Was Pontius Pilate, governor and chief justice of Judea during the trial and execution of Jesus Christ, so vile a man that, upon his own execution, neither the rivers nor the earth would accept his corpse, and wicked spirits tore at his flesh and tossed pieces of it into the air? Or was Pilate merely a weak and ineffectual bureaucrat, bowing to the crowd’s demands? According to Kateryna Rudnytzky, both Pilates made history, with considerable dramatic effect.

One of 16 doctoral students who received a Dissertation Fellowship from the UNC-CH Graduate School for Spring, 1995, Rudnytzky has studied how the portraits of Pontius Pilate have changed in response to societal values and literary concerns.Beginning with first century writings about Pilate, she follows Pilate through to the 15th century Corpus Christi Cycle Plays of medieval England, in which guilds and craftsmen of English towns annually re-enacted Biblical history.

Rudnytzky read texts written in Latin, Greek, German, French and Old and Middle English during her research. She studied theological, historical, anthropological, and dramatic portrayals of Pilate.She explains that Pilate is both villain and sympathetic being: “In condemning Christ, Pilate played a major role in God’s plan of salvation, but he condemned an innocent man to death. I was attracted to this topic because of the paradoxical nature of Pilate’s position.”

The earliest mention of Pilate is in the Gospels, which give only brief and conflicting accounts. According to John, Pilate knows that Christ is innocent, but when he sees that he cannot sway the gathered crowd, he capitulates to their wishes-the act of a weak bureaucrat. Pilate has Christ scourged, delivers Him for crucifixion, and, mocking Christ’s divinity, posts an inscription over the cross declaring Christ “King of the Jews.”

“Against this background of contrasts, emerge more elaborate characterizations of Pilate, including some that are quite sympathetic,” Rudnytzky says. The apocryphal works, the early Christian writings rejected as major canon of the New Testament, contain many stories about Pilate. In one account, the Gospel of Nicodemus, Pilate is repentant, and God’s response assures him of salvation. God says, “All generations and the families of the nations shall count thee blessed, because under thee have been fulfilled all those things said about me by the prophets; and thou thyself shalt be seen as my witness at my second appearing.”

By the fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and Pilate, as the judge who condemned Christ to death, is often portrayed as an unrepentant villain. Through the tenth century, stories of Pilate’s criminal life and miserable death are abundant. The Stanziac Life of Christ and its presumed source, The Death of Pilate, show Pilate’s ignominious beginnings as the bastard son of King Atus and a miller’s daughter, Pila. In this story, Pilate kills his legitimate half-brother when they are both still children. His father, not wanting to execute his own son, sends Pilate to Rome where Pilate rises to power through murder and treachery.

In the 13th century book The Golden Legends, Jacobus Wyerenga collected many of the stories about Pilate from earlier centuries, including a legend in which Pilate is arrested for killing Christ. Each time Pilate is brought before the emperor for sentencing, he wraps himself in the seamless, holy garment he has stolen from Christ, and its protective powers save him. Eventually, Pilate’s trickery is discovered, and he is condemned to death. He commits suicide, but even in death his evilness remains-when his body is thrown into the Tiber River, the river spits him out. His executioners tie rocks to his body and throw him into the Rhone River, but it, too, spits him out-in torn pieces-while terrible storms rage and the “malignant and filthy spirits in his malignant and filthy body” writhe about, making the water turbulent. Pilate’s body was ultimately buried in the hills of Lausanne in Austria where, according to Roman belief, the gates to Hell existed.

The stories gain depth and complexity in English drama during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly the Corpus Christi Cycle Plays that were presented during the summer feast of Corpus Christi. The plays ranged from the story of the creation, episodes from Genesis and Exodus, through the passion sequence.

“Many of the legends about Pilate from the earlier centuries are now brought to life,” Rudnytzky says, “and full characterizations, dialogue and details that reflect the concerns of medieval England are added to the stories.

“Up until the 14th century, we’ve been talking about Pilate in texts, but when you see him on stage, you have a different concern,” Rudnytzky says. “How are you going to make this character interesting to the audience? What are you going to do to make him easy to relate to?”

One solution was to link Pilate in his role of judge of indigenous people to medieval England’s itinerant judges who moved from town to town hearing cases. “In the 13th and 14 centuries, the English judicial system was well intentioned, but didn’t always function fairly,” Rudnytzky says. Portraying Pilate as a corrupt and evil judge gave relevance to the plays.

The Corpus Christi Pilates range in villainy. In one he is represented as a weak, vacillating individual who has to be pushed to his decision by the Jews. In another he leaps on the stage, drunk and lascivious, declaring his intention to crucify Christ from the outset. In another, Pilate is portrayed as a man with a taste for fleshly pleasures whose actions exude pride, lechery, gluttony and sloth.

“Generally, as the debate shifts from early religious writings to more secular literature, writers become more definitive as to the extent of Pilate’s guilt,” Rudnytzky says. “And, as successive authors re-interpret Pilate, they communicate something about their own concerns.”

Rudnytzky, a Catholic, has come away from her research with sympathy for Pilate. “In Pilate, we can see our own potential failure to recognize truth and act accordingly. Pilate’s terrible position provokes introspection and spiritual self-examination.”