Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Pontius Pilate: Deciphering a Memory

Pontius Pilate: Deciphering a Memory / Aldo Schiavone, translated by Jeremy Carden, 238 pp.

Schiavone is a classicist, and this is an especially erudite linguistic and historical analysis of the encounter between Pilate and Christ in the four Gospels, along with Pilate's interactions with the people of Judaea as these events are recorded by Josephus and others.

"Especially erudite" is code for "this reader didn't understand everything she read;" still, there was a lot for me to enjoy as I slowly worked my way through the text.  I was especially interested in what Schiavone had to say about the Q and A between the prefect and his prisoner and how their conversational nuances lay down important distinctions between the empire Pilate serves and that other kingdom, the one that's harder to draw on a map.

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