All right, time to nerd out with me over ancient history, legends, and people who may or may not have existed! Since I am delving into all of the above while writing The Claudia Chronicles, I thought it might be fun to talk about the “real” Claudia Procula, wife of Pontius Pilate.

I’m ready. Are you ready? Let’s do this!

We know nothing about her that can be verified.

History has no trace of her. There’s no evidence she ever existed, unlike Pilate. Her only mention is in the Gospel of Matthew, where she is simply called Pilate’s wife:

Matthew 27:19: While Pilate was sitting in the judgment seat, his wife sent him this message: “Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him.”

Did Claudia Procula Really Exist?

Nobody knows.

Some people take scripture literally; for them, her being in scripture means she existed.

For everyone else, we can theorize that since Roman governors usually had wives, Pilate had a wife. She was probably with him in Judea. But did she dream about Jesus and warn Pilate? Hard to say. Her inclusion in scripture could have been literal (this is what happened) or a trope (high-ranking wives being sympathetic to Jewish beliefs is common in early writings, including Josephus) or an attempt to make the book of Matthew appealing to Greek and Roman readers, and to women, by casting her and Pilate in a positive light.

Scholars disagree on when the book of Matthew was written; most date Matthew to after 70 AD, often around 80-90-AD. Some argue it came from eyewitnesses; others that it’s been pieced together from oral legends and lore.

Matthew includes a lot of things that are absent in other gospels, but the most relevant ones are Pilate declaring himself innocent of Jesus’s blood, his wife having a dream, the dead walking through the streets of Jerusalem, the Jewish leaders asking Pilate to secure Jesus’s tomb, and bribing the guards; it fleshes out a lot of the Roman aspects of the trial, crucifixion, and aftermath.

Did Pontius Pilate Take His Wife to Judea?

Probably, yes. We know Roman officials sometimes took their wives with them to provincial postings because Tacitus records a Senate debate about the practice in AD 21, only a few years before Pilate went to Judea.

Senator Severus Caecina argued that governors should be forbidden from taking their wives into the provinces, blaming women for interfering in politics and encouraging corruption. Other senators disagreed, and his proposal went nowhere.

So there was no rule preventing Pilate from bringing his wife to Judea when he became prefect around AD 26. That doesn’t prove she accompanied him, but it makes her presence there plausible.

When Did Pilate’s Wife Become “Claudia Procula”?

Pilate’s wife wasn’t called Procula for five centuries, and we don’t know where it came from. She did not receive a first name until the 1600s.

The Legends About Claudia Procula

In the 4th or 5th Century, the Greek author who wrote “The Gospel of Nicodemus” expounded her role in the story significantly. In this version of events, she is practicing the Jewish religion and is present at the crucifixion along with her husband. Both of them are saddened by it.

After that, Christian writers went wild with their ideas about who she was, what happened to her, and how she knew Jesus, in the grand tradition of storytellers.

In various Greek texts after this period…

Tiberius orders Pilate beheaded for executing Jesus. (Unlikely. Tiberius did not care about Jesus and was dead by the time Pilate left Judea.)

Claudia is baptized by Paul and becomes a saint.

Pilate is crucified for being a Christian and is miraculously rescued… then killed, and she dies that same day.

He is martyred, and she is delighted at having seen an angel carry her husband’s severed head up to heaven. (Okkay.)

Both of them are crucified twice, because once wasn’t enough. (Imagine being crucified, miraculously “saved” or “brought back to life,” only to be crucified again, cuz it didn’t stick last time.)

Sometimes, she has children healed by Jesus, and that’s how she knows him (either a boy named Pilo who is disabled, or two deaf and mute daughters).

By the ninth century, an old Saxon poem claimed that the dream about Jesus came from Satan, who feared Christ’s crucifixion would empty hell of all sinners. (Bummer.) Later playwrights play off this concept. Satan tells Procula that Jesus is innocent, and if her husband condemns him, she and Pilate will lose their lives of privilege. He listens, but the high priests convince him that Jesus sent her the dream by witchcraft. As one does.

I dig it. Christians have been writing Claudia & Pilate fanfic for 1,500 years!

Was Claudia Procula Related to Emperor Augustus?

In the middle ages, no doubt inspired by stories of Caesar Augustus’s scandalous daughter Julia, writers made Claudia a member of the Claudian dynasty as Julia’s illegitimate daughter. They made her the result of an affair and had her born in exile. Because all the best heroines are bastards!

Is Claudia Procula a Saint?

Interestingly, whether you were pro-or anti-Pilate in early Christian tradition varied by where you were from; the Middle Eastern Churches venerated him and his wife, while the western ones despised him. Pilate’s wife is venerated in three separate Eastern Orthodox Churches as a saint, one of whom also considers Pilate to be a saint.

How I Reimagined Claudia in The Dream Diviner

So, there’s what we know about the “real” Claudia Procula! Zip, zilch, nada. A woman who may or may not have existed, but who became legend in the lore of the early church. We have one unnamed woman, one mysterious dream, and a few lines in Matthew. Everything else was added over centuries as Christians, poets, playwrights, and storytellers tried to answer the same question: Who was Pilate’s wife?

And now, apparently, it’s my turn.

I love writing historical fiction. I love writing historical fiction in which nobody knows much about the real person even more, because I get to make stuff up. At length.

With great glee, I went off the best, most inspired fanfic ideas from the past. In my novel, she is indeed Julia’s illegitimate daughter, which allows her to spend time with some of Rome’s most infamous people (like Sejanus, who likes to kill people with his own two hands, and Tiberius, who just wants to eat grapes and lie in the sun. But we don’t all get what we want).

I also took the one fascinating thing scripture tells us about her (Claudia has prophetic dreams) and asked… what if this wasn’t the first one?

Where did they come from? That’s the question haunting her in the first book, The Dream Diviner. Why are these symbolic dreams spelling out the future? Who sent them to me? Where are they coming from? What do they mean? Can I interpret them faster?

This leads her to a Jewish man named Avram, who is in Rome as a “missionary” seeking Roman converts. But both of them get caught up in the midst of riots, assassination attempts, conspiracies, and the politics of the time.

Rather than beginning Claudia’s story where scripture remembers her (at Jesus’s trial), I wanted to start at the beginning. Who was she before Judea? How did she meet Pilate? When did her dreams begin? And how did these two Romans become the people we meet in the Gospel account?

The Dream Diviner begins that story in Rome… click here to learn more.

Related Posts:

Pontius Pilate in History and the Bible: Who Was the Real Man?

About the Author: Charity Bishop writes historical fiction, historical fantasy, and suspense novels that explores the darkness in human hearts, and the light that refuses to be extinguished. Discover her books.