CHAPTER 15

“The role of a prefect in the province,” Tiberius once said, “is to shear his sheep, not skin them.” A governor could act with brutal force, if necessary, to keep the peace, but the goal was to be a good shepherd.

Nobody would have used that phrase to describe Pontius Pilate.

He didn’t even look the part. He was more Praetorian Guard than provincial governor. He was short and muscular, a committed disciple to exercising in his Caesarean bath complex before his evening meal. He was bald with an oval face, weathered skin, a furrowed forehead, small and close-set eyes, and a natural sneer. He preferred his gold breastplate and scarlet armor from his days as a guard to the long red robes of a magistrate.

Nor was his disposition well suited to the administrative drudgery of running a province. I learned early on that he could be stubborn, inflexible, and petty. He was Roman to the core and never understood, or even tried to understand, the Jewish culture. His sole goal was to serve his time and secure an advancement to a position in Rome. And nothing was more important in achieving that goal than currying favor with Caesar.

Ironically enough, it was this need for Caesar’s approval that allowed me to become one of Pilate’s closest confidants.

As the personal representative of the emperor, it was Pilate’s job to maintain a detailed record of everything that happened in his province. Every day Pilate was expected to add to his commentarii and send copies to the provincial archives in Rome along with excerpts to Tiberius at Capri. When I first arrived, Pilate’s private secretary wrote the commentarii in cursive script on parchment as Pilate dictated. To prepare for these formal reports, informal notes would be jotted down during the day by Pilate’s advisers on wax tablets.

Pilate would scan the reports and data, dictate summaries to his secretary, and then change the wording and start over. He wrote with little confidence and no flair. He was never really satisfied with the report destined for Tiberius, but he would eventually have it copied, seal both copies with his signet ring, and dispatch them with two duplicate couriers to Capri.

That entire process changed when Pilate discovered that I had a way with words. At first, I joined him as he dictated. I watched him pace the room with his hands behind his back, struggling to find the right phrase. I would suggest a certain wording. “Yes! Yes!” Pilate would exclaim. “That’s it precisely. Say that again, Theophilus.” He’d walk over to his secretary, peering over the man’s shoulder, making sure he got the words exactly right.

Before long, Pilate was merely suggesting the substance and I was dictating the entire letter. He would read it afterward and sometimes make changes, though I cringed when I read some of them.

From time to time, Tiberius would reply to one of the commentarii, probably just to demonstrate that he actually read them. When he did, he only seemed to have questions about the parts that Pilate drafted. The result was that Pilate began entrusting more and more of his writing responsibilities to me.

After about a year, Pilate insisted that I join him for his morning shave. It was a long and tedious process, and Pilate, being a morning person, didn’t want the time to go to waste. Every military man had heard the stories of how Julius Caesar read reports each morning as he shaved, taking advantage of every minute. Hence, it became expected of all magistrates to do the same.

Pilate and I would sit side by side while the barbers clipped my hair and shaved his head, then splashed cold water on our cheeks and the backs of our necks, dragging their razors across our skin. After each stroke, the barber would wipe the blade along a leather strop, and Pilate and I would talk about the challenges of the day, interrupted by an occasional curse when the barber slipped and drew blood.

Unfortunately, it was easier to write about the province than to govern it. And no matter how much I gilded the words and made the sentences dance, the fact of the matter was that things were bumpy in Palestine. Pilate seemed determined to rule Judea from Caesarea, the gleaming city by the sea. The city had been largely rebuilt by Herod the Great, a client king who had reigned in Judea for thirty years, prior to Pilate. Caesarea was magnificent in its architecture and diverse in its inhabitants. For Pilate, it was both comfortable and fitting for a man of his stature. He left only when absolutely necessary.

But staying hunkered down in Caesarea wasn’t Pilate’s only weakness. He made no effort to understand the Jewish people. For Pilate, they were eccentric and uncompromising, impossible to figure out. Judea was the one province where Rome had been unable to impose its religion and culture. Thus, instead of being forced to adopt the state-sanctioned religion of Rome, which combined the sacrifices to the traditional gods of the Roman pantheon with emperor worship, the inhabitants of Judea were allowed to continue in their Judaism. Accommodation was the order of the day. And Pilate could never understand why the Jewish leaders weren’t more grateful.

I knew this was one of Pilate’s blind spots, so I made it my mission to study the Jewish religion and to dialogue with their leaders. On more than one occasion, I listened to the great Jewish rabbi Gamaliel teach in the Temple courtyard. I befriended members of the Jewish Sanhedrin and became particularly close to the leaders with substantial wealth —men like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Still, the Jewish customs seemed bizarre, antiquated, and inflexible. In Rome, we used our religion for personal gain and favor, bending the rules as necessary to advance our individual agendas. But the Jews took the opposite view. These men would rather die than transgress the thousands of nuanced laws and customs required by their God.

During my first two years in the province, tensions simmered just beneath the surface. Pilate’s soldiers were itching for an excuse to attack. The Jews awaited a Messiah who would shatter the yoke of Roman domination. Pilate seethed and sulked, making his reports to Caesar, biding his time, keeping his body in shape, and planning the next set of games for the arena in Caesarea. For my part, I felt trapped in the middle, doing my best to apply Roman law without triggering Jewish sensibilities.

Though we managed to hold it together for two long years, I awoke each morning with a feeling in the pit of my stomach that before long, it would all unravel.

The first thread was pulled in the Roman Senate.