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Veronica seems enchanted with the Jesus who comes to us most clearly in the Gospel of Luke—the Jesus who hangs around with poor folks and lepers and women. She had heard that Jesus "loved women, yet was no lover. Yet who was a lover. What sense did that make? It belonged to some fabulous state of innocence; could one get back?"

Veronica never fully grasps that "getting back" requires following Jesus. Instead of allowing him to save her, she tries to save him, slipping an opiate into his water so that he merely passes out on the Cross. (It is, of course, one of the oldest heresies in the book: Jesus never rose from the dead because he never died.)

James Mills, a California state senator turned novelist, is also interested in Mrs. Pilate. Despite his not giving her a name, Mills offers readers a Mrs. Pilate who is remarkably modern and who shares in a remarkably modern marriage: her husband consults her on important state matters, shares all his secrets with her, and seems at a loss after she dies. But the Pilates' anachronistically companionate marriage is just one of many problems with Memoirs of Pontius Pilate.

In this fictional rendering of the aged Roman prefect's recollections, Mills apparently tries to do what Marguerite Yourcenar accomplished with such panache in Memoirs of Hadrian:

Take a life that is known and completed, recorded and fixed by history (as much as lives ever can be fixed), so that its entire course may be seen at a single glance: more important still choose the moment when the man that lived that existence weighs and examines it, and is, for the briefest span, capable of judging it. Try to manage so that he stands before his own life in much the same position as we stand when we look at it.

But, on all counts, Mills fails. His prose is wooden, and Pilate sounds more like a man reading from an ancient history textbook than a man examining existence.

Central to all these books are questions of guilt and blame: who was really responsible for Jesus' death? Pilate? The Jews?

H. D. presents the most novel hypothesis: Pilate, under orders from his superiors and beholden to give "the people … their little sideshow," cannot simply stay the execution. But it is he who informs Veronica that there is still "one chance" to save Jesus; it is Pilate who instructs her to go to any of her mystical soothsayers and return with an opiate. Pilate is responsible for Jesus' death, but he is also responsible for trying to prevent it.

Mills's novel opens with musings about responsibility: who was guilty of starting the "great fire that destroyed Rome"? Maybe Christians. Or maybe it was the emperor himself, who then blamed the Christians. "Whether or not persons punished are responsible for the crimes of which they are accused is not the only factor to be taken into account sometimes," says Mills's Pilate. "That can be an uncomfortable truth, as it was for me in the case of the carpenter."

By the end of the book, Pilate doesn't quite kneel and pray the sinner's prayer, but his soul lurches toward Christianity. The last few paragraphs clinch the book's Christian message: "It is unlikely," Pilate muses, "that Christianity will survive, given the determination of Nero to obliterate it."

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December 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 14