The Pilate Who Made Me Curious by Charity Bishop

Pontius Pilate has appeared in dozens of movies and television shows about Jesus, from Basil Rathbone in The Last Days of Pompeii and Frank Thring in Ben-Hur to Hristo Shopov in The Passion of the Christ. Some portray him as a brutal Roman tyrant, others as a cynical politician, reluctant executioner, or man haunted by sending an innocent man to his death. Of all these portrayals of Pontius Pilate, one made me curious enough about the man (and his mysterious wife, Claudia) to eventually write their story.

I can still remember sitting down in the theater to see The Passion of the Christ. Everything about it captivated me. Here was cinematic art as its peak, using Catholic symbolism and imagery to tell a story visually. A brutal, unflinching, hard-to-watch depiction of the final twelve hours of Jesus’s life. And yet, there’s something everyone clings to or takes away from it. For some, that was the Stations of the Cross. For others, the moment Mary cradles His body in her arms, invoking Michelangelo’s Pietà. Or maybe Jesus crushing the head of the viper beneath His heel in the Garden of Gethsemane.

For me… it was Pontius Pilate.

You see, this was the first time I ever saw him depicted as anything other than a ruthless tyrant. I had seen him in plenty of other films about Jesus, but never with such a sympathetic depiction. All of his scenes haunted me. His moments with his wife stirred me. I wanted them to be longer.

All at once, a deep question rose within me:

What prompted him to crucify an innocent man? What kind of man makes that choice? And what would it be like to live with the aftermath?

Being a storyteller, I had to find out. I watched every movie I could find about Pilate. I read books. I scoured the early internet. And eventually, I wrote a novel. It was simply called Claudia, and it was far too ambitious for the writer I was then. But it had meat on its bones. Ten years later, I rewrote it. And now I’m back at it, structuring it into a book series.

But we’ll get to my Pilate later.

First, let’s look at what Hollywood has done with him.

Basil Rathbone’s Pilate in The Last Days of Pompeii (1935)

One of my favorite depictions of Pilate is in the old movie Pompeii. It’s pretty bad overall, and the timeline is certainly messed up (Pompeii got buried in ash in 79 AD, so Pilate was probably not still alive by then). But I like it, because it’s the first “take” at a morally ambiguous Pilate.

The story is about a man named Marcus who is told by a fortune teller that he will encounter the “greatest man in Judea,” whom he assumes is Pilate. When Marcus approaches Pilate for permission to cross the Jordan to buy horses, Pilate realizes he can use Marcus. King Herod has been covertly encouraging an Ammonite chief to raid Roman territory, so Pilate proposes some unofficial retaliation: Marcus and his men will raid the Ammonites, steal their horses and treasure, and split the proceeds with him. Pilate gets revenge with plausible deniability, and Marcus gets rich.

Marcus goes along with this, but his adopted son Flavius is injured after being thrown from a horse. He takes him to a local healer (Jesus), who saves his life. When he returns to Jerusalem to settle up with Pilate, he finds out Pilate has just sentenced Jesus to death. This event has shaken Pilate. He did not like to condemn a man in whom he found no fault. Disgusted with the violence, hatred, and irrationality around him, he tells Marcus to put his faith in gold instead of in humanity.

Many years later, Marcus is running a gladiator arena in Pompeii when Pilate pays him a visit. Falvius, now a young man, vaguely remembers being healed by Jesus in Jerusalem, and find out Pilate is still haunted by Jesus’ death. Flavius has internalized Jesus’ messages about loving one another, and Pilate retorts that those are indeed beautiful dreams, but they are incompatible with the real world.

In Rathbone’s Pilate, we see that Jesus affected him profoundly, but did not convert him to a different way of thinking. It’s well-written in the sense that in only two or three scenes you know what kind of a man Pilate is: someone who will authorize murder and theft to get back at an enemy, but is shaken by putting the Messiah to death.

Frank Thring in Ben Hur (1959)

Next comes one of the better-known but ambiguous depictions of Pilate, in the original classic Ben-Hur. Where Rathbone’s Pilate was not specifically a diplomat or a soldier, this one is a diplomat and a realist. We meet him early in Rome, when he isn’t thrilled about being sent to govern Judea, because he wanted Alexandria.

This Pilate is jaded and cynical, but also brutally aware of reality; he knows that Rome is fickle and built up of a “mob.” When Judah wins the chariot race, Pilate tells him that he has become the people’s “one true god… for the time being.”

Judah struggles to accept his victory and to appreciate becoming a Roman, when Rome destroyed his family. (Years earlier, he was sent to work as a slave and his mother and sister thrown in a dungeon, where they contracted leprosy.) Pilate initially, and diplomatically, tries to separate Judah’s concept of Rome from his hatred of his ex-friend, Messala. He says mistakes were made, and that Messala is to blame, but he is now dead, so Judah should move on. Judah argues that Rome made Messala into what he became, and it destroyed them all.

Pilate basically tells him to grow up, that this is how the world works, that power, great governments, and great men are capable of great errors. One of his better lines is, “A grown man knows the world he lives in, and for the present, that world is Rome.” He makes no moral assessment on whether Rome is good or evil; it simply exists, and it is reality, and if you reject it, you will become an enemy of Rome.

Rathbone’s Pilate knows that Rome can be ugly, but Thring’s Pilate thinks accepting that ugliness is simply part of being an adult.

From here on, Pilate got a bunch of different motivations: Arthur Kennedy’s Pilate in Barabbas (1961) is the weary administrator, irritated by the Jesus problem and eager to escape a dangerous political situation. Rod Steiger in Jesus of Nazareth (1977) is the intelligent skeptic who realizes Jesus is no revolutionary but isn’t willing to risk himself to save Him. Barry Dennen in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) is nervous, sardonic, and increasingly unnerved by Jesus. David Bowie’s wonderfully understated Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) is the detached intellectual: Jesus interests him, but Rome is going to kill Him anyway.

Hristo Shopov in The Passion of The Christ (2004)

As mentioned at the start of this article, this is the first place where Pilate “got to me,” because it takes the time to show us his relationship with his wife, and his attempts to understand what truth actually is, and what it means for him in context of being a Roman governor.

Most of the other films leave out Pilate’s wife altogether; here, we see her as a major influence in his life. She has a dream, she warns him not to deal badly with Jesus, she cautions him about listening to the mob. He listens to her, even if he cannot obey her warning. In only a few scenes, we get the sense of a deep and meaningful marriage, of a man caught up in a bad situation, and of a woman devastated by what her husband is forced to do. You don’t know if they will survive this, as a couple.

To me, that stood out more than the violence or the scourging. I sat there thinking, “Who are these people and how come we don’t get to spend more time with them?” This Pilate comes across as a weary Roman official sent to govern an unstable province, who is pressured by the mob to go against his wife’s counsel and his own conscience, and get rid of a rising “problem.” He doesn’t want to do it. He is burdened by it. His reactions to Jesus are increasingly sympathetic. Jesus clearly has an effect on him. Pilate wants Jesus to speak up for himself, to say, “None of the allegations against me are true,” to give him a political reason to release him. He wants the crowd to choose Jesus instead of Barabbas. Seeing Jesus returned to him bloody and beaten gets a visible reaction out of him. Pilate has seen scourged men before, but it seems like this is the first time where he has thought, “was that necessary?”

It left me thinking, “This man is between a rock and a hard place…”

And it made me want to know more… about him, and Claudia, and their marriage, and how he came to be in Judea, and why he would allow something so unjust to happen on his watch.

Other Cinematic & Small Screen Pilates

Later depictions ranged from sympathetic to bored to a brutal tyrant, to young and stupid. The Bible miniseries heavily leaned into the “violent tyrant” angle, which morphed into Vincent Regan’s Pilate in the follow-up scripted series, A.D. The Bible Continues (2015). There, he is even worse. In Risen (2016), Pilate is an exhausted administrator who just wants the Jesus problem to go away, and commissions a soldier to find the missing body and put an end to the rumors of Resurrection. The Pilate in the remake of Ben Hur (2016) is an evil Roman military man. And he has a beard, which is ridiculous.

Hristo Shopov reprised his role as Pontius Pilate in The Final Inquiry (2006), in which a Roman investigator begins asking questions about what happened to Jesus and his body. This Pilate has to live with his decision and the aftermath, and is a haunted man looking backward at a choice that defined him.

And then there’s Pilate in The Chosen, which I’ll save for a future post, because I have a Whole Lot of Thoughts about Nepo Baby Pilate.

So, What About My Pilate?

Almost all of these stories meet Pilate at the end of his journey. He is already the governor of Judea. He’s already cynical, brutal, weary, politically trapped, or some combination of the above. Pilate is already able to compromise his morality when political necessity demands it. Almost none of them have his wife around, and other than in The Passion, she is sometimes his emotional or literal punching bag.

I became interested in a different question.

What kind of journey would a man have to take to become Pontius Pilate? And what kind of a woman would fall in love with that man? How does an ambitious, intelligent young man learn to make compromises until one day that compromise becomes Jesus?

Who was he before Judea? Before Caiaphas? Before Jesus stood in front of him? Before he became someone who could look at an innocent prisoner, know what was right, and choose political expediency anyway? And who was he, apart from all of that, as a man, as a lover, as a husband, as a prospective father, as a diplomat?

Furthermore, what about his wife? Why had she chosen to go with him to Judea instead of staying in Rome? Who was she? Where did she come from? Were her dreams something that happened all the time? Why would he take them seriously?

What story brought them together and took them to Judea?

Their back stories have changed several times, but their core selves always remained the same. My Pilate is not just Pontius Pilate. He has a first name: Lucius. He loves horses, he is politically ambitious. He is not yet jaded, but is already politically shrewd. He is not yet a haunted realist, or a cynical defender of Roman power, but he is a skeptic. He is intelligent, strategic, and utterly convinced that if he can think far enough ahead, he can control his own future. And then he meets Claudia, and everything changes.

I started writing about him because I wanted to understand the man who “washed his hands” of Jesus. Eventually, I realized that to understand what took him to that moment, I had to discover what kind of a man he was before his hands needed washing.