The Jesus Archive caught up with Helen K. Bond during the lazy days of August. She’d just returned from a vacation to Poland, where she’d combined a romp through the Polish countryside with a haunting visit to Auschwitz. An English transplant to Scotland, she teaches New Testament studies at the University of Edinburgh. We queried her about her recent work on Pontius Pilate and current research into the High Priest of the Jews, Joseph Caiaphas.
Jesus Archive: Ann Wroe wrote a novel about Pilate around the same time you wrote your treatise. Published by Random House, the book has received loads of publicity and sold fairly well. What’s your reaction to Wroe’s portrayal of Pilate?
Helen Bond: I like what she did with Josephus and Philo, two of our main sources about Pilate: She’s aware of the negative rhetoric in their texts. But she tends to harmonize the Gospel material, which I don’t find particularly helpful. I like the way she brought together the later pictures of Pilate, the traditions, the legend that he was born in Scotland—
JA: Scotland? Someone claims that Pontius Pilate was a Scotsman?
HB: Supposedly, he is the illegitimate son of a Roman centurion in a Roman camp, and had an affair with a local lassie. He somehow finds his way back to Rome. The interesting question about the origin of these stories is whether it was the Scots who claimed Pilate or it was it English who thought he was so bad that they claimed him for the Scots. It’s a nice idea but completely improbable. The Romans weren’t up in Scotland at that time. But it’s a nice little legend – good for the local tourist trade.
JA: Pilate is a central player in the passion narrative of all four Gospels. Outside of Jesus and Paul, he may be the best-developed character in the New Testament. Yet your book is the first academic treatment of him, in English at least. Why the lack of interest in the historical Pontius Pilate?
HB: There have been a couple of articles, but there’s been an assumption that there’s not enough to write a book about. A lot of people have doubted that there’s much in the Gospels that’s historical. Outside of the New Testament, Josephus and Philo mention him, but there’s a perception that there’s not enough to go on. I was not just looking at the historical side of Pilate, but how he was interpreted. I had more scope in my work.
JA: Yet Pilate does figure prominently in New Testament studies. Since the end of World War II, he has been depicted as a storm trooper in a toga: brutal, corrupt and vindictive towards the Jews. Is this an accurate historical picture or does it reflect the preoccupation of modern scholars?
HB: I think it is a modern creation. Everyone who interprets Pilate does so within the context of their own recent history. The events around World War II did give people a context to interpret Pilate. Also, though, there’s been a rediscovery of the works of Josephus. Josephus speaks of him harshly. And Philo even more so. The fact that these two Jewish writers speak so negatively of him reinforce the idea that Pilate was brutal, especially given that they are considered to be historical where the Gospels are not. The image of Pilate comes out of a combination of 20th century context and the works of Philo and Josephus.
JA: Why did Philo portray Pilate so harshly?
HB: He talks about him only in one of his works, The Embassy to Gaius, in the context of a letter from Agrippa I trying to persuade Gaius not to put up a statue of himself in the Jerusalem Temple. The aim of this letter is to show Caius Caligula that good emperors respect Judaism. Augustus bestowed every honor on the Jews, and he was a great man. Tiberius did, too, and he was a great man, and so on. The point of mentioning Pilate was to show that a lesser official treated the Jews in an offhand way. Once Tiberius found out about the incident, he castigated Pilate severely. As the foil to Tiberius, Pilate is characterized as everything as bad. Everybody who is antagonistic to Judaism is base, murderous, deceitful – a whole string of negative adjectives. Pilate is a literary character, feeding into Philo’s rhetoric. If you read the whole work, you see that it’s extremely apologetic and rhetorical in nature. Historically, it’s not clear that Tiberius was really so friendly to the Jews: He expelled them from Rome in 19 C.E. There is a historical basis to the episode cited by Philo – Pilate did put up some votive shields inside the governor’s praetorium. Gradually, certain groups of people within the population did take offense and Tiberius forced him to remove the shields. But I don’t think he would have been as angry about the incident as Philo made out. Otherwise, he just would have got rid of Pilate.
JA: And Josephus?
HB: Josephus handles Pilate differently in his two works. In The Jewish War, he describes the incidents of the emperor’s standards and the funding of the aqueduct, but doesn’t say anything negative about Pilate’s motives. He’s more interested in the Jewish reaction to events rather than in Pilate. In one incident (implanting the emperor’s effigy in Jerusalem), the Jewish reaction is passive and it succeeds – Pilate removes the standards. In the other (using Temple funds to finance construction of an aqueduct), the reaction is aggressive, and it doesn’t succeed and people get killed. The lesson is that resistance is futile. Passivity and diplomacy are effective. It’s in the Antiquities [of the Jews] that Josephus says Pilate was trying to destroy the Jewish law. Antiquities has a strong Deuteronomistic idea that anyone who sets himself against the Jewish law is setting himself up for a fall. Josephus says that Pilate did things against Jewish law, so he got sent back to Rome. People wrote history in a very different way back then. They used rhetoric. They wanted to shape peoples’ emotions and push their point of view. Josephus’ view is argumentative. He wanted to show that all of the Roman governors were negative to the Jews and Jewish law, part of the reason the Jews were driven to revolt in 66 C.E.
JA: How do you appraise the historical Pilate?
HB: I suppose I see him as being a competent governor. He must have been harsh to a certain extent. He did what Rome expected him to do. If there was any sign of a riot or uprising, he put it down with a firm hand. I don’t have any impression that he was deliberately aggressive. He may have been a bit insensitive. He probably came from Rome with little idea of what Jews believed, or perhaps a negative idea based on perceptions of the Jewish community in Rome. But he wasn’t deliberately provocative. It’s easy to underestimate how difficult the job was. Judea was tiny little place, but you had had Jews, Samaritans, gentiles. There were constant struggles between all of these groups. He must have managed it reasonably well. Even though Tiberius liked to leave people in a post for quite a long time, he wouldn’t have left Pilate in Judea for 10 or 11 years if he hasn’t been reasonably competent. It’s a boring picture. Everyone would like to see him as a monster. But he was probably a fairly reasonable bloke.
JA: The Gospel authors had their own reasons for depicting Pilate as they did. Many scholars have argued that Mark, writing shortly after the Romans crushed the Jewish revolt in Jerusalem, tried to shift the blame for Jesus’ execution from Pilate to the Jewish leadership. Do you find this plausible?
HB: Not really. One question is who is actually reading Mark’s Gospel? Is he writing it so Romans will read it and think that Christianity is not threat? I don’t think so. He’s writing for a group of insiders. There’s no doubt that he wants to put a lot of the blame for Jesus’ death on the Jewish leadership. The representatives of Judaism rejected the messiah – and the fall of the Temple was the result. But I don’t think Mark is particularly positive to Rome either. His picture was shaped by his community’s persecution by Nero in the 60s. If he was sucking up to the Romans, he didn’t do a very good job of it. Luke did it much better. In Mark, there’s a parallelism between the Jewish trial of Jesus and the Roman trial: Mark wants to show that both sets of authorities, Jewish and Roman, are rejecting Jesus.
JA: Dominic Crossan, among others, has ridiculed the image in Mark’s narrative of a weak and vacillating Pilate haggling with the priests over the fate of Jesus. What other motive could Mark have had for penning such a portrait other than to exonerate Pilate and the Romans?
HB: In my reading of Pilate in Mark, I don’t see him as weak. Look at the Barabbas section. He asks the crowd, “Shall I release the King of the Jews?” By characterizing Jesus as “king of the Jews,” he’s issuing a challenge. It’s a way of finding out how much support Jesus had. You can read it as a skilful, shrewd piece of manipulation. The crowd isn’t up to the challenge. They know what Rome does to messiahs, so they say, “kill him.” Pilate gets Jesus’ followers to shout for his death.
JA: The Temple priests are integral to the story. The Gospels give them much of the responsibility for Jesus’ execution. How do you appraise their motives?
HB: Their motives were similar to those of Antipas with John the Baptist. You’ve got a holy man wandering around and attracting interest. John 11[1] isn’t far off the mark. The priests were worried that Rome would see this following, get worried and intervene. They may have worried that Jesus would do something at the Passover, make some kind of demonstration – which he did in the Jerusalem Temple. Things could escalate and get out of hand. It would be good to nip it in the bud and hope that his movement would die with him. But I don’t think they were acting with as evil intentions as is often suggested. Their motives were honorable. They genuinely did think that messianic movements like Jesus’ were detrimental to the stability of the state. They probably thought that Jesus was perverting the nation, leading people astray.
JA: You’re working now on a book about Caiaphas. He gets even worse press than Pilate. He’s typically portrayed as a collaborator. If Pilate is the Heinrich Heydrich of Roman-occupied Palestine, Caiaphas is the Quisling.
HB: The priests certainly were collaborators. The way the Roman Empire worked, the governor expected the local elite to run the province and be loyal to Roman interests. In return, they would keep their responsibilities and status. They were entirely dependent upon Rome – particularly the High Priest, Caiaphas, who had been personally appointed by the Roman governor. He was all too aware that he could be deposed at any moment. The priests were very much dependent upon Roman favor, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t do as good a job as they could. Just because you’re appointed by Rome, just because you’re an aristocrat, doesn’t mean you don’t worship God as devoutly as possible. To call them collaborators is a bit one sided. They had a difficult job. They had to look after Roman interests, but they had to keep everybody happy. They had to keep an eye on what people were saying. They looked after Jewish interests as well.
JA: In his book The Ruling Class of Judea, Martin Goodman described the aristocratic factions that competed for power in the mid-1st century. Can you illuminate those rivalries at the time of Jesus?
HB: There certainly were factions: Four leading priestly families competed for high priesthood. Goodman’s work is very important for the period leading up to the revolt [in 66 C.E.] What’s different in the earlier period, before the rise of Agrippa I to the throne [in 40 C.E.], is that there’s only one high priestly house, the House of Annas. After the reign of Agrippa, the high priesthood changed hands frequently; there was competition for the office. Before Agrippa, Annas and his family dominated the high priesthood. There were only two years in which the high priesthood was given to another family. There may have been competition – other priestly families ready to jump in – but Annas and his family maintained control of the high priesthood. Caiaphas, Annas’ son-in-law, had to form alliances with other clans no doubt, he had to compromise, but his position was strong.
JA: What caused the change? How did the House of Annas lose its grip on the high priesthood?
HB: Probably because Annas himself was no longer around. I would imagine that he died around the time of Agrippa. Annas seems to have been a crucial figure, even though his son-in-law Caiaphas was high priest. John and Luke both bring him into the trial of Jesus. Annas was the power to be reckoned with, the dominating presence of that era.
JA: Bruce Chilton suggests that there was a lot more going on during the tenure of Caiaphas than suggested by Josephus or the Gospels. The High Priest exiled the Sanhedrin from its quarters in the Temple, probably in a dispute over the propriety of buying and selling sacrificial animals inside the Temple.
HB:I haven’t read Chilton, though I have read a similar theory by Eppstein, whom Chilton cites. The difficulty with this theory is that the evidence comes from rabbinic texts. It’s very uncertain as to what they’re talking about. One passage says that the Sanhedrin was ejected from the chamber of hewn stone 40 years before the destruction of the Temple. What does that mean? It could mean anything. Some people have suggested that 40 years is just a round number, not necessarily referring to the time of Caiaphas. … It’s quite likely that there were other factions, other high priestly families, whose noses were put out of joint when Annas was made high priest. But there just isn’t much to go on. Scholars aren’t even sure if there was a Sanhedrin, if a fixed council is meant by the term. Some think it could have been just an ad hoc group called by the high priest.
JA: The ultimate fate of Pilate is lost in legend. Vitellius sent him packing back to Rome after he massacred the Samaritans, but the reliable record ends there. What do you think happened to him?
HB: He disappears from history. There are all sorts of Christian accounts of what happened. One is that he became a Christian and killed himself out of remorse – he became a saint in the Coptic Church. Another is that he was an evil man, and all these evil spirits hung around his body, and he had to be thrown into a lake in Switzerland. I think he was probably just sent off on another commission. It’s not particularly surprising that we never hear from him again. He’s only known to us because of his time in Judea and his association with Jesus, as a result of which we have a number of surviving records.
JA: How about the tradition that Caligula sentenced him to death and that he died by his own hand?
HB: I’m not sure why he would be sentenced to death. When he put down the Samaritans – this guy said he was the messiah and some people followed him up the mountain with weapons – he may have been overly brutal and his soldiers overly zealous, but that’s what Roman governors did. What’s a Roman governor to do: Say, “Let’s sit down chaps and talk about this over coffee?” You can understand why the Samaritan leaders complain, and why the legate sent Pilate back. But I would be surprised if Caligula thought that was enough reason to execute him. If he had suffered this terrible end, Christian circles in Rome would have known about it and would have pointed to it as an example of God’s justice. But the traditions of his suicide date to a later time. They have all the elements of legend. It would have made my book more interesting to use that material. But is it likely? Probably not.