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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 571. Pilate
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Literature
Brodrick, M., The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ of Nazareth (1908), 102.
Brooke, S. A., Sermons, ii. (1875) 294.
Burn, A. E., The Crown of Thorns (1911), 27.
Bush, J., Modern Thoughts on Ancient Stories, 156.
Buss, S., Roman Law and History in the New Testament (1901), 174.
Cameron, A. B., From the Garden to the Cross (1896), 132, 181.
Candlish, R. S., Scripture Characters (1872), 297, 320, 339.
Carpenter, W. B., The Son of Man among the Sons of Men (1893), 35.
Clow, W. M., The Day of the Cross (1909), 27.
Doney, C. G., The Throne-Room of the Soul (1907), 83.
English, E., Sermons and Homilies (1913), 95.
Farrar, F. W., The Life of Lives (1900), 494.
Hough, L. H., The Men of the Gospels (1913), 71.
Innes, A. T., The Trial of Jesus Christ (1899), 61.
Lightfoot, J. B., Sermons Preached in St. Paul's Cathedral (1891), 91.
Little, W. J. K., Sunlight and Shadow (1892), 242.
Lucas, B., Conversations with Christ (1905), 246.
Moulton, J. H., Visions of Sin (1891), 187.
Mursell, A., Hush and Hurry (1902), 18, 29.
Peabody, F. G., Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. (1908) 185.
Peabody, F. G., Sunday Evenings in the College Chapel (1911), 197.
Robertson, F. W., Sermons, i. (1875) 292.
Rosadi, G., The Trial of Jesus (1905), 219.
Sewell, W., The Character of Pilate (1850).
Simcox, W. H., The Cessation of Prophecy (1891), 287.
Smith, H. A., in A Book of Lay Sermons (1905), 3.
Stalker, J., The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ (1894), 43.
Stevenson, J. G., The Judges of Jesus (1909), 153.
Trench, R. C, Sermons New and Old (1886), 134.
Vaughan, B., Society, Sin and the Saviour (1908), 89.
Watson, J., The Life of the Master (1902), 373.
Whyte, A., Bible Characters: Joseph and Mary to James (1900), 121.
Dictionary of the Bible, iii. (1909) 875 (G. T. Purves).
Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, ii. (1908) 363 (A. Souter).
Preacher's Magazine, xxiv. (1913) 295 (E. S. Waterhouse).
What I have written, I have written.- Joh_19:22.
Pilate furnishes a remarkable illustration of this feature in the Fourth Gospel. Pilate is the chief agent in the crowning scene in the Evangelical history. He is necessarily a prominent figure in all the four narratives of this crisis. In the first three Gospels we learn much about him; we find him there, as we find him in St. John, at cross purposes with the Jews; he is represented there, not less than by St. John, as giving an unwilling consent to the judicial murder of Jesus. His Roman sense of justice is too strong to allow him to yield without an effort; his personal courage is too weak to persevere in the struggle when the consequences threaten to become inconvenient. He is timid, politic, time-serving, as represented by all alike; he has just enough conscience to wish to shake off the responsibility, but far too little conscience to shrink from committing a sin.
But in St. John's narrative we pierce far below the surface. Here Pilate is revealed to us as the sarcastic, cynical worldling, who doubts everything, distrusts everything, despises everything. He has an intense scorn for the Jews, and yet he has a craven dread of them. He has a certain professional regard for justice, and yet he has no real belief in truth or honour. Throughout he manifests a malicious irony in his conduct at this crisis. There is a lofty scorn in his answer, when he repudiates any sympathy with the accusers, “Am I a Jew?” There is a sarcastic pity in the question which he addresses to the Prisoner before him: “Art thou the King of the Jews?” “Art thou then a King, thou poor, weak, helpless fanatic, whom with a single word I could doom to death?” He is half-bewildered, half-diverted, with the incongruity of this claim. And yet there is a certain propriety that a wild enthusiast should assert his sovereignty over a nation of bigots. So he sarcastically adopts the title: “Will ye that I release unto you the King of the Jews?” Even when at length he is obliged to yield to the popular clamour, he will at least have his revenge by a studied contempt. “Behold your King.” “Shall I crucify your King?” And to the very last moment he indulges his cynical scorn. The title on the cross was indeed unconsciously a proclamation of a Divine truth, but in its immediate purpose and intent it was the mere gratification of Pilate's sarcastic humour. “Jesus of Nazareth (could any good thing come out of Nazareth?), Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews!” He has sacrificed his honour to them; but he will not sacrifice his contempt: “What I have written, I have written.”
Like all who yield what they know they should not give up, Pilate tried to cover his weakness by obstinacy. If he had asserted himself a little sooner, he would have escaped his bad preeminence. He did not know what he had written, in imperishable characters, in the record of his deeds; and, while he thought himself announcing with fitting dignity his determination, he was declaring that the black lines he had traced would last for ever. Strange that the awful truth of the ineffaceableness of our deeds should come from his lips! Blessed we if we have learned that He whom Pilate slew will blot out our sins from His book.1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
2. We know nothing of Pilate apart from his administration of Judæa. His family name Pontius leaves open the possibility that he was descended from the brave Samnite general Gaius Pontius, the hero of the Caudine Forks. Philo quotes from Agrippa I. a comprehensive account of the man: “Inflexibly obstinate by nature, he was as reckless as he was implacable.” The same witness describes “his openness to bribes, his acts of insolence, his robberies, his outrages, his tyrannies, his unbroken series of murders without form of trial, his insatiable and devastating savagery.”
His acts abundantly bear out this description. Incapable himself of understanding why any one should care “what is truth,” he set himself from the first to trample upon the religious prejudices which he so heartily despised. When he entered on his province, he sent his men into Jerusalem by night with flags showing the figure of the Emperor. For six days the Jews fruitlessly protested and entreated, and Pilate answered by preparing a general massacre at Cæsarea, whither the eager people had hastened; he yielded only when he had satisfied his insolence by securing the people's submission. He impounded the Temple treasures to build an aqueduct, and overawed the people by scattering among them plain-clothes men secretly armed with clubs. St. Luke tells us of Galilæan pilgrims, otherwise unknown, whose blood Pilate mingled with the sacrifices they came to offer.
It will, perhaps, help us to realize the position of Pilate if we compare it with that of a French general despatched from the idle and fashionable life of the boulevards to administer the government of Algiers. There would be a like contemptuous estimate of the race to be kept in subjection by military force; a lofty sense of superiority which would lead its possessor to regard the exercise of cruelty towards them as something quite different in its nature from cruelty towards his fellow-countrymen. This would be readily called forth under the irritation of émeutes or petty revolts, seen to be foolishly weak, yet quite sufficient to cause annoyance. Just as St. Arnaud, the scandalous and favourite marshal of Napoleon the little, exasperated the Kabyles of the Atlas by atrocious cruelties, which were rewarded with disgraceful decorations, so Pilate inaugurated his administration by first outraging the religious sensibilities of those under his authority, and then treacherously murdering those who protested against his insults.1 [Note: W. E. Skinner, A Book of Lay Sermons, 4.]
In his volume of essays entitled Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Fitzjames [who held that, in regard to religions, the State cannot be an impartial bystander, and who disputed John Stuart Mill's view on the subject] discusses at some length the case of Pontius Pilate, to which I may notice he had often applied parallels from Ram Singh and other Indian experiences. Pontius Pilate was in a position analogous to that of the governor of a British province. He decides that if Pilate had acted upon Mill's principles he would have risked “setting the whole province in a blaze.” He condemns the Roman persecutors as “clumsy and brutal”; but thinks that they might have succeeded “in the same miserable sense in which the Spanish Inquisition succeeded,” had they been more systematic, and then would at least not have been self-stultified. Had the Roman Government seen the importance of the question, the strife, if inevitable, might have been noble. It would have been a case of “generous opponents each working his way to the truth from opposite sides,” not the case of a “touching though slightly hysterical victim, mauled from time to time by a sleepy tyrant in his intervals of fury.”1 [Note: Leslie Stephen, The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 326.]
3. This man, then, was the governor, that is, procurator, of Judæa to whom the Jewish council delivered Jesus. He had already been condemned to death, and gladly would the Jewish authorities have carried it out in the Jewish fashion-by stoning. But it was not in their power: their Roman masters, while conceding to the native courts the power of trying and punishing minor offences, reserved to themselves the prerogative of life and death; and a case in which a capital sentence had been passed in a Jewish court had to go before the representative of Rome in the country, who tried it over again, and might either confirm or reverse the sentence.
What a spectacle was that! The heads of the Jewish nation leading their own Messiah in chains to deliver Him up to a Gentile governor, with the petition that He should be put to death! Shades of the heroes and the prophets who loved this nation and boasted of it and foretold its glorious fate, the hour of destiny has come, and this is the result!
Luther, strange to say, was inclined almost to apologize for Pilate, whom he describes in his Table Talk as “a kindly man of the world,” that “scourged Christ from compassion, that he might thereby quiet the insatiable rage and fury of the Jews.” “Pilate,” he adds, “is a better man than any of the princes of the empire (at present) who are not Evangelical. He kept firmly to the Roman rights and laws, affirming that he could not suffer an innocent man to be put to death, his cause unheard, convicted of no one evil deed. Therefore he tried all honourable methods to set Christ free. But when they spoke to him of the displeasure of Cæsar, he was carried away, and let the Roman laws and rights go. For he thought, ‘It is only one man, poor, and, moreover, despised. No one will take the case up. What harm can his death do me? It is better that one should die than that the whole nation should be set against me.'
“When Pilate asked Christ, ‘Art thou the King of the Jews?' ‘Yes,' He said, ‘I am; but not such a king as Cæsar, else would My servants and soldiers fight for Me to set Me free. But I am a King sent to preach the Glad Tidings, that I might bear witness to the Truth.' ‘Oh,' said Pilate, ‘if thou art a king of that kind, and hast such a kingdom as that, consisting of the Word and the Truth, thou wilt do no harm to my kingdom.' And Pilate doubtless thought, ‘Jesus is a good, simple, harmless man, who is talking about a kingdom no one knows anything about. Probably he comes out of some forest, or out-of-the-way region, and is a simple creature who knows nothing of the world or its government.' ”1 [Note: Luther, Table Talk, iv. 172, 398.]
4. It is not our purpose to follow the trial of Jesus by Pilate through all its tortuous and humiliating scenes. Our purpose is to inquire into Pilate's character. It is from these scenes that we learn what manner of man he was, but they are familiar to us, and we shall proceed at once to gather from them the features of this man's character which led him to play his great part so ignobly. We shall find that his failure was due to unbelief, worldliness, and weakness.