Pilate: the biography of an invented man By Ann Wroe Jonathan Cape 381pp, £17.99 in UK
Ann Wroe is the American editor of The Economist. That explains the style, the wit, the short sentences in a fat book. But the topic? She is an historian too, but the only hard evidence left to the biographer of Pilate is an inscribed stone and a few coins, a couple of paragraphs from Philo of Alexandria and a sentence from Tacitus.
That, and the gospels: and the other myths of Christians through the centuries who need to tell their own story by inventing the man who killed Jesus. This is as much a work of sociology as history. It owes its fascination to Wroe's talent for political analysis and analogy more than dry scholarship in search of the real Pilate. An unimportant bureaucrat who made the Resurrection possible is resurrected himself. If Wroe manages to roll back the tombstone on Pilate's life, however, it is not to reveal the man himself. It is to uncover the perennial human needs, and to expose the politics through which we know him.
The origins of the Pilate of history are lost, as befits the banality of his person and life. He was a peasant from Rome who ingratiated himself into the governorship of Judea; or he hailed from Tarragona, smelling of fish and garlic, or from the Rheinland stinking of beer and resin, as different legends have it. Each narrative had its cultural agenda. If Ann Wroe had unearthed a Pontius Pilate from Paris, or a Proinsias Pila from Dublin, they would doubtless have smelled as sweet.
The days leading to the Crucifixion are plotted from the hints and biases of every source she can find, all interlaced in the frame of God's predestining and Pilate's dumb obedience. His role was to be the winter to Christ's spring. He could struggle, of course. He was free to do that. But the result of his struggling was already known; however he wriggled, he would end up as God's agent . . . to be merciful and soft, in his case, would do nothing to advance the transformation of the world. Pilate's awful decision was plotted in heaven long before he had the delusion of escaping it.
But one important actor in the story thought differently. In a vivid account of the trial and Crucifixion, Wroe discusses the dream of Pilate's wife, Procula. Medieval writers were convinced that she dreamed of Satan coming to her in sleep to get her to ensure that Jesus was not crucified. "No, don't wake, dear . . . I won't ravish you . . . or at least only through your ear . . . I won't deflower you of anything but your peace of mind." Having put the mockers on Eve's future in the garden, the devil, it seems, tried to use Pilate's wife to screw up the plan of salvation.
Who is Pilate for us today? Throughout the book Wroe flits unexpectedly from teasing out the threads of history and legend to making the modern political comparison. Neville Chamberlain fits her bill in 1938, as does Lord Reading of India in relation to Gandhi. Tony Blair's views are quoted: Pilate, he says, "commands our moral attention not because he was a bad man, but because he was so nearly a good man . . . It is possible to view Pilate as the archetypal politician, caught on the horns of an age-old political dilemma." A bit like New Labour, one is left to presume, though Wroe coyly avoids drawing any such conclusion.
But it is that image of Pilate as the great equivocator which she leaves us to take away from her work, repulsed and fascinated like people down through the ages. "Like an audience at a show, they love to watch him teeter, struggle, almost save himself, and fall. In some sense, they feel they are watching themselves." Nothing is known of what became of the great equivocator after his star role in the Crucifixion. In the end, Wroe concludes, Pilate is the figure of the human condition. But she writes more elegantly than that: "He stayed as he was. As most of us do."
Pilate emerges from Wroe's book rather more tarnished than her own evidence demands. He was also the great compromiser, a word more sullied in political discourse than "equivocator". He was just a man forced to decide on a routine problem when duty pulled in opposite directions. We all do it, only politicians have to do it in the glare of the media. Had Pilate been there instead of Spanish monarchs and medieval popes, there might have been no crusades or inquisition. Just think: without the Pilates of Anglo-Irish politics we might never have had the Good Friday Agreement. Pilate condemned Jesus and then he went to lunch. Greater men than he have done a lot worse, but they were not so unlucky as to have had the four evangelists taking notes.
Bill McSweeney teaches at the Irish School of Ecumenics