Pontius Pilate
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3.9 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “Sublime . . . The definitive study of Pilate.”—The Washington Post Book World
“A masterwork . . . one of the most interesting and creative books I’ve read in a very long time.”—Ryan Holiday, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Obstacle Is the Way
“Compelling, eloquent and vivid . . . In a superb blend of scholarship and creativity, Wroe brings this elusive yet pivotal figure to life.”—The Boston Globe
One of Esquire’s Best Biographies of All Time • Finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize
The foil to Jesus, the defiant antihero of the Easter story, mocking, skeptical Pilate is a historical figure who haunts our imagination. For some he is a saint, for others the embodiment of human weakness, an archetypal politician willing to sacrifice one man for the sake of stability.
In this dazzlingly conceived biography, Ann Wroe brings man and myth to life. Working from classical sources, she reconstructs his origins and upbringing, his career in the military and life in Rome, his confrontation with Christ, and his long journey home. We catch glimpses of him pacing the marble floors in Caesarea, sharpening his stylus, getting dressed shortly before sunrise on the day that would seal his place in history. What were the pressures on Pilate that day? What did he really think of Jesus?
Pontius Pilate lets us see Christ's trial for the first time, in all its confusion, from the point of view of his executioner.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wroe takes current trends in the genre of biography one step further in this eloquent yet frustrating book, offering a reconstructed life of the Roman official who, by ordering the execution of Jesus of Nazareth but otherwise serving with little distinction, managed to become simultaneously famous and obscure. Outside the Gospels, which each bring the governor on stage for a brief if highly charged cameo appearance, there are only a few references to Pilate in contemporary sources. Where other biographers would see a historical desert, Wroe sees the tantalizing mirages that have sprung up over the centuries, from the fourth-century Acta Pilati to medieval mystery plays. She weaves these nonhistorical speculations together with well-researched accounts of first-century Roman lives, producing a shifting but suggestive portrait of an ultimately very human functionary. The writing is both precise and rich (as one might expect from the American editor of the Economist), and the insights into human character ring consistently true, but Wroe's bibliography is alarmingly scant when it comes to historical research on Jesus (who, after all, presents similar problems to biographers). And unlike Jaroslav Pelikan in his masterful Jesus Through the Centuries, Wroe often forfeits the opportunity to show how Pilate's reimagining served changing historical situations, juxtaposing quotes from mystery plays and letters from Cicero with deliberate abandon. "What did he look like? However men imagine him," Wroe writes. Readers who know the satisfactions of more conventional history will find such equivocations disappointing, but those who take Wroe's project on its own terms will find much to ponder.
