Pilate's Wife: The Gospel According to the Eyewitness

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EPILOGUE

As the Roman historian Cassius Dio tells us, Tiberius Caesar was so intimidated by Sejanus' power that he could not act openly on the clear evidence that Sejanus was attempting to usurp him. So throughout the summer of 31 A.D., Tiberius engaged in a stealth campaign. He continued to grant Sejanus extraordinary honors, naming him pontifex -- a Roman high priesthood of considerable symbolic importance. But Tiberius carefully kept Sejanus at a distance in Rome, refusing his requests to return to Capri. To counter the rising cult of Sejanus-worship, Tiberius forbade sacrifices to living persons.

At last the notoriously cautious and dilatory Tiberius followed these maneuvers with direct action. On the night of October 17, 31 A.D., Tiberius' agent arrived in Rome with instructions to bribe Sejanus' Praetorian guard and deliver a letter to the Senate. Tiberius' characteristically rambling letter was read the next morning in the Senate chamber; it denounced Sejanus in relatively mild terms, but in closing called for his imprisonment. Encouraged by the orgy of popular celebration that greeted Sejanus' arrest, the Senate condemned him. By the end of the day, Sejanus had been strangled and his body cast into the Tiber River from the Gemonian Steps, the traditional disgrace for traitors.

In the aftermath of Tiberius' counter-coup, the Syrian legions were given cash awards (our source, the Roman biographer Suetonius, doesn't say how much) for their non-participation in Sejanus' conspiracy. They were the only legions so rewarded.

Pontius Pilate continued to hold the office of Prefect of Judea until 36 A.D. His authority was considerably compromised by the appointment in 35 A.D. of a new governor of Syria, a powerful Senator named Lucius Vitellius -- very likely the mysterious Senator L. V-- of these commentarii. Within a year Lucius Vitellius had sent Pilate back to Rome. Ostensibly, Pilate was to provide Caesar an account of a controversial incident in which he had surprised a band of Samaritan dissidents, killing, capturing, and summarily executing a significant number -- a preemptive strike quite similar to the Hinnom attack described by his wife in these commentarii. After dispatching Pilate, Lucius Vitellius went to Jerusalem, where he remitted the city's hated sales tax and removed the High Priest Josephus Caiaphas from office.

There is no historical account of Pilate's fate following his departure from Judea in 36 A.D. His rehabilitation began with the authors of the New Testament gospels, who had good reason to revise his role in the execution of Jesus. The oppression only temporarily relieved by Lucius Vitellius finally provoked the Jews to full-scale rebellion in 66 A.D. Mark, the first of the New Testament gospels, was written in Roman Syria shortly after the Jewish revolt began; also within recent memory was the vicious persecution of the Christian community in Rome following the fire that destroyed the city in 64 A.D. Addressed to Gentile proselytes residing under Roman rule, Mark and the subsequent gospels were an effort to provide the "good news" about a Messiah who had been executed by Roman authority in a fashion reserved for the same kind of dissidents and revolutionaries who had so recently brought brutal Roman retribution on Judea. The good news, then, was that Pilate had actually found Jesus guiltless; only the coercion of the same clamoring Jewish mob that Pilate had devoted his career to brutally suppressing had obliged him to execute a man he had publicly declared innocent. What comfort this brazen fiction brought to Christians who continued to be persecuted by Roman authorities is questionable. Far more certain is the appalling history of the persecution that fiction has brought upon the Jewish people.

Subsequent writers took even greater creative license with Pilate's reputation, forging various "Acts of Pilate," alleged to be Pilate's official report to Caesar on the execution of Jesus. The late second-century Christian writer Tertullian wrote in his Apology that Pilate, already a secret Christian, had revealed to Tiberius the truth of Christ's divinity.

The notion that Pilate's wife became a Christian also entered Christian tradition. One legend held that Pilate and his wife became Christian martyrs; in the ninth century, they were both canonized by the Coptic church. The Greek Orthodox church still celebrates Pilate's wife as St. Procula (the name, which has no historical basis, is provided by one of the fictional "Acts").

Pilate's authentic traces remain in modern Israel. In 1961 an archaeological team excavating at Caesarea found a stone plaque with Pilate's name and title carved on it; the Latin inscription was evidently the dedication of a Temple in honor of Tiberius. Archaeologists have also speculated on the location of Pilate's aqueduct. Most likely it extended for 40 kilometers -- a necessarily circuitous route -- from present-day 'Ain Kuweiziba to a series of ancient reservoirs known as Solomon's Pools. Remnants of its channels and tunnels, hewn into the living stone of the Judean hills, are still visible.

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