Pontius Pilate’s attitude towards Jesus.

Matthew 27.19, 24-26, John 19.7-12.

Whenever preachers talk about Pontius Pilate, I find way too many of them describe him as an uncaring government functionary or bureaucrat, who clearly didn’t care enough about Jesus to stop him from dying.

I’m not entirely sure where they got this idea. I suspect it comes from bad Jesus movies. Most of them, trying to foreshadow Jesus’s death or create dramatic tension, try to depict the people who killed Jesus as way more organized than they actually were. It works for today’s audiences, who are mainly thinking of the way their culture works, not Jesus’s. In a democracy, if rulers want to murder someone, government answers to the people, and people have rights; so it takes a lot of conspiring between corrupt officials to try to make it look like a reasonable action. But the Roman Empire was no democracy. It was a fascist dictatorship, which answered to no one. Roman citizens’ rights were recognized, but no one else’s was, and you could kill ’em simply because they were inconvenient. Jesus easily fell into that category.

The bad Jesus movies also typically depict Pilate as an unbelieving skeptic, if not nontheist. The writers must figure if Pilate were religious in any form, he’d’ve fought harder for Jesus. The most they show, is Pilate is curious about Jesus; his accusers claim he’s a revolutionary, but Jesus tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” Jn 18.36 —it’s not a political kingdom; it’s not a political threat to the Roman Empire at all. So Pilate deduces Jesus isn’t a problem, and wants to let him go because he’s not, but the Judean rulers are so insistent, and Pilate doesn’t wanna rile them up, so he throws up his hands and crucifies Jesus as the path of least resistance.

All this junk worms its way into Christian sermons, because people remember movies way better than the text of the scriptures. But I’m going with the gospels, and they depict Pilate as really hesitant to have anything to do with Jesus. He’s particularly wary in John’s gospel. Here’s part of the reason why:

John 19.7-12 KWL

7The Judean leaders replied to Pilate,

“We have a Law, and according to Law,

Jesus is obligated to die,

for he makes himself out to be the son of God.”

8So when Pilate hears this word, he’s even more afraid.

9Pilate again enters the prætorium

and tells Jesus, “Where did you come from?”

Jesus gives him no answer.

10So Pilate tells Jesus, “You don’t speak to me?

Didn’t you know I have power to release you

and power to crucify you?”

11Jesus answers Pilate, “You don’t have power over me.

You have nothing—

unless it was given you from above.

This is why the one who betrayed me to you

has a greater sin.”

12ABecause of this, Pilate is seeking to release Jesus.

And in Matthew we see another part.

Matthew 27.19 KWL

As Pilate was sitting in the rostrum,

his woman sends him a message,

saying, “Have nothing between you and that righteous man.

For I am suffering greatly because of a dream about him.”

Pilate the pagan.

There’s no reason to believe Pilate didn’t believe in gods, miracles, religion, or anything; that he was a skeptical nontheist. The scriptures don’t describe him that way, and all his actions indicate he definitely believed in something.

Since he was Roman, and especially since he was a Roman prætor, it’s fair to assume he believed in the Roman state religion. That’d be a combination of the worship of Zeus—whom the Romans called Jupiter, and the emperor was officially Jupiter’s head priest—and the worship of Zeus’s family. Plus anyone else whom the Roman senate determined was divine. The Romans believed if you started worshiping anybody, Zeus and the other gods were obligated to grant them divinity. So when Cæsar Augustus had the senate declare his great-uncle and adoptive father Julius Cæsar was a god, and order people to worship him, it meant Julius actually became one of the gods of the Roman pantheon—and Augustus was now filius dei, the “son of [a] god.” (Which made it weird when the ancient Christians stated Jesus is the actual son of the actual God.)

True, not every Roman was devout. They might’ve believed—same as many Americans believe—that yeah, sure, there are gods; but the gods are unknowable, so they’re not gonna bother to get to know them or go to temple. And since they’re good people, why would the gods punish them in the afterlife? Some of them might not have believed in gods whatsoever—but plenty of people, including people in power, did believe, and it wouldn’t be healthy to be too public with your skepticism. Especially if you wanted to get ahead politically.

But if you were devout, what you typically saw in devout pagans was extreme superstition. Greco-Roman pagans were taught by their priests that the gods spoke in signs… and anything could be a sign. Dreams especially. So if Pilate’s wife dreamed about Jesus, it meant the gods were involved in Jesus’s life, either to bless or curse him. (The thing about “signs” is they can be interpreted either way, which comes in really handy when you’re a fake prophet.) Wasn’t clear which way the gods were going, but either way, Roman myths were clear: You do not wanna get on the gods’ bad side. Those gods are where all the stories come from about ironic punishments in hell.

You didn’t wanna offend the gods especially if Jesus was a righteous person, as Pilate’s wife said. All the myths about Greco-Roman gods claimed they were outraged whenever righteous people suffered injustice. (Unless, of course, the gods themselves were unjust. Their gods were giant hypocrites, y’see.)

So when we see Pilate get agitated by the Jesus situation, this’d be why. Pilate knew Jesus was a righteous man. That’s how the public described him; that’s how his wife described him. Pilate himself might be selfish and corrupt, and not care at all about Judea, its citizens, and their problems… but he didn’t wanna outrage his gods. If he ticked off his gods, the gods might smite him. Or his fellow Romans, who were more devout than he, might smite him on the gods’ behalf.

Then there’s Pilate’s reaction when the Judeans said Jesus “makes himself out to be the Son of God.” Jn 19.7 Pilate believed in sons of God. In their myths, Zeus could not keep it in his pants, and regularly snuck down from Olympus, had sex with humans, and fathered demigods. Some of the popular heroes of myth were Zeus’s offspring, like Dionysus (later made the god of wine), Epaphus of Egypt, Minos (father of the Minotaur), Tantalus (who wound up tormented in Tartarus), Perseus (whom you know from Clash of the Titans), Heracles (a.k.a. Hercules), Amphion, Helen of Sparta/Troy, Pollux (half-twin brother of Castor), and nowadays, Wonder Woman.

The idea that Zeus, or the god of Israel (whom Antiochus Epiphanes of Seleucia figured was Zeus, although the Maccabees violently disagreed) could’ve fathered Jesus, terrified Pilate. As a polytheistic pagan, he couldn’t rule out the possibility the Judeans’ god, though not part of his pantheon, was nonetheless a real god, with real power over him. And if you really wanna get on a god’s bad side, execute one of their children. That’s why his immediate response was to go to Jesus and demand, “Where did you come from?” Jn 19.9 But because Pilate couldn’t handle his answer, Jesus gave none.

Jesus’s further statement—“You don’t have power over me” Jn 19.11 —probably terrified Pilate further. I mean, it’d be really easy for Pilate to misinterpret Jesus’s attitude of “This has to happen, so let’s get on with it” Mt 26.53-54 as “You’re not in control here; I am.” Plenty of deterministic Christians certainly have. In any case since Jesus acted like the Son of God, Pilate figured he may very well be, and thereafter tried to get him freed. Jn 19.12

The limits of Pilate’s religious beliefs.

Well, more accurately, Pilate tried to get Jesus freed until the second part of that very same verse. That’s when the Judeans gave him a death threat.

John 19.12 KWL

12BBut the Judean leaders cry out,

saying, “When you release this man,

you’re no ‘friend of Cæsar’!

Everyone who makes themselves king

is challenging Cæsar!”

Amicus Cæsaris, “friend of Cæsar,” was the Roman term for a loyal member of the emperor’s administration. Cæsar Augustus had made himself king of Judea, and his paranoid successor, Cæsar Tiberius, had sent Pilate to Judea to supervise it for him. Now, if Cæsar’s personal representative Pilate had in his clutches some pretender to the throne, and actually let him go, he’d be in deep deep trouble with his boss. Tiberius, and especially his right-hand man Lucius Aelius Sejanus, were notorious for cracking down hard on disloyal subjects. The Judeans were kinda making it obvious: They were gonna make very certain Pilate was one of the people in Sejanus’s political purges.

Pilate may have been a religious pagan, but with his own head on the chopping block, it seems he decided he wasn’t all that religious. So here’s when he decided to send Jesus to his death. But in order to appease the god of Israel as best he could, he borrowed an idea actually found in the Law:

Deuteronomy 21.6-9 Schocken Bible

6…and all the elders of that town, the ones nearest the corpse,

are to wash their hands

over the neck-broken calf at the wadi;

7then they are to speak up and say:

Our hands did not shed this blood,

our eyes did not see!

8O purge your people Israel that you redeemed, O YHWH;

do not put innocent blood amid your people Israel!

So shall they be atoned of the blood,

9and so shall you yourself eradicate the innocent blood from your midst—

for you are to do what-is-right in the eyes of YHWH!

Yep, washing your hands of a situation comes from the bible. Pilate clearly had some access to Judean religious advisers, who told him this’d probably appease the God of Israel best. So that’s what he did.

Matthew 27.24-26 KWL

24Pilate, seeing how nothing he does works,

but instead creates an uproar,

accepting water,

washes off his hands before the crowd,

saying, “I’m not guilty of the blood of this righteous man.

You will see for yourselves.”

25In reply all the people say, “His blood be upon us

and upon our children.”

26Then Pilate releases bar Abbas to them,

and flogging Jesus, sends him out to be crucified.

Yeah, various antisemites try to use verse 25 to justify all sorts of heinous behaviors towards Jews, but the guilt for Jesus’s death properly belongs to humanity. The Jerusalemites just happened to be the subset of humanity who was there.

Verse 24 tends to get translated “See ye to it,” Mt 27.24 KJV or “see to it yourselves” Mt 27.24 ESV —as if Pilate now left it to the Judeans to kill Jesus. Which is a bad interpretation, because Pilate didn’t hand Jesus over to the Judeans; the Romans still flogged and crucified him. Pilate’s statement, “You will see for yourselves” properly means, “You will see, by my future actions, how I’m not on your side about this.” Notice one of those future actions was to tack the sign, “King of the Judeans” over Jesus’s cross, Jn 19.19 despite the Judeans’ objections. Jn 19.21-22

Does washing his hands of it really get Pilate off the hook? Nah. The Deuteronomy passage is properly about when you find a murder victim on your land, and you can’t figure out who killed them, and you don’t want God cursing the entire land over it. Plus they had to sacrifice a calf on the people’s behalf. It’s about taking murder seriously. It’s certainly not about a governor looking the other way as a state-sanctioned murder takes place. Pilate still had to answer to God for this—as does any public official who’s only thinking about their own career instead of justice.