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If Nero succeeds, than it will be clear that "Jesus of Nazareth was a poor mad fellow who misled himself and others into a tragic error." But if the church flourishes, if as many people come to believe in Jesus as in Hercules, if more people pray to Jesus than to Aesculapius, then we can conclude that Jesus was who he said he was: God. Pilate, it seems, would have become a Christian, if only he had had a crystal ball.

Although Mills's Pilate was coerced by Jewish leaders who would not take no for an answer, Pilate is still plagued with anxiety about his role in Jesus' death; so much so that he spends his last days recording everything he can remember about his brief encounter with Jesus. "[E]very memory of mine that has to do with Jesus of Nazareth is still clear," he writes. "Each of those vivid recollections seems like a punishment visited on me by some god."

Did Pilate suffer?

Wroe shows that this question—whether God visited a punishment upon Pilate—intrigued church Fathers for centuries. Did Pilate live out his days peaceful and prosperous, or the victim of suffering at the hands of an angry God?

Origen and Celsus debated the question in 248—if Jesus was indeed God, Pilate should have suffered a miserable end. Celsus argued that since Pilate had not apparently suffered, Christ must not be God. But Origen said Celsus came to the wrong conclusion: Pilate was not the guilty party. The Jews were. And they had been suffering ever since. Pilate, said Origen, lived out his dotage peaceful and obscure. "Philo and Josephus," Wroe tells us, "endorsed the view," as did Anatole France, writing in 1892 of a Pilate happily exiled to Sicily, unable to even remember who Jesus was.

Some church Fathers, however, did not accept Origen's account. "It was not good enough to say, with Origen, that he was innocent," writes Wroe. "[E]very one knew it was the Romans, not the Jews, who had actually crucified Christ."

Juvenal and others pictured Pilate wracked by a guilty conscience, exiled to Tuscany, or, as a 14th-century Latin verse has it, imprisoned for 12 years in a well in Lausanne.

Of course we should be keen to affirm, contra Origen, that it was the Romans and not the Jews who sentenced Christ to hang. But in affirming just that, we should not lose sight of the deeper truth: it was our sin, finally, that sentenced him to die. Pilate was responsible, to be sure. But so are we.

Pontius Pilate and Memoirs of Pontius Pilate: A Novel are available at the ChristianityToday.com bookstore and other book retailers. Pilate's Wife is available at Amazon.com and other book retailers.

See earlier Christianity Today articles about Pilate and Jesus' trial, including " Who Killed Jesus? " and " Jesus v. Sanhedrin ." See also U.S. News's April 24 cover story, " Why Did He Die? "

See more on Pilate from Britannica.com , The Ecole Initiative , The Catholic Encyclopedia , and K.C. Hanson .

Random House has an excerpt from Wroe's Pontius Pilate.

Baker Book House has an excerpt from Mills's Memoirs of Pontius Pilate.

There's a site devoted to the works of H.D. , or Hilda Doolittle, but there's little on Pilate's Wife.

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December 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 14