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By George Rafael

April 21, 2000 |  "Why Pontius Pilate? Couldn't you choose a different subject?" That's how Ann Wroe opens her superb "Pontius Pilate," taking the words right out of your mouth. Wroe, editor of the American section of the Economist and its former literary editor, admits to playing with fire by encroaching on ground sacred to classicists and biblical scholars alike. She has little material to go on -- some coins, one inscribed stone, a few paragraphs in the ancient historian Josephus, three pages of the Alexandrian philosopher Philo.

There's the sensitive topic of anti-Semitism -- Pilate's detractors were more than willing to cut him some slack during the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Dreyfus Affair, Czarist pogroms and numerous other episodes of mass hysteria and hatred. Add to that the endless theological debates over the Resurrection ... Why Pontius Pilate? Because he was there.

Equipped, then, with scraps of change, papyrus and a pocketful of dust, Wroe chases Pilate's flitting shade across the centuries, working up a speculative but convincing portrait that draws on mystery plays, folklore, apocryphal gospels, hagiographies and medieval sources.

Indeed, Pilates abound. There's Pilate the Spaniard, born in Seville, a flashy, garlic-crunching character who couldn't wait to get to Rome; not surprisingly, the Spanish disown him. Then there's the German or Alpine Pilate in Caxton's ecclesiastical compilation, "The Golden Legend," who became popular in the Middle Ages and spread through Northern Europe like the plague; this Pilate adapted local costumes and customs wherever he went -- the Lucerne Pilate is a margrave in fancy dress, the York Pilate is a pompous magistrate and so on -- in plays and tales steeped in Christianity and native bigotry. (The Oberammergau Passion Play comes to mind.) Hollywood and Cinecittą Pilates have usually been effete if not bitchy or fey.

But the likeliest Pilate came of noble stock, the Pontii of Samnium, a mountainous region near Rome; he was enough of a city boy to conceal his country roots and play up to men of position. Minor army commissions and provincial postings depended on patronage, and the infamous Sejanus, commander of the Praetorian Guard and right-hand man to the emperor Tiberius, became his mentor.

Wroe seeks most of her clues in the New Testament, however, combing lines for hidden meanings and patterns, which coalesce with her classical and European findings into an elaborate mosaic. Essentially, Pilate comes across as an oaf, a man out of his depth. In St. John, the most controversial of the four Gospels, he appears almost sympathetic to Christ. (Wifely influence, no doubt -- Procula falls for the pale Galilean.) Pilate probably was out of his depth, Judea being a hotbed of civil unrest; like most bureaucrats, he wanted a quiet life and to him Jesus was simply a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser. The standard Roman punishment in such cases was the cross, and Pilate took the easy way -- a legalistic one -- out of a potentially explosive situation. We don't know what happened to him after Judea (he was an ineffectual governor with few friends left in high places), but exile is one possibility, and that would have been living death to a true Roman -- nonperson status, if you will. (Ovid, banished to the shores of the Black Sea, would sit down and weep when he remembered Rome.)

The crux of the matter is that the Gospels and the Pauline books of the New Testament give slightly different slants on the historical events and personages, reflecting the individual (or collaborative) visions of their authors. Views conflict and the authors are remote. Your Pilate, as well as your Christ (or your Judas or Barabbas or Paul), may be as good, bad or indifferent as mine. "What is truth?" Like beauty, it's in the eyes of the beholder.

Despite her brilliant exegesis, Wroe senses that the flesh-and-blood Pilate has slipped through her fingers. What defies her isn't, as she phrases it, "the grand arcana of Roman myths and gods, or their revolting quack medicine, or their sensual appreciation of blood;" it's the details. As she correctly points out, the ancients saw with different eyes; Marcus Aurelius' absorption in the minutiae of nature -- for instance, his perception of beauty in putrescence ("olives, which when they fall by themselves and are near decaying, are particularly pretty to look at") -- are of another sensibility, another world.

In an echo of Hannah Arendt's famous verdict regarding Eichmann, Wroe ends on this disquieting thought:

He was the essence of evil or the essence of goodness: God's rejecter or God's embracer. These opposing legends had taken on lives of their own. Yet they had both sprung, however far back, from a civil servant's moment of uncertainty. There had been potential in Pilate at that moment for darkness or light far beyond the routine experience of a Roman prefect. Even he seemed to sense it. The tiny seed had lodged in his heart or his mind, suggesting infinite possibilities. He could take untraveled roads, open hidden doors, escape the bounds of earth and flesh, exceed himself. Or he could stay as he was: shrug, scratch his ear, write another memorandum.

He stayed as he was. As most of us do.

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