This is not a book about Pontius Pilate. Not exactly.

The Roman figure who served as prefect of the province of Judaea from roughly 27 to 37 AD is known from numerous ancient works, and while his particular involvement with the Passion narrative is carefully observed, other details about his life remain shrouded in obscurity. The quest for the historical Pilate, like the quest for the historical Jesus, can be a frustrating experience. Although he played only a minor part in it, the story of the Passion occupies so central a role in the theology and history of Christianity that the figure of Pilate has come to take on a significance far exceeding his accomplishments. As the only mortal besides the Virgin Mary to be mentioned in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the prefect’s name has, since the fourth century AD, been uttered aloud more frequently than virtually any other from the Roman world, perhaps more often even than Julius or Augustus Caesar. Four of the earliest sources are located, of course, in the New Testament. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John offer a fairly, although not perfectly, consistent depiction of Pilate’s interactions with Jesus and the Jewish priests. Earlier still, Pilate had been a subject in the works of Flavius Josephus (Yosef ben Matityahu), the Romano-Jewish historian of the first century AD. In both his Jewish Antiquities and Jewish War, he discusses the administration of Judaea under Pontius Pilate. It is from Josephus, for instance, that we learn about the civil unrest provoked by Pilate’s introduction of Roman standards into Jerusalem and his use of Temple funds to construct an aqueduct – the latter the focus of much cinematic speculation (and the answer to the question asked in Monty Python’s Life of Brian by John Cleese’s Reg: ‘What have Romans ever done for us?’). The earliest work to deal with the prefect is On the Embassy to Gaius by the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who also recounted unrest over Pilate’s activities as prefect and referred to him as ‘a man of inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition’ (chapter 38).