Pontius Pilate

Rating:
Summary: Kenneth Clark treatment of Pilate
Review: Author Ann Wroe does not pretend to try to patch together a pseudo-biography of Pontius Pilate out of the scraps of available authoritative historical information. Instead, she weaves together a fascinating cultural and literary synthesis of this legendary character. If you are expecting a conventional biography, you will be disappointed. But if you enjoy the vision that Kenneth Clark and Joseph Campbell bring to the worlds of art and mythology, you will appreciate the way this book reveals many fascinating portraits of the elusive Pontius Pilate.

Rating:
Summary: Kenneth Clark treatment of Pilate
Review: Author Ann Wroe does not pretend to try to patch together a pseudo-biography of Pontius Pilate out of the scraps of available authoritative historical information. Instead, she weaves together a fascinating cultural and literary synthesis of this legendary character. If you are expecting a conventional biography, you will be disappointed. But if you enjoy the vision that Kenneth Clark and Joseph Campbell bring to the worlds of art and mythology, you will appreciate the way this book reveals many fascinating portraits of the elusive Pontius Pilate.

Rating:
Summary: Pontius Pilate: The Biography of an invented man by ann wroe
Review: Excellent book covering views and folklore and historical data available on Pontius Pilate. Gives a great insight on the times, and culture during the time of Jesus. Best book on the subject of Pilate.

Rating:
Summary: Invented Biography
Review: Let's be honest. None of us really knows anything about Pontius Pilate, the antihero of the Passion. Even Wroe admits that much. Despite that, she attempts to write what starts out as a very promising biography. Of course, there are a couple of problems with her work. First, while she starts out using the experiences of other Roman procurators and governors, her work ends up being a survey of every major medieval play about the Passion there is. Second, she consistently derides the Gospel accounts (some of her only actual period references)and any period work that mentions him, with the exception of Josephus. Granted, other authors may have had an agenda in their writing, but that does not lessen their authenticity or value. Third, her interpretations of Pilate's actions are, at best, a stretch. I won't go into more detail on that one. Fourth, the majority of the last half of the book is written like a play, making it less a scholarly work and more a work of fiction. Fifth, her scholarships resounds with gross generalizations. If she had submitted even part of this to any professor in my department, especially our NT prof., she would have received a more or less instant F, for her lack of scholarship and for my sixth compliant, which is she uses not one single footnote, parenthetical reference, or allusion to a single scholarly work. She won't even cite the biblical passages or those of Josephus (both of which are big no-nos). That leads me to believe she does not intend her work to be scholarly (in which case it should stop being promoted as such), she plagiarized everything, or she just doesn't care. By this point, some may be wondering why I didn't give her one star. It's because the initial chapters are rich with USEFUL information, but are totally overshadowed by later musings. In short, instead of being under religious studies, it should be under theatre for all the attention it gives to the Acta Piliti.

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable historic science-fiction
Review: Ms. Wroe has done an excellent job in bringing the reign of Pontius Pilate to life. He is a reluctant governor who dislikes the people he is forced to govern while under orders of an irascible emperor. Every minor misstep may lead to recall and worse. He neither understands nor wants to understand the people he is supposed to be responsible for and who in turn don't want to be governed by Rome.
The author paints her subject in life-like colors and shows us how the character of Pilate - his vacillations and shirking of responsibility - are still to be found in every day life. She has done her homework and the book contains numerous nuggets of genuine information about Roman life which are a joy to read about even when one does not accept the theology. Ms. Wroe is careful to distance herself from the fantastic Christian apologias which have been woven about Pilate. She reports them because they are part of the lore but does not credit them. Christians will find their belief in Jesus sustained. For Jews the topic is more controversial since they are unable to subscribe to the idea that Jesus could have been the promised Messiah. Nevertheless even Jews may find the historical aspects of the Roman milieu in the first century of interest.

Rating:
Summary: Ann Wroe brings History to Life
Review: Not long after Noah's Flood, when I was attending a boys' boarding school in Western Canada, it was still fashionable to teach history by rote as a series of names, dates and events. I still have the cadence of "William the first, William the second, Henry the first and Steeeeeven" permanently burned into my memory banks. It is little wonder that history was one of the subjects that I managed to fail so miserably that once I managed to score a minus ten on a test paper (I accidentally spelled my name wrong).

Real history is about people and how they interact, and the events they are involved in. It is fascinating when you can climb inside the mind of historical protagonists and examine how and why they did what they did. Over time, society elects to paint some folks as good guys, and some folks as bad guys, and society as a whole tends to accept those characterizations, and move on.

Some bad guys are in the big leagues. These might include Attilla the Hun, Ivan the Terrible, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and, of course, Pontius Pilate. Add in Al Capone, Ted Bundy and, perhaps most recently Scott Peterson, and you hold a handful of identities that folks will agree are "bad". What folks will usually overlook is the fact that these individuals are also "people", and a careful examination of their lives and motivations will often reveal a far more complex set of motivations than the simplistic ones that have distilled with the passing of time over their histories.

Pontius Pilate is, to Christans st least, in the biggest of the big leagues. Tiny children learn his name as the guy who condemned Jesus to death. Members of some Christian denominations recite the creed weekly that includes his name in terms of "..suffered under Pontius Pilate..", and all Christians know his name is in the New Testament. Actually it only appears in 8 verses of Matthew, 10 of Mark, 12 of Luke, 19 of John, and 3 of Acts. Not a lot of press for trying to find out a lot about the man.

Ann Wroe has not let this stop her. As a true historian, she has examined the time in which he lived, the type of person he would have been, his ancestry, his probably training for the job, his probable daily routine. Then she adds in certain known historical events in his ten year term of service, including the notorious carrying of the Roman Standards into the Temple courtyard on his first arrival, and his ultimate capitulation rather than slaughter all the Jews who objected to the graven images which they considered them to be in that most holy place.

Ms. Wroe builds daily life, the process of dealing with the interaction with the Sanhedrin, Annas and Caiaphas, and Jesus himself (and later even with Cornelius at Caesarea). She describes the hazards of communicating with Tiberius, the Emperor, who by that stage was in declining health -- both physical and mental. You feel drawn into every moment of the lifestyle of the time -- you become a part of living in the history.

When it comes to the trial, instead of the few verses of the New Testament that we have had to live with for a lifetime, she offers an examination of every aspect of the process of the trial. Ms. Wroe considers the location, who would be present, how the trial would be conducted, when Pilate and Jesus might have adjourned to an antechamber, and then returned, who would probably have accompanied them during the adjournment, the position of Pilate's wife in the process.

In addition she includes extended quotations from several passion plays from various time periods, starting from as early as the 4th century, through the 19th century, showing how different societies have interpreted possible reactions that Pilate (and others) may have had to the events.

It is important to understand that this is not a religious text. It is a historical text, and as such it is eminently readable. It actually reads almost like a novel, where you have read other novels involving some of the main characters before, and are eager to read another adventure with them, or an expanded text of a short story you read once. I heartlily recommend this to any reader of any age.

Rating:
Summary: A Figurative Biography Only.
Review: Since there is bound to be a surge of interest about Pilate
in the wake of the Gibson film, I thought it might be helpful
to post this cautionary note to the curious.

Be advised that there is scant factual information about the
real, historical Pontius Pilate available anywhere.
Therefore, Ann Wroe's biography is, as her title indirectly reveals -
and which she thoroughly admits to within -
an invention; though all credit to her, a superbly researched invention.

This is a virtual biography of someone who has become a cultural icon.
There is considerable scholarship and erudition on display in this portrait,
but so much speculation and reliance
on the fictionalization of its subject that it is guaranteed
to frustrate anyone who hopes to discover the real person
buried within.

Pontius Pilate is lost in time and all we have left is our
cultural phantasms of him. Ann Wroe finds these projections
interesting, but you may not. If you enjoy cultural history,
then by all means appreciate Ann Wroe's considerable research.
If you prefer a more factual representation, this book is not for
you.

Fashionable rationalizations concerning the impossibility
of accurately reconstructing historical events or a person's
life actually work to this author's advantage in this case.
Otherwise, I think such arguments are sophistry at its worst.

Rating:
Summary: It's A Struggle.
Review: Some of it is brilliant and some of it is mind-numbing. I understand the author's premise of using the environment to define and reveal someone we know little about, but the effort is unfocused, irregular, and haphazard at times. It's not a pleasure to read, it's more like homework.

Rating:
Summary: ideas and fictional interpretations
Review: This book is an odd egg: on one hand, an exhaustive litany that reviews the cultural IDEA of the man through time, and on the other hand, Wroe's own fictional interpretation of Pilate. Readers looking for factual historic perspectives will be disappointed; whereas those interested in the intellectual interpretation of an important historical figure will be impressed. With the mindset of the latter, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Also, on a personal note, I used it as a reference to the Prologue "Aponiptein, Dikaion Touton" (meaning "to wash of from" and "this just person" in latin) in my recently published book Deep Immersion: The Experience of Water (i.e. the Passion told from the perspective of the element water).

Rating:
Summary: Good Book
Review: This book is VERY well written. I loved the style of it. However, I wish it had not contained EVERY myth and legend about the man. I can appreciated the writer's dedication, however it was just too much. I did enjoy it quite a bit!