Pontius Pilate (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "HE WAS BORN a few years before Christ, somewhere in Italy, most probably in Rome..." (more)
Key Phrases: medieval playwrights, third soldier, Acta Pilati, Golden Legend, John's Gospel (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Pontius Pilate, by Ann Wroe, is beautifully written, imaginatively researched, and intricately structured. Most importantly, it provides readers with a valuable emotional experience: a chance to rediscover and redeem Pilate's famous question--"What is truth?"--in a spirit of humility and hope. A handful of small coins and one inscribed stone are the only physical evidence that Pilate existed. All of the textual sources that mention Pilate, Wroe notes, are "so wrapped in propaganda or agendas that it is difficult to detect what, if anything, may be true." But since Pilate "stands at the center of the Christian story and God's plan of redemption," Wroe persevered in her efforts to discern the profile of his life. "Without his climactic judgment of Jesus, the world would not have been saved. To have a faceless bureaucrat at the heart of all this drama was unacceptable: something had to be made of this man." The book's bold ambition, however, is not blind. "This is not a search for the 'real' Pilate," Wroe admits. "At best, all we have are glints and hypotheses." To learn about her subject, Wroe had to sacrifice most of her sympathetic impulses and shift her concentration to the elements of Roman life that she did not understand. And oddly enough, the passages in which Wroe describes her ignorance most clearly are where we begin to glimpse "a man actually walking on a marble floor in Caesarea, feeling his shoes pinch, clicking his fingers for a slave, while clouds of lasting infamy gather overhead."

From Publishers Weekly

Wroe takes current trends in the genre of biography one step further in this eloquent yet frustrating book, offering a reconstructed life of the Roman official who, by ordering the execution of Jesus of Nazareth but otherwise serving with little distinction, managed to become simultaneously famous and obscure. Outside the Gospels, which each bring the governor on stage for a brief if highly charged cameo appearance, there are only a few references to Pilate in contemporary sources. Where other biographers would see a historical desert, Wroe sees the tantalizing mirages that have sprung up over the centuries, from the fourth-century Acta Pilati to medieval mystery plays. She weaves these nonhistorical speculations together with well-researched accounts of first-century Roman lives, producing a shifting but suggestive portrait of an ultimately very human functionary. The writing is both precise and rich (as one might expect from the American editor of the Economist), and the insights into human character ring consistently true, but Wroe's bibliography is alarmingly scant when it comes to historical research on Jesus (who, after all, presents similar problems to biographers). And unlike Jaroslav Pelikan in his masterful Jesus Through the Centuries, Wroe often forfeits the opportunity to show how Pilate's reimagining served changing historical situations, juxtaposing quotes from mystery plays and letters from Cicero with deliberate abandon. "What did he look like? However men imagine him," Wroe writes. Readers who know the satisfactions of more conventional history will find such equivocations disappointing, but those who take Wroe's project on its own terms will find much to ponder. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (April 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375503056
• ISBN-13: 978-0375503054
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,002,892 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #49 in

  Books > History > Middle East > Palestine

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well done...evenly balanced, May 25, 2000

By	Luciano D'Orazio (Deer Park, New York USA) - See all my reviews

This book is unique in that it does not assume to have all the facts about Pontius Pilate's life. Rather, Wroe takes what little we know of him, coupled with classical writings of Tacitus, Pliny and Suetonius, as well as medieval and modern representations through drama and prose, and creates a general character that is as complex as any person should be under those circumstances. This is not a history of Christianity or the Jews, but an attempt to create a living character out of what little we know. I think any other method to examining Pilate's life would be reduced to crude hagiography.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars eloquent studies of pilate, judaea, tiberias, and jesus, October 30, 2000

By	David W. Lee "leelawok" (edmond, ok United States) - See all my reviews

I was deeply moved by the feeling, eloquence and power of this book, and valued its interlacing of the lives of Pilate, Tiberias Caesar, and Jesus in a historical context. An especially powerful rendering, on pages 137 and 138, conveys the presence of Jesus as follows: ". . . the stars were in alignment, and the land of Judaea swarmed with intimations of Christ. . . . The leaves shivered and, before the wind, exposed the name of Christ on their pale undersides. . . . [W]ord came to the swallows that darted around the eaves of the houses . . . . All day they swooped and dashed across the terraces and into the cool tiles halls, squeaking the name of Christ."

It is impossible not to be affected by the spirit of what transpired during Pilate's life. This is a wonderful book, and a valued one.

David W. Lee [e-mail]

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and thought provoking, April 23, 2001

By	Douglas Turnbull (Alexandria, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pontius Pilate : The Biography of an Invented Man (Paperback)

As Wroe admits, there is not enough hard evidence to allow one to write a true biography of Pilate. So she doesn't attempt this. Instead, she weaves together the fragments that do exist into a wonderful book, which can be roughly divided into 2main sections.

The first deals with the historical background. Firstly,what did it mean for a Roman to be named a provincial governor? What sorts of people acheived this status, and how would they have viewed their job?

Secondly, what was the situation in Judea during Pilate's time there? What was the relationship between the Romans and the Jews? What do we know about Pilate's specific acts while there? Although I knew quite a bit of Roman history, these sections were still very interesting, and did a better job of putting that history into a personal context than the usual political histories.

The second section is much more speculative, and recounts the Passion, using both the Gospels and numerous medieval Passion Plays to explore Pilate, his character, and his motives. I think it is this section that some reviewers have objected to, but it was what I found most interesting.

Pilate only shows up briefly in the Gospels, but the very existence of this book testifies to the continuing fascination that he has for people. Wroe traces some of the historical threads and interpretations on Pilate that have been created, and supplies a few speculations of her own. To me, this section read like nothing so much as _The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony_ by Calasso, with its telling and retelling of the Greek myths, sort of a theme and variations approach to the numerous alternative myths that have grown up around the central stories.

So, maybe it isn't biography, but it is an enjoyable, informative, and thought provoking work of non-fiction, wherever you want to shelve it.