peoples. They were exiled in Egypt, and freed by Moses during the Exodus. There was the Babylonian Captivity. They were occupied by the Persians, and then by the Greek rulers of the Seleucid Empire. This history of domination by foreign peoples imbued in the Jews a belief in their own superiority. They believed that Yahweh would send them a liberator, a messiah, who would overthrow foreign rulers and consolidate Jewish sovereignty over the so-called Promised Land.
North of Judea was Galilee, a seditious province that was especially griped by anti-Roman sentiment. There, a rabbi had appeared, much to Pilate’s alarm. He preached the coming of the Kingdom of God. His name was Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus was not a political revolutionary. He did not necessarily want to overthrow Roman rule through armed revolt. But his preaching about God’s Kingdom was widely understood as a rebuke and challenge to the Roman political order. Many people flocked around this itinerant Jewish preacher. Some sought miraculous healings. Others were persuaded by his eloquent preaching and enigmatic parables. Still others sought political salvation from the hand of Rome, even though Jesus had no army at his disposal.
In the Christian Gospels, Pontius Pilate plays a pivotal role in Jesus’ death. But to Josephus, Jesus was one among many Jews who claimed to be the messiah. The Jewish historian listed several others: a slave named Simon, a shepherd named Athronges, Judas the Galilean, and John the Baptist. Each of these messianic Jewish leaders had challenged the Romans. Their incitation was put down either by the Romans, or else by the Hellenized Jews—collectively known as the Herodians.
In Pilate’s day, Galilee was a client kingdom of Rome. It was run by the second son of Herod the Great, a man named Herod Antipas. The Gospel of Luke claims that there was enmity between Pilate and Herod, but gives no reason why.
Pilate expected King Herod to deal with any troublemakers in Galilee. But unlike John the Baptist, Jesus deliberately slipped out of Herod’s jurisdiction. The Galilean messiah walked right into Pilate’s sphere of influence. Five times, he came south to Jerusalem to attend feasts. There, Jesus was certainly Pilate’s problem.
Festivals of sedition
The Romans were concerned by Jewish festivals held in Jerusalem. This is not because they were somehow preoccupied with Jewish religious propriety. It was because massive crowds of pilgrims, pouring in from all over Judea, Galilee, and the Jewish Diaspora, congregated to worship their god Yahweh. Jewish nationalism was at its highest, which was a political liability for the Romans to deal with.
Most Jewish festivals revolved around the theme of God’s deliverance from political occupations at the hands of pagans. The Exodus had been a liberation from Egyptian rule. Now, the Jews recalled their history, calling upon God’s direct intervention to overthrow Roman occupation of the Holy Land.
Three times a year, Pilate came to Jerusalem to keep peace during the volatile feast days. He brought fresh troops to reinforce the Roman garrison in the Holy City. The Romans wanted to ensure no riots, but their very presence ironically made the rioting more likely. Pilate’s peacekeeping trips were certainly not seen that way by the Jews. Crowds followed him, angrily yelling at the Roman prefect.
Hellenized Jews
Pilate needed a strategy beyond brute force to keep the crowd at bay. Like many Romans before him, he forged alliances with the local aristocracy. For Pilate, this meant the Temple priests. Rome only had a small administrative force in any given province. Pilate had very few troops at his disposal. This meant that he had to depend heavily on native authorities in Jerusalem for the day-to-day running of affairs. For Judea, this meant the Jewish High Priest, named Caiaphas. Priests were thus responsible for maintaining law and order. Local nobles acted as a mediator between the ordinary Jewish populace and the Roman prefect. The Romans were in charge of picking Jewish priests. They were effectively puppets of the Roman state.
The problem for Pilate was that the Jewish populace did not care to follow their priests. Priests were seen as colluding with the foreign Roman occupiers. This volatility was only made worse by the Galileans and their rogue messiah. The synoptic Gospels give the impression that Jesus only went to Jerusalem for a single Passover. But John’s Gospel suggests that Christ went after the festivals quite often, whipping up the crowds against Roman rule.
Pilate and the Romans would have been quite confused by the character of Jesus. Roman governors typically had elaborate spy networks, and they kept good records. They compiled intelligence about potential troublemakers. Jesus didn’t really fit the traditional model of a Jewish political instigator. Christ was gathering crowds, which had some threatening potential. Furthermore, Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God. The phrase was well understood by the Jews of the 1st century as a rejection of secular rule—be it by Pilate, Herod, or Caesar—in favor of God’s direct control. But Jesus also did not call for armed revolt against the Romans. The Romans were not really sure what to make of him, or how the story would play out.
Jesus never preached directly against the Romans. But he relentlessly went after the Jewish priests who aligned themselves with Caesar. Jesus attached these Jewish leaders as hypocrites. He stirred up the crowds against them, challenging the legitimacy of the Jewish elite. Jesus presented himself, his literal embodied personality, as the new Temple of Jerusalem. The Gospel of John describes a scene where outraged priests urge the crowds to stone Jesus. It was Pilate’s job to police those kind of disturbances.
Aqueduct riot
On one occasion, according to Josephus, Pilate had used Temple funds to build an aqueduct. This was done with the consent of the Hellenistic Jewish elites. But ordinary Jews saw it as a blasphemous sacrilege. They surrounded the prefect’s palace.
Pilate was forced to restore law and order. He ordered his men to dress as civilians, disguised in Jewish robes. Instead of swords, they came with wooden clubs. Outside the palace, it became a riot. In the words of Josephus, it was a “full torrent of abuse.”
Pilate gave the signal. His men moved in, isolating and arresting the instigators. The unarmed Jews were caught by surprise. It worked perfectly. A revolt was stopped before it could even start.
The Christian Gospels don’t directly mention these events, but they allude to them in certain passages. Luke speaks of the “Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.”
One of these Jewish agitators was a man named Barabbas. Little is known about him, beyond a mere description of him by Mark that he had killed someone in the uprising. Another Jewish festival had ended with bitter and tragic violence. As Jews congregated for Passover, Pilate would again be forced to exert his power. This time, the victim would be Jesus.
Coming of Passover
Josephus described Jesus as a “doer of startling deeds, a teacher of the people, condemned by Pilate to the cross.” The Jewish historian observed that the followers of Christ did not abandon the cause after his crucifixion. Josephus wrote about 40 years after the events, right around the same time that the first Gospels were being written.
Modern scholars believe that Jesus was crucified around Passover in the year 30 AD. In that week, the rabbi Jesus made a public display of his messianic claims. He entered into Jerusalem atop a donkey, which was loaded with Jewish prophetic meaning. The crowd understood the references immediately. This was how the Old Testament prophets expected the King to come. It was a universal challenge to all worldly authority.
Even worse, Jesus went boldly after Pilate’s Jewish allies in the Temple. The messiah turned against the money changers. These Temple officials served a religious function by exchanging pagan Roman coins in exchange for Jewish money. By attacking those officials, Jesus was criticizing the entire institution of the Temple. To the Jewish mind, any disruptions in the Temple’s cultic activity would upset God’s cosmic order. This theological squabbling escalated into a political hemorrhage that the Romans now had to deal with.
King of the Jews
The Romans grew increasingly alarmed by Jesus’ agitation against the Hellenized Jewish establishment. They wanted Pilate to deal with this rabble-rouser. They blamed Christ for disrupting the all-holy Passover holiday. Pilate was yet again thrown into an unenviable, unstable situation. He couldn’t simply order Roman troops into the Temple, because the presence of pagans in the Jewish Temple would completely upend the holiday. So he had to proceed with caution, reluctantly supporting his Jewish allies against the factious Galileans.
Pilate probably didn’t care about the Jews and their silly rituals. But he did care about one thing: Jesus’ claim to be a messiah. Messiah was a politically loaded term. It meant “anointed one.” The messiah was understood to be the King of the Jews. It was a political title, not a spiritual one. It was a direct challenge to Roman rule.
The Jesus problem was a perfect opportunity for Pilate to assert Roman rule over Judea. That night, in Gethsemane, a cohort of 500 Roman troops accompanied the Jewish priests to arrest Jesus. Was it actually 500 troops, or is this another exaggeration by the Gospels? Either way, it certainly fits the portrait of Pilate provided by Josephus’ writings.
The next day, Pilate tried and executed Jesus under Roman law.
Pilate meets Jesus
The morning of the day of Jesus’ trial, fate shone down on Pilate. Like a regular day, he got up, got dressed, and washed himself. He offered his incense and prayers to the gods.
According to the Gospels, Jesus spent the hours before his trial in the presence of Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest. The priests tore up Jesus’ robes in contempt. But the Jewish elites lacked the political authority to actually execute Jesus. So they handed him off to Pilate.
In John’s Gospel, the Jewish priests stood outside Pilate’s palace. They wanted to preserve their ritual purity before the Passover feast later in the day. Pilate came out to meet them. Right away, the Roman prefect challenged the Jews. “Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law,” he replied scornfully. “But we have no power to execute anyone,” the Jews said. With his authority now established, a grinning Pilate now retired back into his palace. He called the prisoner Jesus in for a private audience. The Jews were left outside, excluded from the process of Roman law.
Here, Pilate stood face-to-face with Jesus. On the one hand was the erudite elegance and sophistication of Roman civilization. On the other stood a common criminal, a Jewish rabble-rouser who preached the coming of God’s Kingdom on Earth. The following exchange comes from John’s Gospel.
“Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asked.
“Is that your own idea, or did others take to you about me?” Jesus replied.
“Am I a Jew?” Pilate answered derisively. “Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done?”
“My kingdom is not of this world,” Christ responded. “If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
“You are a King, then!” Pilate exclaimed.
“You say that I am a King. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me,” Jesus declared.
“What is truth?” retorted Pilate, with a snicker on his face.
Pilate inquired of the Jews where Jesus came from. They said he came from Galilee. So Pilate sent him to Herod Antipas. Pilate saw in this an opportunity to repair his friendship with King Herod. By offering Herod a role in governing Judea, he could restore ties with a regional Jewish ally. The gesture worked. Herod satisfied his curiosity, questioned Jesus, and then sent him back to Pilate. According to Luke’s Gospel, Pilate and Herod became friends that day.
“I find no basis for a charge against him,” the prefect told the Jews. “But it is your custom for me to release to you one prisoner at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release the King of the Jews?”
“No, not him!” They shouted. “Give us Barabbas!”
By punishing Jesus, Pilate was ensuring that the Jews would recognize the legitimacy of Roman power. The prefect ordered that Jesus be lashed. Roman soldiers put a crown of thorns on Christ’s head, and clothed him a purple robe, mockingly hailing him as the King of the Jews and slapping him in the face.
“Behold the man”
Once again, Pilate came out to address the Jews. Jesus was presented wearing a crown of thorns and a purple robe. “Behold the man,” Pilate proclaimed. The Latin phrase for this is ecce homo, and it is now an iconic phrase. The Jewish priests still demanded that Jesus be crucified.
The Gospels presented Pilate as very perturbed by Jesus’ case. Pilate grew increasingly worried, and retreated back to his palace. “Where do you come from?” the Roman asked Jesus, but Christ gave no reply. “Do you refuse to speak to me?” He demanded. “Don’t you realize I have the power either to free you or to crucify you?”
“You would have no power over me if it were not given you from above,” Christ answered. “Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”
Pilate tried to release Jesus, but the Jewish leaders shouted, “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar. Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar.”
“Here is your King,” Pontius proclaimed to the Jews.
“Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!” They shouted back.
“Shall I crucify your king?” Pilate asked.
“We have no king but Caesar,” the priests answered.
Pilate’s wife
The Christian Gospels present Pilate as a cautious, uneasy man who is reluctant to condemn Jesus to death. Matthew’s Gospel claims that Pilate’s wife actively tried to dissuade the prefect from going through with the crucifixion.
“Have nothing to do with that righteous man; for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him,” she allegedly told her husband in a message during the trial.
Pilate was probably married, although this single sentence from the Gospels is all we have to reconstruct her. According to Christian legend, her name was Claudia Procula. In the 1920s, a sarcophagus was found in Beirut continuing two inscriptions with the name Claudia Procula in Greek. The tomb was dated to the 3rd century, but parts of it were much older. Was this the tomb of Pilate’s wife? We don’t know.
Crucifixion
Finally, Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified. Christ was hardly the only rebel that Pilate had to deal with. Jesus was crucified alongside two others men. The Gospels use the Greek word lestes, meaning a “guerrilla” or “revolutionary.”
The Romans used the barbaric method of crucifixion against slaves or anyone who challenged Roman power. It was a public, humiliating way of death. It was a political statement that the Romans held power over life and death.
The inscription over Jesus’ head read, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” The priests complained, saying that the sign should merely indicate that Jesus made this claim about himself. “What I have written, I have written,” Pilate famously replied.
Five years later, another messiah would-be came out of Samaria. Josephus recounted how Pilate ordered the man and his followers to be killed.
Conclusion
Pontius Pilate remains one of the most interesting figures in Roman history. He is one of a handful of biblical characters whose existence has been corroborated by extra-biblical sources. Beyond the Christian Gospels, his life can be reconstructed from the writings of Josephus, Tacitus, Philo, and other non-Christian sources—not to mention the archeological evidence. Together, all of these ancient sources provide a more complete portrait of the Roman prefect, whose magnetic personality has attracted attention for over two millennia.
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