the historian records. Philo goes further, giving a story told by
Agrippa, according to which Pilate hung gilt shields in the palace of
Herod at Jerusalem, but was compelled to take them down as the result
of an appeal to Tiberius Caesar, and adding that Agrippa described
Pilate as "inflexible, merciless, and obstinate." He says that Pilate
dreaded lest the Jews should go on an embassy to the emperor,
impeaching him for "his corruptions, his acts of insolence, his rapine,
and his habit of insulting people; his cruelty, and his continual
murders of people untried and uncondemned, and his never-ending,
gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity." Josephus is not
trustworthy, always writing "with a motive," and Philo must be
considered prejudiced, since he saw too much of the worst side of the
Roman treatment of Jews; and the wholly unfavourable verdict of these
two writers should be qualified by what we read in the New Testament
concerning the subject of them. The interesting point is that we have
to go to the Christian documents for the more calm and just estimate of
the man who crucified Christ. This fact should deepen our sense of the
fairness of the evangelists. They evince nothing of that bitterness of
resentment which the Jews, quite naturally, as the world judges,
cherished towards their oppressors. They were the followers of One who
had taught them to love their enemies, and who, when in mortal agony,
prayed to God to forgive the men who had inflicted it. But further,
the early Christians discriminated between the Jewish authorities, who
planned and purposed the death of Christ and really compassed it, and
Pilate, who was but a weak instrument in the hands of these men. The
fact that the evangelists so clearly mark this distinction is a sign
that they are in close touch with the events, and that they faithfully
record what they know to have taken place. In a word, it is clear that
we have a more just and accurate portrait of Pilate in our Gospels than
the representations of him by Josephus and Philo, who are thus seen to