… as his powerful Roman Patron Sejanus is put to the sword
The Judean perch was not prestigious though. The prefects, as sub-governors of Judea were otherwise known, were not of high social status. At least one – Felix, referenced by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles – was an ex-slave, which says a lot on the low regard in which the province was held by Rome. Pilate was only secondarily sent to Judea on account of having married into royalty: his posting to the volatile province stemmed, primarily, from his being of a inferior social pedigree. Be that as it may, Pilate relished the posting in that it gave him the chance to exercise power, absolute power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and in Pilate was the archetypal example.
Pilate’s brief was simple: to collect taxes, maintain law and order, see that the infrastructure was in good nick, and keep the population subdued. Although he was born lowly, he positively had the power of life and death over his Jewish subjects. Let us listen to Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in his allusion to Coponius, Judea’s first Roman governor and who like Pilate was from the same subservient social class: “And now (Herod) Archelaus’ part of Judea was reduced into a province and Coponius, one of the equestrian order among the Romans, was sent as procurator, having the power of life and death put into his hands by Caesar.”
Pilate was callous to a point of being sadistic. He was scarcely the scrupling judge with the rare soft spot that we encounter in the gospels. Philo charges him with “corruptibility, violence, robberies, ill-treatment of the people, grievances, continuous executions without even the form of a trial, endless and intolerable cruelties”. He goes on to declare him a “savage, inflexible, and arbitrary ruler” who was of a “stubborn and harsh quality” and “could not bring himself to do anything that might cause pleasure to the Jews”. The essentially humane character of the Pilate who presided over the trial of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels may not be wholly fictitious but is for sure highly embellished.
SEJANUS, PILATE’S SVENGALI
Why did Pilate have such a pathological hatred of the Jews?
Sejanus had more to do with it than the spontaneous leanings of his own nature.
According to Philo, Sejanus hated the Jews like the plague and wished “to do away with the nation” – to exterminate it. In AD 19, for instance, he forced the Jews in Rome to burn their religious vestments and expelled them from the city without much ado. For as long as Sejanus was in power, Pilate could do pretty much as he pleased. He didn’t have to worry about compromising reportage reaching the emperor as everything went through the implacably anti-Jewish Sejanus. Sejanus was unrivalled in power: golden statues of the general were being put up in Rome, the Senate had voted his birthday a public holiday, public prayers were offered on behalf of both Emperor Tiberius and Sejanus, and in AD 31 Sejanus was named as Consul jointly with Tiberius.
The Judea posting also gave Pilate a golden opportunity to make money – lots of it. The governors of the Roman provinces were invariably rapacious, greedy, and incompetent: this we learn not only from Jewish historians of the day but from contemporary Roman writers as well such as Tacitus and Juvenal. As long as the money skimmed from the provinces was not overly excessive, governors were allowed a free hand. It is said of Emperor Tiberius that, “Once he ordered a governor to reverse a steep rise in taxes saying, ‘I want my sheep shorn, not skinned’!” For those governors, such as Pilate, who had support from the very acmes of Roman power, they were practically a law unto themselves.
A BOOT-LICKER PAR EXCELLENCE
Pontius Pilate was untrained in political office. Furthermore, he was a sycophant to the core who was prepared to go to any length in a bid to curry favour with and prove his loyalty to the powers that be in Rome. Both these attributes gave rise to a series of blunders that brought him the intense hatred of the Jews.
The first abomination he committed in the eyes of the Jews was to set up a temple dedicated to Emperor Tiberius, which he called the Tiberieum, making him the only known official to have built a temple to a living emperor. True, Roman emperors were worshipped, but Tiberius was the one exception. According to the Roman scholar and historian Suetonius, Tiberius did not allow the consecration of temples to himself. Pilate’s act was therefore an overkill: it was not appreciated at all.
Throughout his tenure, Pilate had a series of run-ins with the Jews, some of which entailed a lot of bloodshed and one of which sparked an insurrection that paved the way to Calvary.
Then it all began to unravel.
PILATE’S WINGS ARE CLIPPED
On October 18, AD 31, Pilate’s patron Sejanus was summoned to the office of Emperor Tiberius and an angry denunciation was read out to him. It is not clear what caused Sejanus’ fall from the emperor’s good graces but circumstantial evidence points to the perceived threat to the emperor’s power. As the ancient historian Cassius Dio puts it, “Sejanus was so great a person by reason both of his excessive haughtiness and of his vast power that to put it briefly, he himself seemed to be the emperor and Tiberius a kind of island potentate, inasmuch as the latter spent his time on the island of Capri”.
Sejanus, hitherto the most powerful man in Rome, was thrown into a dungeon. That same evening, he was summarily condemned to death, extracted from his cell, hung, and had his body given over to a crowd that tore it to pieces in a frenzy of manic excitement. His three children were all executed over the following months and his wife, Tiberius’ own daughter, committed suicide. The people further celebrated his downfall by pulling down his statues. Meanwhile, Tiberius began pursuing all those who could have been involved in the “plots” of Sejanus.
In Judea, Pilate, effectively a Sejanus appointee, must have been badly shaken. Were his friends and family under suspicion? Would he be purged like others?
Imperial attitudes to the Jewish race seemed to have changed now with Sejanus’ riddance. Tiberius made sure this was the case by appointing a new governor for Syria (who went by the title Legate and to whom Pilate was obligated to report). The governor, Lucius Pomponius Flaccus, arrived in Rome in AD 32. Philo records that Tiberius now “charged his procurators in every place to which they were appointed to speak comfortably to the members of our nation in the different cities, assuring them that the penal measures did not extend to all but only to the guilty who were few, and to disturb none of the established customs but even to regard them as a trust committed to their care, the people as naturally peaceable and the institution as an influence promoting orderly conduct”.
So Pilate had lost his supporters at the top, his new boss was on his doorstep, and there had been a change of policy regarding the very people he was in charge of. Surely, he would have to watch his step. The fact of the matter, however, was that he hardly did so. In November 32 AD, for instance, he provoked a mini zealot uprising led by Judas Iscariot, Theudas Barabbas, and Simon Zelotes, the three seniormost associates of Jesus. It was this revolt that culminated in those three “crosses” of Calvary that are indelibly etched on the mind of every Christian.