Clash of cultures

How delightful it would be, I thought—and then I immediately chastened myself: delightful in a grave Lenten sort of way, of course—to prepare for Good Friday by reading two books about Pontius Pilate. These books resemble one another on the surface: each is written by an eminent Italian scholar, and each features a vivid cover portrait of Jesus and Pilate.

But I was wrong to think that they would be similar. One is a carefully-researched revisionist history that adjudicates fact from fiction as it reconstructs a plausible account of the overnight encounter between Jesus, Pilate, and the chief priests. The other is a kaleidoscopic journey across the history of interpretation of Pilate, aimed at illuminating the role of legal judgment in a society whose members are trying to work out the relationship between the historical and the eternal. Both are worth reading.

I began with Aldo Schiavone’s masterful biography of Pilate. Schiavone’s expertise in Roman law and rigorous scholarly method give credibility to his account of Pilate’s character, motivations, and emotions during the hours between Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. Schiavone relies mostly on John’s narrative, although he also draws upon the synoptic accounts. He’s not shy about naming contradictions and prejudices, from Philo to Josephus to the gospel writers. For example, regarding Matthew’s story of Pilate’s handwashing and the crowd’s response (“His blood be on us and on our children!”), Schiavone writes: