The Strange Afterlife of Pontius Pilate (2016)
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
There must have been a tonne of records, of which less than 1% has survived. Arcanum, incanabula, stiffening for the spines of book binding, the bits of ancient paper which survive defy the reality of Marie Kondo through the ages.
"This record of pontius pilates tribunal for stuffing up as governor does not spark joy" riiiiip
It is quite likely that Pilate feared for his life much more than looking like a fool. Under Tiberius those two might have been one in the same.
It's the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ after 3 days from when Pontius Pilate (of the featured article) sentenced Jesus to death.
Also note that the Eastern Orthodox church is not the church of Russia, there are quite a few Orthodox churches who recognize each other as having the same creed, but who don't otherwise share leadership (with 14 Patriarchs - Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Georgia, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia, Greece, Poland, Romania, Albania, and the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and a few others).
Non-Jewish, and later Roman state Christianity, required an orthodoxy. As part of that orthodoxy, Jewish Christians had to be demonized and/or converted, and Jewish claims that Jesus was not the messiah and the messiah had yet to come had to be painted as evil. This was one of a hundred ways that was done.
edit: the extratextual antisemitism that largely still exists in various Christian orthodoxies (but isn't actually in the books) should probably be considered a kind of Christian Talmud. Protestantism was partially a reaction motivated by a perception that the Roman church had grown soft, and too lenient on the Jews. The authoritarianism and corruption of the Catholic church was preventing believers from adequately punishing the Jews who refused to, or who pretended to, convert.
Do you have any evidence of this?
All the earliest available historical evidence depicts the event in essentially the same way, which also makes logical sense - why would Pilate otherwise care about some random Jewish mystic?
Secondly, it seems like we need to overcome the pretty big hurdle of explaining why a population of mostly Jewish people who largely continued to identify themselves as Jewish during the period in question would write books in a way that painted the Jews as guilty because of their antisemitism rather than because it was an accurate reflection of what they actually believed happened, or, most charitably, because they were afraid any anti-Roman sentiment would bring down the hammer.
I couldn’t tell you how widely accepted this theory is however (or the motivations of its progenitor). Biblical studies seems like an area where the orthodoxy is constantly shifting.
The essentials of what you're saying are largely correct based on our historical understanding and the evidence of the epistles - "competing" is probably not the right word, but James certainly appears to have focused on converting the Jewish community, while Paul considered himself (and was by others) the apostle to the gentiles, and they had at least one documented disagreement.
But what the GP is suggesting, in this context, would be that decades after the events, but still while eyewitnesses were around, what you would call the Pauline faction redacted all the earliest texts (canonical and non-canonical!) to be antisemitic and the almost certainly majority Jewish following just...accepted it. Actually, redacted wouldn't even be the right word; it's the only ones ever written down, as far as we know. And although historiographers argue about it, the earliest secondary sources (c 100AD) credit the gospels as written to the apostles or those working with them. (According to Papias, Peter's disciple wrote down what Peter preached as Mark; the book of John itself and other early sources claim it was written by the apostle John, Matthew was supposedly the apostle Matthew, and Luke allegedly worked with Paul; even if you don't buy the authorship as believed by people in the first century, they were all still written in the first century and had to survive criticism by people who knew what they were about.) And moreover, they edited the whole story, not just the account of his arrest and crucifixion, because all the gospels have Jesus repeatedly claiming the Jewish authorities are going to kill him, that they kill the prophets sent to them, etc.
It seems like a more parsimonious explanation is simply that the non-supernatural events simply played out approximately as written. And well, if they didn't, we don't have any evidence of it, so speculating about it can be fun but isn't really doing anything but generating conspiracy theories.
Edit: Read it. Interesting to hear the historical traditions about Pilate and his guilt. Here's the link to the story I mentioned.
https://aletheasmind.wordpress.com/2019/08/03/what-pilate-sa...
> The foil to Jesus, the defiant antihero of the Easter story, mocking, skeptical Pilate is a historical figure who haunts our imagination. For some he is a saint, for others the embodiment of human weakness, an archetypal politician willing to sacrifice one man for the sake of stability. In this dazzlingly conceived biography, a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Ann Wroe brings man and myth to life. Working from classical sources, she plunges us into the world of biblical Judaea under the reign of the erratic and licentious emperor Tiberius and lets us see the trial of Jesus, in all its confusion, from the point of view of his executioner.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/490449.Pontius_Pilate
Tries to reconstruct, using records about the lives other Roman governors and notable government types, what kind of person Pilate could/may have been.
That feels like quite a stretch. Pilate is an important figure in the story, but antihero? He largely is the state actor “just trying to keep the peace” and giving in to the religious leaders to make that happen.
Seems more like a real politik type of character of his day than anything to my memory. Keep the tax revenue flowing, don’t require more legions to be brought in, keep your governorship.
As far as the Nicene Creed goes, adherents believe five persons (unique agents) are mentioned, and it's not especially long, so I'm not sure there's much to read into the Pilate reference. It could be in there to imply historicity.
He might be a "realist" politician for some, but he has never been considered a saint for anybody. Also neither "antihero", nor "defiant". He had the power of life and death, and he yielded it to a mob with a shrug, something neither anti-heroic, nor defiant.
No creed celebrates Pilate as Saint for his actions in scriptures.
Christopher Hitchens points out that humans suffered alone among the elements, for aeons, before suddenly prophets began preaching the "goodness" of sky daddy. The enduring existence of evil provides a counterexample.
Either he delights in evil, or he is incompetent to do anything about it. There's no justice, there's just us.
It's worth noting that during the time of Jesus (I accept there may have been such a historical figure), there were reams and reams of prophets. It is remarkable that the state chose to steal his thunder by coopting that one. But decades before that political decision, Jesus was just another prophet among prophets. Nothing in the liturgical account of the trial makes sense, given how ordinary the case would have been against the wider background of similar cases.
But the God of the Old Testament being a God of perfect love, perfect wisdom and absolute power is so cognitively dissonant that an entire heretical religion (Gnostics) could only square that circle by claiming that God must have really been the actual God's moustache-twirling evil twin all along.
Oh I see, we're in BBC Horizon Easter Special territory
It looks like they speculated on more than actually read the Bible. There is a pattern of God blessing obedience and punishing disobedience. This happens on two levels: being held accountable for our actions on Judgement Day with eternal consequences (definite); what happens in this life leading up to it (varies). Psalm 73 and the Prophets (esp Habakkuk) show God in His sovereignty lets the wicked succeed to use them as instruments for His will. Job shows even the most righteous man on earth might suffer if it leads to the greatest good. He's an intelligent and sovereign being who dispenses grace (or not) as He sees fit.
Just a few verses tell you what matters about Pontius Pilate:
"I tell you that every idle word that men speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment." (Matt. 12:36)
"I saw a great white throne, and him who sat on it... I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and they opened books. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged out of the things which were written in the books, according to their works... If anyone was not found written in the book of life, he was cast into the lake of fire." (Rev. 20:11-15)
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God didn’t send his Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through him. He who believes in him is not judged. He who doesn’t believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God. " (John 3:16-18)
"Most certainly I tell you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and doesn’t come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life." (John 5:24)
"If you declare with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified (sins paid for), and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved." (Romans 10:9-10 NIV)
God exercising wrath during the earthly life is optional, varies, and usually isn't recorded. What is clear are Pilate's options when facing Jesus Christ the next time. Pilate is a sinner who also killed the Son of God. He'll face judgement for his sins with eternal punishment. If could and did repent, Jesus' death absorbs God's wrath against him via substitution on the cross (Romans 3:21-28). One of those two things happened.
The authors of the Gospels are more interested in what you will decide once they've shared the Gospel with you. I'll link it one more time: GetHisWord.com. Before you is life and death. Eternally. Choose wisely. Put faith in and surrender your life to Jesus Christ. Then, live this one with He who knitted you together in the womb, has a plan for your life, and works all things for the good of those who walk with Him. I pray more of you experience the peace I was given back in 2020 by making that decision. It's been an adventure, HN! I struggle but I'm never bored!
Gospels would then have been variant versions of this timeline, preached at different jurisdictions, that then had to all be retained as each had already developed a regional constituency, with no one of them finally able to dominate.
First, Jesus and his resurrection is central to Paul's teachings, not an optional addon restricted to a few bits of text. Second, Paul is much more doctrinaire than Jesus. And third, parable-based teaching is probably not an ideal form for transmitting doctrine because previous writings weren't doctrinaire enough, right?
The Pauline epistles are indeed though usually cited as the works in the New Testament that were the earliest written down, but there's plenty of reason to doubt the academic consensus, which has shifted over time, and like all historical subjects, somewhat subject to fads. (After all, you can't gain notoriety or publish a new paper that simply says "yeah, what's written is likely true, or the closest approximation to the truth we're likely to ever have, and the people who came before me were right.)
Take the Gospel of Mark, usually cited as the earliest gospel. One of the strongest held reasons that it's believed to have been written after 70 AD is because Jesus prophesies what sounds like the Siege of Jerusalem. That's it. It certainly doesn't seem crazy even from a one hundred percent secular worldview that Jesus correctly or even accidentally predicted the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans via one hundred percent natural means, given the contemporary political situation. If anything, you can understand how the 1 of 100 prophets who completely by chance made an accurate prediction would become more popular afterward.
Or consider the gospel of John - one of the strongest held arguments against Johannine authorship is about the only biographical information we know about him is that he's a fisherman, and the author of John sounds like an intelligent Greek writer. That's it. I don't think it's radically implausible that he may have been employed at the time as a fisherman, and still had an educated background. Scholars usually call it "anonymous", even though the author clearly focuses on John and refers to him in a special way..and the ends the book by claiming that this is the disciple which testifies these things, and wrote these things. He also repeatedly humblebrags that John beat Peter in race...the kind of detail that doesn't seem like a religious community would find worth highlighting.
It's also not surprising that different accounts of something that occurred over a long timespan contain differences or highlight different things. You see this all the time from eyewitnesses today and throughout history. I was just reading the Landmark Edition of Anabasis that just came out, and there's a whole appendix about how Xenophon and Cyrus's doctor narrate a battle differently and make different claims about how Cyrus was wounded. But they were both eyewitnesses, or the closest to it you could ever hope to get for an event that happened 2500 years ago.
…but uh, there’s also no record of what happened to Caiaphas in the gospels. Presumably he didn’t meet a grisly fate either, and he’s certainly blamed by the gospels much more than Pilate.
You can do anything reasoning backwards from the desired conclusions, and that’s what a lot of historiography is.
But a need for a historical Jesus, and accompanying apostolic drama, in order to support your spiritual doctrine is hard to understand. Either it's right or it's wrong, either you have faith or you don't, whether it was written down right then or only centuries later.
I love that book but can’t recommend it to non nerds because it doesn’t flow quite right for a modern book. Education of Cyrus similarly. I LOVE these books but they take a little patience. Ironically, the Socratic Dialogues of Xenophon read easier than Plato’s.
Now, Golden Ass (Apuleius- trans. Robert Graves) reads like a modern book. Amazing.
The Landmark Edition from what I’ve skimmed through of the actual translation looks like the usual quality fare - I always recommend them, though I was a little disappointed with their Gallic Wars; Caesar is made a little too informal, I wish they had just used an existing translation.
I do need to get to the Golden Ass, thanks for the reminder, and that’ll be the translation I go for based on your recommendation. :)
That Paul does not encompass the whole of later writing is far from surprising. Making a new religion is hard and thirsty work, and you don't know what will be needed until you have got congregations and sees together, and seen what would need shoring up.
I have also seen how the whole "redeeming original sin" rationale for the resurrection stunt was invented maybe centuries later, and that various sects had numerous other theories about it, until it was recognized that the question was causing too much dissension, and one theory had to be picked to rally around.
I get that people can be upset at discussion of possible ahistoricity of a Jesus figure. I can't see how anybody who has faith could be upset about it, though; to be upset about it, it seems to me you would have to have doubts yourself, and fear that discussion might turn up more facts that would cause you even more doubt.
In any case, citations of documentary evidence all of which was in the possession of the Church for millennia, and which it generally would have had to take initiative to transcribe before its paper rotted and crumbled, cannot establish any objective authority. The Church is the prototypical Interested Party. Certainly we have copious examples of forgery both early and late, so we need more than ordinary attestation to establish facts.
If the only motive you can attribute to your ideological opponents is one that confirms your views and would be embarrassing to them (e.g., “religious people don’t actually believe what they say they believe”), it is worth considering the possibility that you haven’t actually made a sincere effort to understand their views.
But they are not really participating in the discussion, which is about facts.
However, I have just read a fair bit of Tim O'Neill's writing, and recognize I will need to read more deeply to be able to hold a non-laughable opinion.
There seems to be very little doubt in academic circles on the whether a Jesus of Nazareth existed:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
What you are espousing is referred to as "Jesus mythicism":
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
Tim O’Neill (an atheist) has an entire section of his weblog on the topic (and why it's generally non-sense):
Surely if Carrier’s opinion of O’Neill is relevant to whether O’Neill is a trustworthy opinion on the subject of Jesus mythicism, then Carrier’s own lack of neutrality on the topic is at least as relevant, as is the fact that his views on mythicism are considered far out of the mainstream by his own peers.
Probably most peers just don't really care whether there was ever a walking, talking Jesus. One thing literally everybody agrees on is that all the historically significant development of Christianity happened after there was certainly no Jesus walking around expressing opinions as to how it should go.
There is not a hint of scholarship around whether anything He supposedly said was anything He did say, vs. being made up from whole cloth by Paul and his cohort, long after CE 37. Literally everybody agrees that the overwhelming majority of writings promoted as from that period are total fabrications, and that most of what might have been written then has been corrupted beyond all repair.
Rewriting Josephus to support his claim is very, very sketchy.
See: https://strangenotions.com/an-atheist-historian-examines-the...
and: https://strangenotions.com/an-atheist-historian-examines-the...
and also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
which states: "Virtually all biblical scholars and classical historians see the theories of his non-existence as effectively refuted"
The TL;DR goes like this:
Pilate: Guys, this Jesus dude is totally innocent.
Jews: Kill him anyway!
Pilate: OK, well how about this--between him and this notorious murderer, who should I pardon?
Jews: Release the murderer! Kill Jesus!
Pilate: Gee, ok fine, but this is all on you guys.
Jews: Yes! His blood is on us and our descendants!
Then least there be any doubt, he _literally_ asks for water to be brought and "washes his hands" of the decision.
It's absolutely the stupidest thing you'll ever read. It is such an obvious after the fact fabrication, it sounds like it was written by a child, and yet this story has been used over the centuries to justify a great deal of violence towards Jews at the hands of Christians.
And of course you end up having to change the whole narrative to sustain this, too - the charges of blasphemy, the betrayal of Judas, etc.
The argument that the passages you cite are insertions just makes no sense, they are totally in keeping with all the rest. If you want to say it’s all inspired anti-semitism, fair enough and there’s probably some truth to it, but there’s no reason to think that those passages alone are fake. It’s probably also worth keeping in mind that the people who wrote this were probably also all Jewish.
Right, so they are also alleged to have killed others, and suddenly for Jesus it is claimed that they "don't have the authority" and need Pilate to do it.
Written by a child.
That’s exactly why in any case they would have had to obtain approval from/remand the case to Pilate.
We have many other documented such incidents resulting in dire consequences. Pilate himself would have been averse to allow mob violence not just because it was illegal but because allowing such to take place as the Roman in charge would have likely merited punishment for him as well especially if it got more out of hand.
Josephus is a great source on the historical situation of the time period, if you have the time to read the Antiquities and the Wars.
This is especially true on the religious side, where the Romans would have cared much less about Jesus' views than the local authorities. Think about the incident at the Temple, the protection of someone collecting wood on the Sabbath, him laying his hands on Lazarus, a dead man, his aspersions against stoning and many other teachings that went well against the fundamentals of Judaism.
To this end, it is not that bizarre to believe that the Jewish authorities would have been far more heated against Jesus than the Roman authorities would have been, and that this is symbolically represented in the story using the character of Pilate.
The details are obvious fabrication. So, we cannot reason based on the fabricated details, but we can reason about the the fabrication itself: It very evidently was felt necessary to make that shit up, later; so, why was it felt necessary?
It... doesn't though; it's long been the canonical Christian illustration of how you can’t escape culpability. Even the significant subset of Christianity that does treat Pilate as an actual saint rather than a villain does so on the basis of extrabiblical narratives of a later heel-face turn—including, in some versions, martyrdom as a direct consequence of his failed attempt to convert Caesar—but still sees him as a villain within the boundaries of the scriptural account of the Passion.
Atheists have a definite belief about God - He does not exist.
Atheists have a definite belief about the afterlife - it does not exist.
These are metaphysical beliefs that cannot be proven by science or any other methods we know of. They must be taken on faith.
Historically, when the communist atheists took over countries like Russia, they would hold debates with indigenous religious leaders to try to prove the superiority of their beliefs.
Only if not having anything to drink is a type of soda.
There are definite metaphysical beliefs that make up Atheism.
Atheism is not the empty set.
An Atheist doesn't say "I believe in nothing".
But anyway, as a non-atheist, you don't get to say what atheists think. (Also, not capitalized.)
Someone, somewhere may believe that, but it certainly isn't a shared belief of most serious historians (much less something most, or any, serious historians would consider strongly supported by historical evidence.)
About the only part of that on which there is broad consensus is that, of the writings incorporated into the scripture, the Pauline corpus is most likely the earliest to have been written in its current form.
A foundational element of Christian faith is the the truth claims contained in what is now the Bible. If the Bible is not true, then there is no basis for Christian faith.
You can probably read the New Testament within a week without trying too hard. If you do, you'll see several claims to be the objective truth of the matters it reports on.