by Daniel Silva
PART TWO
ECCE HOMO
24
JESUIT CURIA, ROME
EVEN HIS FIRST NAME WAS lost to the mists of time—the name his mother and father had called him the day he was presented to the gods and a golden amulet, a bulla, was hung round his tiny neck to ward off evil spirits. Later in life he would have answered to his cognomen, the third name of a Roman citizen, a hereditary label used to distinguish one branch of a family from the others. His had three syllables, not two, and sounded nothing like the version that would follow him down through the ages and into infamy.
The year of his birth is not known, nor the place. One school of thought held that he was from Roman-ruled Spain—perhaps Tarragona on the Catalonian coast or Seville, where even today, near the Plaza de Arguelles, there stands an elaborate Andalusian palace known as the Casa de Pilatos. Another theory, prevalent in the Middle Ages, imagined he was the illegitimate child of a German king called Tyrus and a concubine named Pila. As the legend goes, Pila did not know the name of the man who impregnated her, so she combined her father’s name with her own and called the boy Pilatus.
His most likely place of birth, however, was Rome. His ancestors were probably Samnites, a warlike tribe who inhabited the craggy hills south of the city. His second name, Pontius, suggested he was a descendant of the Pontii, a clan that produced several important Roman military figures. His cognomen, Pilatus, meant “skilled with a javelin.” It was possible Pontius Pilate, through his military exploits, earned the name himself. The more plausible explanation is that he was the son of a knight and a member of the equestrian order, the second tier of Roman nobility, falling just beneath the senatorial class.
If so, he would have enjoyed a comfortable Roman upbringing. The family home would have had an atrium, a colonnaded garden, running water, and a private bath. A second dwelling, a villa, would have overlooked the sea. He would have traveled the streets of Rome not on foot but held aloft in a litter by slaves. Unlike most children at the dawn of the first millennium, he would have never known hunger. He would have wanted for nothing.
His education would have been rigorous—several hours of instruction each day in reading, writing, mathematics, and, when he was older, the finer points of critical thinking and debate, skills that would serve him well later in life. He would have honed his physique with regular weight lifting and then recovered from his efforts with a trip to the baths. For entertainment he would have reveled in the blood-soaked spectacles of the games. It was unlikely he ever saw the Flavian Amphitheatre, the great circular colosseum built in the low valley between the Caelian, Esquiline, and Palatine hills. The project was funded with spoils from the Temple in Jerusalem, which he knew intimately. He would not witness its destruction in 70 C.E., though surely he must have known its days were numbered.
The new and restive province of Judea was some fourteen hundred miles from Rome, a journey of three weeks or more by sea. Pontius Pilate, after serving several years as a junior officer in the Roman army, arrived there in 26 C.E. It was not a coveted post; Syria to the north and Egypt to the southeast were far more important. But what Judea lacked in stature it more than made up for in potential trouble. Its native population considered themselves chosen by their God and superior to their pagan, polytheist occupiers. Jerusalem, their holy city, was the only place in the Empire where local inhabitants did not have to prostrate themselves before an image of the emperor. Pilate, if he was to succeed, would have to handle them with care.
He had no doubt seen these people in Rome. They were the bearded, circumcised inhabitants of Regio XIV, a crowded quarter on the west side of the Tiber that would one day become known as Trastevere. There were perhaps four and a half million of them spread throughout the Empire. They had thrived under Roman rule, taking advantage of the freedom of commerce and movement the Empire afforded them. Everywhere they settled they were wealthy and much admired as a God-fearing people who loved their children, respected human life, and looked after the poor, the sick, the widowed, and the orphaned. Julius Caesar spoke highly of them and granted them important rights of association, which allowed them to worship their God instead of Rome’s.
But those who lived in the ancestral homeland of Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee were a less cosmopolitan lot. Violently anti-Roman, they were riven with sects, perhaps as many as twenty-four, including the puritanical Essenes, who did not recognize the authority of the Temple. A massive complex atop Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, it was controlled by Sadducee aristocrats who profited through their association with the occupation and worked closely with the Roman prefect to assure stability.
Pilate was only the fifth to serve in the post. His headquarters were in Caesarea, a Roman enclave of gleaming white marble on the Mediterranean coast. There was a curving promenade by the sea where he could stroll when the weather was fine, and Roman temples where he made sacrifices to his gods, not theirs. Pilate, if he were so inclined, might well have imagined he had never left home.
It was not his task to remake the inhabitants of the province—they would one day become known as Jews—in Rome’s image. Pilate was a collector of taxes, a facilitator of trade, and a writer of endless reports to Emperor Tiberius, which he sealed with wax and marked with the signet ring he wore on the last finger of his left hand. Rome, by and large, did not involve itself in every facet of culture and society in the lands it occupied. Its laws hibernated during periods of tranquillity and awoke only when there was a threat to order.
Troublemakers typically received a warning. And if they foolishly persisted, they were dealt with swiftly and brutally. Pilate’s immediate predecessor, Valerius Gratus, once dispatched two hundred Jews simultaneously with Rome’s preferred method of execution: death on the cross. After a revolt in 4 B.C.E., two thousand were crucified outside Jerusalem. So powerful was their faith in their one God, they went to the cross without fear.
As prefect, Pilate was Judea’s chief magistrate, its judge and jury. Even so, the Jews handled much of the province’s civil administration and law enforcement through the Sanhedrin, the rabbinical tribunal that convened daily—except for religious festivals and the Sabbath—in the Hall of Hewn Stones on the north side of the Temple complex. Pilate was under orders from Emperor Tiberius to grant the Jews wide latitude in running their own affairs, especially when it came to matters of their religion. He was to remain in the background whenever possible, the hidden hand, Rome’s invisible man.
But Pilate, quick-tempered and vindictive, soon developed a reputation for savagery, theft, endless executions, and needless provocations. There was, for example, his decision to affix military standards bearing the emperor’s likeness to the walls of the Antonia Fortress, which overlooked the Temple itself. Predictably, the Jews reacted with fury. Several thousand surrounded Pilate’s palace in Caesarea, where a weeklong standoff ensued. When the Jews made it clear that they were prepared to die if their demands were not met, Pilate relented and the standards were removed.
And then there was Pilate’s admittedly impressive aqueduct, which he financed, at least in part, with sacred money, corban, stolen from the Temple treasury. Once again he was confronted by a large crowd, this time at the Great Pavement, the elevated platform outside Herod’s Citadel, which served as Pilate’s Jerusalem headquarters. Sprawled impassively atop his curule chair, Pilate silently endured their abuse for a time before ordering his soldiers to unsheathe their swords. Some of the unarmed Jews were hacked to pieces. Others were trampled in the melee.
Lastly, there were the gold-plated shields dedicated to Tiberius that he hung in his Jerusalem apartments. The Jews demanded the shields be removed. And when Pilate refused, they dispatched a letter of protest to none other than the emperor himself. It reached Tiberius while he was on holiday in Capri, or so claimed the philosopher Philo. Seething with rage over his prefect’s needless blunder, Tiberius ordered Pilate to remove the shields without delay.
He went to Jerusalem as seldom as possib
le, usually to oversee security during Jewish festivals. Passover, the celebration of the Jews’ deliverance from bondage in Egypt, was rife with both religious and political implications. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from across the Empire—in some cases, entire villages—descended on the city. The streets were jammed with pilgrims and perhaps a quarter-million bleating sheep awaiting ritual slaughter. Lurking in the shadows were the Sicarii, cloaked Jewish zealots who killed Roman soldiers with their distinctive daggers and then disappeared into the crowds.
At the center of this pandemonium was the Temple. Roman soldiers kept watch on the celebrations from their garrison at the Antonia; Pilate, from his splendid private chambers in Herod’s Citadel. Any hint of unrest—a challenge to Roman rule or to the collaborative Temple authorities—would have been dealt with ruthlessly, lest the situation spin out of control. One spark, one agitator, and Jerusalem might erupt.
It was into this volatile city—perhaps in the year 33 C.E., or perhaps as early as 27 or as late as 36—that there came a Galilean, a healer, a worker of miracles, a preacher of parables who warned that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. He arrived, as prophesied, astride an ass. It is possible Pilate already knew of this Galilean and that he witnessed his tumultuous entrance into Jerusalem. There were many such messianic figures in first-century Judea, men who called themselves the “anointed one” and promised to rebuild David’s kingdom. Pilate viewed these preachers as a direct threat to Roman rule and extinguished them without mercy. Invariably, their adherents suffered the same fate.
Historians disagree on the nature of the incident that led to the Galilean’s earthly demise. Most concur that a crime was committed—perhaps a physical attack on the currency traders in the Royal Portico, perhaps a verbal tirade against the Temple elite. It is possible Roman soldiers witnessed the disturbance and took the Galilean into custody straightaway. But tradition holds that he was arrested by a joint Roman-Jewish force on the Mount of Olives after sharing a final Pesach meal with his disciples.
What happened next is still less clear. Even the traditional accounts are riddled with contradictions. They suggest that sometime after midnight, the Galilean was brought to the house of the high priest, Joseph ben Caiaphas, where he was subjected to a brutal interrogation by a portion of the Sanhedrin. Contemporary historians, however, have cast doubt on this version of the story. After all, it was both Passover and the eve of the Sabbath, and Jerusalem was bursting at the seams with Jews from around the known world. Caiaphas, having put in a long day at the Temple, is unlikely to have welcomed the late-night intrusion. Moreover, the trial as described—it was purportedly conducted outside in the courtyard by the light of a bonfire—was strictly forbidden by the Laws of Moses and therefore could not have taken place.
One way or another, the Galilean ended up in the hands of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect and chief magistrate of the province. Tradition holds that he presided over a public tribunal, but no official record of such a proceeding survives. One central fact, however, is indisputable. The Galilean was put to death by crucifixion, the Roman method of execution reserved solely for insurrectionists, probably just outside the city walls, where his punishment would serve as a warning. Pilate might have witnessed the man’s suffering from his chambers in Herod’s Citadel. But in all likelihood, given his fearsome reputation, the entire episode was quickly forgotten, swept away by some new problem. Pilate, after all, was a busy man.
But then again, the prefect may well have carried a memory of the man long after ordering his execution, especially during the final years of his rule in Judea, as followers of the Galilean, who was called Jesus of Nazareth, took the first halting steps toward creating a new faith. Traumatized by what they had witnessed, they comforted each other with accounts of the Galilean’s ministry, accounts that would eventually be written down in books, evangelizing pamphlets known as gospels, which circulated among communities of early believers. And it was there that Archbishop Luigi Donati, in his rooms at the Jesuit Curia on the Borgo Santo Spirito in Rome, picked up the thread of the story.
25
JESUIT CURIA, ROME
MARK, NOT MATTHEW, WAS THE first. It was written in colloquial koine Greek sometime between 66 and 75 C.E., more than thirty years after the death of Jesus, an eternity in the ancient world. The gospel circulated anonymously for several decades before Church Fathers ascribed it to a companion of the apostle Peter, a conclusion rejected by most contemporary biblical scholars, who contend the author’s identity is not known.
His audience was a community of gentile Christians living in Rome, directly under the thumb of the emperor. It is unlikely he spoke the language of Jesus or his disciples, and he probably possessed only passing familiarity with the geography and customs of the land in which the story was set. By the time he took up his pen, nearly all of the firsthand witnesses had died off or been killed. For his source material he drew upon an oral tradition and perhaps a few written fragments. In the fifteenth chapter, a blameless and benevolent Pilate is portrayed as having bowed to the demands of a Jewish crowd to sentence Jesus to death. The earliest versions of Mark concluded abruptly with the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb, an ending many early Christians considered anticlimactic and unsatisfying. Later versions of Mark had two alternative endings. In the so-called Longer Ending, a resurrected Jesus appears in different forms to his disciples.
“Mark’s original author did not compose the alternative ending,” explained Donati. “It was probably written hundreds of years after his death. In fact, the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus, the oldest known copy of the New Testament, contains the original empty tomb ending.”
The Gospel of Matthew, Donati continued, was composed next, probably between 80 and 90 C.E., but perhaps as late as 110, long after the cataclysmic First Roman-Jewish War and the destruction of the Temple. Matthew’s audience was a community of Jewish Christians living in Roman-occupied Syria. He drew heavily from Mark, borrowing six hundred verses. But scholars believe Matthew expanded on the work of his predecessor with the help of the Q source, a theoretical collection of the sayings of Jesus. His work reflects the sharp divide between Jewish Christians who accepted Jesus as the messiah and Jews who did not. The depiction of Jesus’ appearance before Pilate is similar to Mark’s, with one critical addition.
“Pilate, the ruthless Roman prefect, washes his hands in front of the Jewish crowd gathered on the Great Pavement and declares himself innocent of Christ’s blood. To which the crowd replies, ‘His blood shall be on us and our children.’ It is the most consequential line of dialogue ever composed. Two thousand years of persecution and slaughter of Jews at the hands of Christians can be traced back to those nine terrible words.”
“Why were they written?” asked Gabriel.
“As a Roman Catholic prelate and a man of great personal faith, I believe the Gospels were divinely inspired. That said, they were composed by human beings long after the events took place and were based on stories of Jesus’ life and ministry told by his earliest followers. If there was indeed a tribunal of some sort, Pilate undoubtedly spoke very few, if any, of the words the Gospel writers put in his mouth. The same would be true, of course, of the Jewish crowd, if there was one. Let his blood be upon us and our children? Did they really shout such an awkward and outlandish line? And with a single voice? Where were the followers of Jesus who came to Jerusalem with him from the Galilee? Where were the dissenters?” Donati shook his head. “That passage was a mistake. A sacred mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.”
“But was it an innocent mistake?”
“A professor of mine at the Gregoriana used to refer to it as the longest lie. Privately, of course. Had he done so openly, he would have been dragged before the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and defrocked.”
“Is the scene in Matthew’s Gospel a lie?”
“The author of Matthew would tell you that he wrote the story as he had heard it himself and as he believed it to be. That said, t
here is no doubt that his Gospel, like Mark’s, shifted the blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans to the Jews.”
“Why?”
“Because within a few short years of the Crucifixion, the Jesus movement was in grave danger of being reabsorbed by Judaism. If there was a future, it lay with the gentiles living under Roman rule. The evangelists and the Church Fathers had to make the new faith acceptable to the Empire. There was nothing they could do to change the fact that Jesus died a Roman death at the hands of Roman troops. But if they could suggest that the Jews had forced Pilate’s hand …”
“Problem solved.”
Donati nodded. “And I’m afraid it gets worse in the later Gospels. Luke suggests it was the Jews rather than the Romans who nailed Jesus to the cross. John makes the accusation straight out. It is inconceivable to me that Jews would crucify one of their own. They might well have stoned Jesus for blasphemy. But the cross? Not a chance.”
“Then why was the passage included in the Christian canon?”
“It is important to remember that the Gospels were never intended to be factual records. They were theology, not history. They were evangelizing documents that laid the foundation of a new faith, a faith that by the end of the first century was in sharp conflict with the one from which it had sprung. Three centuries later, when the bishops of the early Church convened the Synod of Hippo, there were many different gospels and other texts circulating among the Christian communities of North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean. The bishops canonized only four, knowing full well they contained numerous discrepancies and inconsistencies. For example, all the canonical Gospels give a slightly different account of the three days leading up to Jesus’ execution.”
“Did the bishops also know they were planting the seeds for two thousand years of Jewish suffering?”