Pilate: a search for truth

Mel Gibson?s film of the Passion depicts the governor of Judaea as a sympathetic figure. But softening him, says his biographer, is a dangerous tactic

About half an hour into Mel Gibson?s The Passion of the Christ, an extraordinary scene occurs. Jesus, already beaten half to death, is led before Pilate; and Pilate offers him a beaker of wine. ?Drink,? he enjoins him. It?s a command, but with an edge of sympathy. Jesus declines; and then, to Pilate?s astonishment, answers the governor?s Aramaic in perfect Latin.

The historian in me finds much to castigate here. Pilate never offered Jesus a drink, as far as we know. Nor would he have been inclined to. He would never have spoken in Aramaic, a language no self-respecting Roman would bother with. He and Jesus, in their brief and somewhat circular exchanges, would have talked a basic sort of Greek to each other. And Pilate, though undoubtedly a clumsy soldier first and a magistrate second (a character very well caught here, by Hristo Naumov Shopov, as a sort of strutting young Mussolini), would hardly have worn his battle dress to a trial in his own palace.

Of this soft and sympathetic Pilate, Gibson gives us several more sightings. After the ?What is truth?? exchange, the governor and his wife have a melancholy conversation in which Pilate concludes, not unreasonably, that the truth is that he is stuck in Judaea in a horrible job. Nonetheless, he plays the philosopher and thinker for a few uncharacteristic minutes, while Procula soothes his brow. In the scene where he presents Jesus, crowned with thorns, to the crowd, he takes him gently by the arm. This is one of the few moments in the film where I was moved, though such a gesture depends on what particular parsing of the Greek ? ?what a figure of a man is this? ? he would actually have spoken.

Glimpsing Jesus? prostration on the road to Golgotha, he orders Simon of Cyrene to help with the cross. And at the end, after the Crucifixion, he is startled and disturbed anew as the earthquake sets lamps swinging in his dining room.

Most of these scenes are mentioned in my own attempt to write a biography of Pilate. They are legends or speculations, used to fill up the enormous blank spaces in the character and the life. And since such space-filling has been going on for centuries, not least by me, I can tolerate quite a lot of it. Truth sometimes lurks at the bottom of legends, no matter how bizarre. Besides, each age makes its own Pilate, from the ranting pagan tyrant of the medieval mystery plays to the besieged Victorian imperialist; yes, even to the flummoxed and lisping governor of Monty Python?s Life of Brian. Since we know so little about Pilate, we have always largely invented him.

Yet inventing, and especially softening, the character of Pilate also carries obvious dangers. Whenever Pilate is made milder, the blame for Christ?s Crucifixion must tip elsewhere, to the Jews. The gospel-writers deliberately did this, in order to make the early Christians more acceptable to Rome. Where the Jews were implacable in their demands for crucifixion, not only Pilate but his soldiers, too, were made confessors of the kingship and divinity of Christ. The centurion?s words, ?Truly, this man was the Son of God!?, were reinforced by Pilate?s handwashing and his titulus on the Cross, proclaiming Jesus king in the three main languages of the world. Good Romans, bad Jews: a verdict the Church now unequivocally rejects, and all thinking Christians too.

Gibson?s film, with its revival of these mythical images and its kind treatment of Pilate in general, has naturally stirred up a storm. Though there is little or no explicit anti-Semitism in the film, anti-Jewish bias is implicit when the Roman governor is portrayed, as he is here, as under intolerable pressure to yield to the high priests? demands. ?The greatest whitewash in history?, some reviewers have called it. A notoriously cruel governor, who would have sent Jesus to his death without a thought, is being presented as a sensitive man in agonies of indecision.

From what we know ? struggling to see through the murky lens of the gospels, Josephus and Philo ? it seems obvious that Gibson has gone too far, even further than the gospels, in airbrushing Pilate?s image. The governor?s wavering is vastly exaggerated. His hand-washing, that dubious scene drawn only from Matthew, is dramatically highlighted. In life, Pilate probably watched the scourging done in front of him, as other governors did; here his absence seems to absolve him from the horrors, until his order stops it. Most of all, his ultimate sole responsibility for sending Christ to the Cross is blurred by his misgivings.

Yet in their eagerness to prove a whitewash, the reviewers too have gone too far. It is not true, as they claim, that Pilate was one of the bloodiest governors of Roman Judaea. Both his predecessor, Gratus, and some of his successors had far more crucifixions to their names. Pilate?s brutalities were sometimes panic reactions (as when he put down the riot over the building of an aqueduct in Jerusalem), and sometimes reactions to rebellion (as in his crucifixions of the leaders of a later revolt in Samaria, for which he was reported to Rome). When the Jews protested against his bringing of the imperial standards into Jerusalem, the horrendous diplomatic insult that marked the start of his governorship, he resisted for three days and then backed down. Jewish dislike of him stemmed more from his appalling insensitivity to Jewish feelings, and his arrant promotion of the culture and religion of Rome, than from actual cruelty. He seems to me to have been a soldier out of his depth in a notoriously tricky posting; but, by the standards of the times, he was no monster.

Would he have wanted, even for a moment, to save Christ? That is a harder question. His brief was simple, to keep the peace, and his job depended on it. On the other hand, he was the representative of (in his view) superior Roman justice in Judaea; and despite the frequent claims that the trial of Jesus was a mockery, it followed fairly closely the forms for trials of non-Roman citizens in outposts of the empire. He even seems to have given Jesus a chance to defend himself, though Jesus did not take it. And we do not have to believe every last one of his comings and goings in the gospels to feel that there was a struggle going on here between the demands of the crowd and what Pilate wished to do.

In my own mind, I can discount as historical whitewashing almost all the governor?s vacillations. The bedraggled Jew who stood before him could not possibly jeopardise his duty to his tyrannical employer back in Rome. And yet I have always believed, too, that for just one moment, Pilate was genuinely worried. Halfway through the trial, Pilate asks Jesus: ?Where are you from?? He does not mean ?Where were you born??, for he knows that Jesus is from Galilee. It is a question that follows directly from the high priests? statement that Jesus has called himself the Son of God. And it means, to me, ?Are you from heaven??

That question would not have been uncharacteristic. Pilate was highly religious, in the Roman way that mixed superstition and genuine god-fearing with promotion of the state. He did not hesitate to flaunt Roman religious symbols on his coins and in his palaces; he dedicated votive tablets, and a temple, to Tiberius. The emperor would have checked Pilate?s astrological chart before appointing him, and at the trial of Jesus it may have seemed that Providence was suddenly embroiling him again in the visitations of the gods, in strange guises, to the world of men. The thought that a god might be standing before him may have gone as quickly as it appeared. But in any case, Jesus did not answer him.

As part of the endless re-invention of Pilate, the modern governor is usually as secular as we are. As such, he is untroubled by Jesus and swift in his handling of the trial. But Pilate was neither modern nor secular. In his distinctly Roman preoccupations, we may find grounds to treat him with a measure of understanding; even if we should not go so far as to make him offer Jesus a drink.

Ann Wroe is the author of Pilate: Biography of an Invented Man published by Vintage.