Tag Archives: 1 Timothy

Whatever Happened To Pontius Pilate?

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While indisputably a real person, we know only a little about Pontius Pilate, primarily from Philo, writing circa 41CE, and also Josephus (writing 75-79CE). Pilate was appointed as prefect, or governor, of Judea in 26CE and after ten years of insensitive and brutal control was, according to Philo, recalled to Rome in 36 ‘to stand trial for cruelty and oppression, particularly on the charge that he had executed men without proper trial.’ (On the Embassy to Gaius)

Described by Philo as having ‘an inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition’, Pilate was not the kind of man who would entertain in his private residence those marked out for crucifixion, nor one who would feel remorse at the execution of thieves, insurrectionists and general trouble makers. It is likely he had hundreds if not thousands of them crucified during his time as prefect.

Would a man known for ‘his venality, his violence, his thievery, his assaults, his abusive behaviour, his frequent executions of untried prisoners and his endless savage ferocity’ (Philo), have a prisoner over for a chat about the nuances of the meaning of Truth? Almost certainly not.

Would he have suffered mental anguish because he might be about to execute an innocent man? Absolutely not.

Would he have symbolically washed his hands to ease his conscience? He would not.

Would he have offered a rabble the chance to free Jesus or the bandit Barabbas? Again, absolutely not. There was no such ‘tradition’ and the episode is clearly symbolic.

If Jesus was crucified ‘under Pontius Pilate’, the Prefect himself would, in all probability, not have been aware of it. Jesus would have been one more seditionist among many. Nor would Pilate have granted a member of the Sanhedrin, unrelated to the crucified criminal, the right to remove his corpse from a cross to give it a decent burial in compliance with Jewish ritual. Pilate was known for his insensitivity to such niceties.

Jesus’ encounters with Pilate in the gospels are so entirely implausible they can only be fictional. The two would never have met. Even if they had, none of the gospel writers would have known the details of their exchanges, different in each gospel. In all of them, the cruel and savage Pilate behaves entirely out of character.

While no records survive of any trials conducted by any prefect of the area (because there were none in the first place?) it is perhaps surprising that details of Jesus’s trial were not preserved, when only a few days later, reports that he had returned from the dead began to circulate. Yet, say apologists, this is one of the few indisputable, ‘minimal’ facts we know about the historical Jesus: ‘he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.’ It’s there in both the Nicene creed (325CE) and the so-called Apostles’ creed (circa 341). Yet Paul, writing close to the time of Pilate’s supposed involvement, doesn’t mention him, ever. When he’s not blaming ‘the Jews’ for Jesus’ death (forgetting he is a Jew himself) Paul is insisting demonic powers are responsible:

Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age (‘Archons of this Aeon’), who are being destroyed. But we speak God’s wisdom, a hidden mystery, which God decreed before the ages for our glory and which none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Corinthians 2:6-8)

While Paul doesn’t refer to either Pilate or the Romans in his teaching about the crucifixion, he does refer to the latter in his letter to believers in Rome itself. in Romans 13 he tells them they must obey Roman authority because God himself has put it in place. What an incongruous, unreasonable directive if the Romans had indeed been responsible for the execution of the Messiah.

The only other mention of Pilate outside the gospels is in 1 Timothy, which was not written by Paul but forged long after Mark had written the Prefect into his gospel as the embodiment of Paul’s demonic powers. (Mark’s gospel is in fact awash with demons, not to mention Satan himself. It’s essentially an allegory of their defeat at the hands of the Messiah.) 1 Timothy 6:13 merely repeats a tradition developed from Mark’s gospel that Jesus made ‘a good confession’ in front of Pilate. 

The ‘fact’ that Pilate had Jesus executed is therefore poorly attested. Mark is the first to mention it, circa 70CE, and we know Matthew and Luke lifted their timelines and much of their detail from Mark. A growing number of scholars think John also relied on Mark for the general outline of his gospel. It is likely therefore there is only one source for Pilate’s involvement in Jesus’ death: Mark.

Outside the Bible, there is no evidence that Pilate was responsible. Josephus’s Testimonium Flavianum is widely accepted as an interpolation (i.e. later Christian tampering) and Tacitus’ mention of Pilate is far too late (c. 116CE) to be an independent source.* There is therefore no contemporaneous, independent, reliable evidence that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. That myth came later and then only from Mark.

Legend has it that Pilate either killed himself in 37CE on the orders of Caligula or retired and faded into obscurity. Whichever it was, would he, in his last days, have regretted his excessive cruelty? Would he have suffered remorse for executing an innocent man? Would he even have remembered? It all seems so unlikely.

*See chapter 3 of Michael Alter’s The Resurrection and Its Apologetics, 2024)

Homelander created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Image of Antony Starr from Amazon Prime’s The Boys.

After the Gospels

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None of the New Testament documents written prior to AD70 – those by Paul – contain any of the sayings, miracles or activities attributed to the Earthly Jesus in the later gospels. They don’t reflect anything of the oral tradition, first proposed in the 18th century. Those same gospels don’t reflect much of it either; the only ‘good news’ passed on by word of mouth was of a transcendent celestial Godman seen in visions. There is no evidence of any other. The later gospels incorporate the visions experienced by Cephas and others in their resurrection stories.

What then of the letters and books written after the appearance of the gospels? Do they reference, quote or base their teaching on the pre-crucifixion aspects of the Earthly Jesus of the gospels? Or do they, like Paul, concentrate solely on demonstrating the heavenly Jesus is the Messiah on the basis of what can be found in Jewish scriptures? You’d think that, with the gospels in circulation by then, that It’d be the former. But you’d be wrong.

Let’s make a quick survey of New Testament books post AD70. I’m taking their composition to be those listed here.

Hebrews (composed anywhere between 60 and 115 by unknown author[s])

Hebrews describes the Messiah as a heavenly high priest. Everything the writers ascribe to him is taken not from the gospels, nor an oral tradition on which the gospels are supposedly based, but from ancient Jewish writing; what we know as the Old Testament. Every single reference is from this source. Read the book for yourself and take note of the footnotes. Like gospel Jesus, Jesus the High Priest is constructed from snippets lifted from the Old Testament.

Revelation (composed anywhere between 70-110)

In Revelation, warrior Jesus has a lot to say, most of it quotations from the Old Testament. None of it is derived from the gospels nor the oral tradition on which the gospels are supposedly based. John’s ‘revelation’ is a fantasy constructed around ancient ‘prophecy’. Again, read the book for yourself and take note of the footnotes. Like gospel-Jesus, Jesus the Great Warrior is constructed from snippets lifted from the Old Testament.

1 Peter (70-100) and 2 Peter (125-150)

You’d think the letters purportedly written by the disciple Peter (or Cephas), the man who, according to the gospels spent three years with Jesus, would be full of his teaching, the mysteries he explained only to his closest followers, reports of his miracles or any of his other activities. But no. The best he can do across the two letters (written by two different people, decades apart, neither of them Peter the disciple) is this:

For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honour and glory from God the Father when the voice came to him from the Majestic Glory, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice that came from heaven when we were with him on the sacred mountain (2 Peter 1: 16).

Remarkably, this fake Peter recalls an event which never happened: when Jesus glowed like a lightbulb as two long-dead prophets beamed down from Heaven. It is, however, finally a reference to a gospel story. But then, doesn’t the author disparage ‘cleverly devised stories’ in this same passage? What else could he be referring to if not the gospels? We find a similar warning in 1 Timothy (and again in Titus 3: 9):

…command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work – which is by faith (1 Timothy 1: 4, written by a fraud pretending to be Paul).

These New Testament writers, even when they seem aware of gospel myths and their endless genealogies don’t approve of them. Perhaps that is why they prefer to ignore them, deriving proof of the Messiah from ancient Jewish scriptures instead. Every other reference to Jesus in the Peter epistles is from the Old Testament. How strange for someone pretending to know the man in the flesh.

We could go on to look at other books of the New Testament – for example, that written by ‘James’, supposedly Jesus’ brother – but this post is already too long. Rest assured if we did, we would see the same thing: none of the information about Jesus is derived from the gospels or the oral tradition on which the gospels are said by apologists to be based. There was no oral tradition, apart from stories of visions. The gospels are literary recreations – allegories – of those visions. They were not well received by the other writers of the New Testament who either ignore or disparage them. All that mattered to these early cultists were ‘revelations’ directly from the Lord and the Old Testament ‘prophecies’ that validated them.

Jettisoned

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It’s all very well discussing how the gospels came to be, but are they true and do Christians adhere to what Jesus purportedly tells them there? Let’s take a look at one of his instructions from Matthew 23.8-10:

But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. 

Context: Matthew’s cult community is moving away from synagogue worship and so supplies Jesus with words condemning Pharisaic practices. Instead, because the new cult at this point is egalitarian, they have him endorse its practice. One teacher: the heavenly Christ. One church: the brotherhood. One Father: God in heaven. One Instructor: the heavenly Christ again.

How quickly the church jettisoned this advice! By the time of Ephesians (written in the late 1st or early 2nd and certainly not by Paul who was long dead) the church is awash with ‘the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, (given by Christ) to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up (Ephesians 4.11-12)

A little later still, 1 Timothy – again, not written by Paul – speaks of hierarchical structures of overseers (‘bishops’), leaders, teachers and instructors (the two words have the same meaning), while later in the first century, and in direct contravention of Jesus’ admonition, the Roman church started calling its priests ‘father’. The Pope, – the term means Father or Papa – soon became the Father of all fathers.

Did the early church not really believe that Matthew 23.8-10 recorded the words of Jesus? (They’d be correct if so.) Or did they think that they didn’t matter; were, in fact, optional? (Parenthetically, what is it with gospel-Jesus habitually referring to saviour-figures in the third person? He does it here – ‘one instructor: the Messiah’ – and when he refers to ‘the Son of Man’. Why should we suppose he means himself when he does this? He’s not afraid to talk at length in the first person about himself in John’s gospel, but in the synoptics he’s apparently too timid to do so and feels compelled to use the third person and hide behind alter-egos. Unless of course fictional gospel-Jesus, or his script writers, regards ‘the Messiah’ and ‘the Son of Man’ as beings other than himself.) 

Then there’s the modern church, with its pastors (‘shepherds’), bishops (‘overseers’), teachers, instructors and priests (‘elders’). Does it too consider that gospel truths about brotherhood, no father but God and no teacher except the Christ, to be optional – insignificant even? Apparently so.

Which other words of Jesus do believers feel free to jettison? We’ll take an occasional look in the weeks ahead.