[Footnote 1:  Philo, Legatio ad Caium, Sec. 38.  Jos., B.J., II. xiv. 8.]

[Footnote 2:  The exact place now occupied by the seraglio of the Pacha of Jerusalem.]

[Footnote 3:  John xviii. 28.]

[Footnote 4:  The Greek word [Greek:  Bema] had passed into the Syro-Chaldaic.]

[Footnote 5:  Jos., B.J., II. ix. 3, xiv. 8; Matt. xxvii. 27; John xviii. 33.]

He had scarcely been informed of the accusation, before he displayed his annoyance at being mixed up with this affair.[1] He then shut himself up in the judgment-hall with Jesus.  There a conversation took place, the precise details of which are lost, no witness having been able to repeat it to the disciples, but the tenor of which appears to have been well divined by John.  His narrative, in fact, perfectly accords with what history teaches us of the mutual position of the two interlocutors.

[Footnote 1:  John xviii. 29.]

The procurator, Pontius, surnamed Pilate, doubtless on account of the pilum or javelin of honor with which he or one of his ancestors was decorated,[1] had hitherto had no relation with the new sect.  Indifferent to the internal quarrels of the Jews, he only saw in all these movements of sectaries, the results of intemperate imaginations and disordered brains.  In general, he did not like the Jews, but the Jews detested him still more.  They thought him hard, scornful, and passionate, and accused him of improbable crimes.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Virg., AEn., XII. 121; Martial, Epigr., I. xxxii., X. xlviii.; Plutarch, Life of Romulus, 29.  Compare the hasta pura, a military decoration.  Orelli and Henzen, Inscr.  Lat., Nos. 3574, 6852, etc. Pilatus is, on this hypothesis, a word of the same form as Torquatus.]

[Footnote 2:  Philo, Leg. ad Caium, Sec. 38.]

Jerusalem, the centre of a great national fermentation, was a very seditious city, and an insupportable abode for a foreigner.  The enthusiasts pretended that it was a fixed design of the new procurator to abolish the Jewish law.[1] Their narrow fanaticism, and their religious hatreds, disgusted that broad sentiment of justice and civil government which the humblest Roman carried everywhere with him.  All the acts of Pilate which are known to us, show him to have been a good administrator.[2] In the earlier period of the exercise of his office, he had difficulties with those subject to him which he had solved in a very brutal manner; but it seems that essentially he was right.  The Jews must have appeared to him a people behind the age; he doubtless judged them as a liberal prefect formerly judged the Bas-Bretons, who rebelled for such trifling matters as a new road, or the establishment of a school.  In his best projects for the good of the country, notably in those relating to public works, he had encountered an impassable obstacle in