The Pilate Stone: The Prefect in Stone

In June 1961 an Italian team led by Antonio Frova was excavating the Roman theatre at Caesarea Maritima, the port city Herod the Great had built on the coast of Judaea. The archaeologist Maria Teresa Fortuna Canivet turned over a limestone block that had been used as a step in a later rebuilding of the theatre. Its underside carried four broken lines of Latin, and in the second line was a name known from every Christian creed: PILATVS.

The inscription

• A limestone block about 82 × 65 cm, cut down when it was reused, so that the left side of every line is missing.
• The surviving text, with standard restorations in brackets:

[ . . . ]S TIBERIEVM
[ . . . PO]NTIVS PILATVS
[ . . . PRAEF]ECTVS IVDA[EA]E
[ . . . FE]CIT D[E . . . ]

• It records that Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judaea, built or dedicated a Tiberieum, a structure named in honour of the emperor Tiberius.
• Pilate governed Judaea from 26 to 36 CE, so the stone dates from those years. The original is in the Israel Museum; a replica stands at Caesarea.

Prefect, not procurator

The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 116, calls Pilate a procurator. So does most later tradition. The stone shows that in his own time Pilate's title was praefectus, a military rank. The governors of Judaea became procurators under Claudius, after Pilate's day. Tacitus used the title of his own time. The Gospels simply call him "governor" (Greek hēgemōn).

What was the Tiberieum?

The first line is the most uncertain. Proposals include:

• a temple for the cult of the emperor, which Pilate, as a loyal official, would promote;
• the epigrapher Géza Alföldy's restoration [Nautis] Tiberieum, "a Tiberieum for sailors": a lighthouse or harbour structure at Caesarea's port.

Neither restoration can be proven from the surviving letters.

Pilate beyond the stone

Pilate appears in the four Gospels, in Josephus and Philo, who describe him as provocative and harsh, and in Tacitus, who notes that Christ "suffered the extreme penalty" under him. The stone adds no new events. What it gives is independent, contemporary confirmation of his office and name. A copper ring found at Herodium, inscribed "of Pilatus" and read with new imaging in 2018, may also be connected with him, although Pilatus was not a unique name.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Honouring the emperor. Naming a building after Tiberius was a political and religious act. In the Roman world, loyalty to the emperor was expressed through cult. In Judaea this collided with Jewish law against images, and Josephus and Philo record Pilate provoking protests by bringing military standards and gilded shields into Jerusalem.

Reuse as erasure. Cutting a governor's dedication down to serve as a stair shows how quickly monuments to officials lost their meaning. It also shows that the stone survived only by accident.

Connections

Rome (ch13), Early Christianity (ch16) and Second Temple Judaism (ch10). Compare the James Ossuary (V16) for inscriptions naming New Testament figures and how they are tested, and the True Cross (V15).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/pilate-stone.html