‘Message from your wife, sir.’ ‘Not now.’ ‘She says: “Have nothing to do with this just man”’

Frank Kermode

  • Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man by Ann Wroe
    Cape, 381 pp, £17.99, March 1999, ISBN 0 224 05942 4

To develop a full-scale portrait of a character from hints, often terse and reticent, in the gospel narratives – using for the purpose your imagination and whatever help you can get elsewhere – is, it seems, an attractive idea. A couple of years ago, reviewing in these pages a book that gave Judas Iscariot the treatment (LRB, 2 January 1997), I tried to explain why I found the result unpersuasive. Now here’s a biography of Pontius Pilate, a long, sometimes lively and sometimes learned piece of work, that is equally unconvincing.

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