Pontius Pilate - Portrayals

Portrayals

Plays and films dealing with life of Jesus Christ often include the character of Pontius Pilate due to the central role he played in the final days of Christ's life. Writers have found various reasons to make Pilate a main character and to fill in any unknown details of his life. Pilate has been portrayed in a number of different ways by various writers:

1. A weak and harried bureaucrat
2. A hard governor who rules with an iron fist
3. A man who clearly sees how the story of Jesus will affect human history
4. A man who regrets his role in Jesus' death (to greater or lesser extents, depending on the work)
5. A man who is oblivious to the significance of the Galilean he condemns to death
6. A tired governor who doesn't care and wants Jesus out of his hands

• Pilate appears in the Mystery Plays and Passion Plays, the most notable being in the Cornish cycle in which he is summoned to Rome by Tiberius and sentenced to death for killing Jesus because this crime cannot be contained by earth, sea or water and so immediately proceeds (body and soul, rather than just soul) to hell.
• In the Vestibule of Hell in Dante's Divine Comedy, a figure is seen "who made the great refusal". This is interpreted to be either Pontius Pilate or Pope Celestine V.
• In Anatole France's short story The Procurator of Judaea, Pilate has retired to Sicily to become a gentleman farmer. This story is an example of the "oblivious" interpretation of Pilate. He has forgotten everything about Jesus and the part that he (Pilate) played in his trial.
• Pontius Pilate is portrayed in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita as being ruthless, yet complex and human; the novel describes his meeting with Jesus the Nazarene, his recognition of an affinity with and spiritual need for him, and his reluctant but resigned and passive handing over of him to those who wanted to kill him. Here Pilate exemplifies the statement "Cowardice is the worst of vices", and thus serves as a model, in an allegorical interpretation of the work, of all the people who have "washed their hands" by silently or actively taking part in the crimes committed by Joseph Stalin.
  • This novel inspired The Rolling Stones 1968 song "Sympathy for the Devil". The song's title and lyrics may have been derived from Bulgakov's portrayal of the Devil. Pilate is referenced in the verse: "And I was around when Jesus Christ / had his moment of doubt and pain / made damn sure that Pilate / washed his hands, and sealed his fate". Due to Soviet censorship, the book was not fully published in Russian until 1966 and the first UK translation, by Michael Glenny, appeared in London in 1967. It was an immediate success d'estime and a favourite of (Jagger's then girlfriend) Marianne Faithfull, who pressed a copy into Jagger's hands. Thus the timeline (and, to anyone familiar with the directions from which Culture passed into the Stones circle) seems likely.
  • The Master and Margarita and Pilate are also referred to in the Pearl Jam song "Pilate", on the album Yield.
• In Robert Graves's novel King Jesus, Pilate is an unscrupulous opportunist who tries to prevent Jesus' death by convincing Jesus to become the King of the Jews (in reality a puppet monarch of Rome) because, in the novel, Jesus is the son of Mary, who is of a royal Jewish line and the daughter of the last Hasmonean and Antipater, the son of Herod the Great. Jesus refuses the offer because his kingdom "is not of this world". Pilate eventually grows exasperated and leaves him die.
• Pilate appears in three stories in Karel Čapek's collection Apocryphal Tales. In "Pilate's Evening", the weary governor wonders why Jesus' friends and relatives did not come to try and save him, and wishes that they had. "Pilate's Creed" features a dialogue between Pilate and Joseph of Arimathea. Their argument reflects the conflict between sceptical humanism (Pilate's famous "What is truth?") and religious certainty (Joseph's reply, "The truth in which I believe"). "The Crucifixion" features a world-weary Pilate disgusted with the political machinations that led to Jesus' condemnation.
• In Roger Caillois' short novel Pontius Pilate (1961), Pilate is portrayed as a vacillating colonial administrator who, during the day after Jesus' arrest, receives advice from his wife, from Judas Iscariot and from a Chaldaean friend who has amassed an immense knowledge of the world's various religions. In the end, he is shown as "a man who despite every hindrance succeeded in being brave".
• In The Flame and the Wind, a novel by John Blackburn, the aged Pilate is wracked by guilt over Jesus' death and directs his heir to find out if Jesus was really the Son of God.
• The Dutch writer Simon Vestdijk's 1938 novel De nadagen van Pilatus (The Last Days of Pilate) presents an account of Pilate's life after the crucifixion.
• Ann Wroe's Pontius Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man is an attempt to provide the obscure official with a biography suitable to the man who is so influential to the Christian story. **The Royal Shakespeare Company debuted a performance piece called The Pilate Workshop in the summer of 2004, which attempted to cast Wroe's research in the form of a mystery play.
• Pilate is mentioned in the theme song for Marvel Comics' Nextwave series in a list of enemies, along with a monster, a pirate, an electric emu, a giant sky-rat, and a midget Hitler.
• Retired California politician James R. Mills wrote a novel titled Gospel According to Pontius Pilate in 1978. Pilate is described as an ordinary, cynical politician whose primary concern is to keep the local population content and maintain social order, rather than particular sense of rightness.
• In the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, Pilate has three songs. In "Pilate's Dream", he foresees that history will mention his name and leave him the blame of Jesus' death. In the song "Pilate and Christ", an arrogant and mocking Pilate perhaps realizing manipulation by the Sanhedrin, tries to prevent Jesus' death by sending Jesus to Herod. "You're Herod's race! You're Herod's case!". In the song "Trial Before Pilate", a sympathetic Pilate pleads with Jesus to speak to him, saying that he believes the accused has "done no wrong" but "ought to be locked up" for insanity. Receiving no answer from the silent Jesus, Pilate eventually grows exasperated and tells him, "Die if you want to, you misguided martyr." Barry Dennen played Pilate on the "Brown Album", on Broadway and in the 1973 film version of the musical, directed by Norman Jewison, with Fred Johanson taking the role in the 2000 revival, directed by Gale Edwards.
• The Collection of Short Stories The Night Chicago Died by Tom Wessex contains a story entitled "An Afternoon on Skull Hill", in which the author supposes that Gestas, one of the thieves crucified with Christ, was in fact Pilate's illegitimate son.
• Pontius Pilate is mentioned in the drama The Crucible by Arthur Miller. Protagonist John Proctor yells "Pontius Pilate! God will not let you wash your hands of this!", to Reverend Hale as Proctor's wife is being arrested.
• "Pontius Pirate" in Asterix and the Black Gold is clearly a reflection of Pontius Pilate
• In Nicolas Notovith's "The Lost Years of Jesus" (1894), an apocryphal Gospel he claims to have found in the Leh lamasery, Ladak, Pilatus is seen as an evil man and the Jews as mild and compassionate.
• In the 2004 Superman storyline "For Tomorrow", a story with strong messianic themes, a priest dying of cancer (and a confidant of Superman) is transformed into a biological war machine, codenamed "Pilate", and rampages through a paradise dimension created by Superman. He retains enough of his humanity to regret his murders and sacrifices himself.
• In Jeffrey Archer's 1980 collection of short stories A Quiver Full of Arrows, one of the stories, "The First Miracle" tells of how a 12-year-old Pontius Pilate meets Joseph and Mary as they arrive in Bethlehem, and gives them the food that his mother had sent him to buy.
• In Toni Morrison's book Song of Solomon, Pilate is the name of Macon Dead's sister
• Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that Pilate is the one powerful personality in the Gospels.
• Hungarian psychologist Péter Popper wrote a novel in 1997 Peloni or the Testament of Pilate in which Pilate portrays himself as a cultivated Roman bewildered by Judea and the Jews, who experienced some of the divine power of Jesus and executed him on Jesus's own impulse.
• Pilatus is the central figure in The Karma Killers a 2009 novel by Angelo Paratico
• In the 2006 musical event Pilate is portrayed by Keith Allen
• The preface to George Bernard Shaw's On the Rocks includes a dramatization of the meeting between Jesus and Pilate.
• A song by UK-based songwriter Howard Dobson called This Is Jesus (King of the Jews) looks at the Passion of Christ from Pilate's perspective and was a semi-finalist in the 2011 UK Songwriting Contest.
• In an October 2012 contribution to political turmoil, a Spanish journalist speculated on the possibility of Pontius Pilate, as well as some of the soldiers who murdered Jesus, being of Catalan descent.