I am preparing my fourth message in the series Eye Witness. The message is entitled “Questions” and centers on the representation of Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of John. I have spoken on Pilate several times, but always from the other gospels. This time I decided to give him a really thorough treatment, so I started doing a little research.

Sources

We really know very little about him. We don’t know who he was other than possibly a descendant of a Samnite general G. Pontius (c. 320 BCE). He appears in no known secular records. The only literary references to him are in the New Testament, the works of Flavius Josephus and the later works of Tacitus.

• The New Testament records are fairly well known (Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23, John 18-19 and a couple of references in Acts and 1 Timothy).
• Josephus makes two direct references to Pilate. We see him succeeding Valerus Gratus in Judea, dealing with Jesus plots and judging Christ and suppressing a Samaritan revolt (Antiquities 18.various, Wars 2.9)
• Tacitus’ reference is only in passing when writing about Jesus. He wrote: auctor nominis eius Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat. Literally translated as, “The source of the name [Christian] is Christ who, during the imperium of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate, suffered the ultimate penalty.)

It is generally concluded that any later references to Pilate draw from these three sources, and even Tacitus may have simply been an expansion of Josephus.

One additional resource has come to light in recent times. In 1961, a block of limestone was discovered in Caesarea that features and inscription in Latin.

[DIS AUGUSTI]S TIBERIEUM

[PO]NTIUS PILATUS

[PRAEF]ECTUS IUDA[EA]E

[FECIT D]E[DICAVIT] 

(letters in brackets are conjectured)

The inscription is short, but it does give us one vital clue about Pilate’s career. He is called a prefect in the inscription. This is different from Tacitus, who called him a prelate. Although the two positions were similar, a prelate was a man of senatorial rank while a prefect was equestrian. This will matter in a little bit, so just file it away for now.

His Career

The limited resources we have available keep us from having a better idea of the kind of man Pilate was. He was almost certainly not a senator. He was probably a member of the equestrian class, which was the lower of the two aristocratic classes of Roman citizen. This meant he was probably from one of the old families, but probably not one with the ear of the senatorial families. As mentioned before, he might have been a descendant of G. Pontius.

As an equestrian, Pilate could not hope for any of the truly powerful offices like consul. At best he could attain power as a silent partner in one of the many power deals that took place in the early imperium. Unfortunately it appears that Pilate did not have the proper connections and was left to rot in a distant, troubled province.

Prefect of Iudaea

Josephus tells us that he replaced Valerus Gratus as prefect of Iudaea in 26 CE and ruled there for ten years. The prefecture itself was a recent consolidation of Judea, Idumea and Samaria, completed in 6 CE after the abortive rule of Herod Archelaus. It was one of the few official provinces ruled by a prefect instead of a legate.

This was primarily because it had been formed from some of the remnants of Herod the Great’s kingdom. The other part, Galilee, was still ruled by Herod’s son Antipas. The Romans attempted to institute home rule several times in the first century but eventually converted the entire region to a prelature.

The prefect was a sort of auxiliary governor to the legate. While Pilate was personally appointed by the emperor, just like a legate, he did not have the same powers as a legate and would have had to draw all of his military might from the legate’s legions.

Instead of the three legions available to the legate of Syria, Pilate had only six cohorts (about 3,000 men). Two were permanently stationed at the provincial capital, Caesarea, and two were in Jerusalem. The other two moved around quite a bit, so at any given time, Pilate had no more than 1,000 troops to call upon and none of them were front line soldiers.

The year 26 CE is significant because that was the year that Tiberius Caesar essentially exiled himself from Rome. His son had died in 23 CE, and Tiberius never recovered. Pliny the Elder called him tristissimus hominus, “the gloomiest man.” Tiberius left the imperial administration to his Praetorian Prefects – Lucius Aelius Sejanus and Quintus Naevius Sutorius Macro. It is very likely that these men had recalled Gratus and sent Pilate to Iudaea.

Unfortunately, the increasingly petulant Tiberius had refused to allow the Syrian legate, the respected senator Lucius Aelius Lamia and relative of Lucius Aelius Sejanus, to go to his province. As a consequence, Pontius Pilate went to Iudaea without the power to command a legion or a superior to request a legion from.

Necessity Breeds Destruction

With so little power to enforce his control of a troubled province, it is not surprising that Pilate managed so badly. We know that he was forced to move quite frequently between his capital at Caesarea and the Jewish religious center in Jerusalem. Quite simply, he was spread too thin.

There were a number of Jewish revolts throughout the rule of V. Gratus and P. Pilate. The constant nuisance of putting down rebellions seems to have worn on Pilate. When he heard of a rebel of the Samaritans, he overstepped his authority and called the Roman cavalry into action. They swept down on Mount Gerazim and massacred the Samaritans.

When L. Aelius Lamia’s replacement, Lucius Vitellius, finally made it to Syria in 36 CE, he found Pilate was overreaching to maintain any kind of order in the provinces. Vitellius immediately dismissed him and replaced him with his friend Marcellus.

Pilate journeyed to Rome to present his case, but Tiberius died while Pilate was in transit. We do not know if Pilate ever presented his case before Caligula, but it is safe to assume that even if he was heard, his appeal was not heeded. Shortly thereafter Caligula appointed his childhood friend, Herod Agrippa, as the King of the Jews and temporarily suspended the Roman prelature. The region was more or less under self rule until they rebelled against Rome and the Roman general Vespasian put down the rebellion. Vespasian’s work was completed with his son Titus’ destruction of the Temple in AD 70. All of Judea was incorporated into the province of Palestine and then Syria-Palestine during the reign of Hadrian.

His Place in the Jesus Story

Pilate’s exchange with Jesus in John 18-19 shows us a lot about who Pilate was. He was clearly intelligent and perceptive. He was also at a tremendous disadvantage when dealing with a troublesome people who wanted Roman protection but not Roman rule.

His own place was precarious, so when he was confronted with this man – Jesus – who he knew had been hailed by the Jews only a few days before, he did his best to manipulate the situation and free Jesus. Unfortunately, Pilate seems to have been a poor politician. He chose to appease the Jews in order to mock them, and his actions (both with Jesus and the later incident with the Samaritans) probably aided in the destabilization of Roman rule in the region.

To John, who provides the most detail about the exchange between Pilate and Jesus, Pilate represents all Gentiles. He asks questions of Jesus while the Jews and Herod Antipas demand things of him. To the Gentile church, Pilate is a symbol of Gentile openness to Jesus’ claims. The Ethiopian church even made him a saint!

More than anything, Pilate is an example of the trap the early believers found themselves in. They were torn in the tension of Judaism, Roman culture, the teaching of Jesus and their own thoughts and ideas. Through Pilate’s interrogation, Jesus remained other – not Jewish or Roman, not rebel or subject. It shows Jesus’ distinction from these powerful influences.

Cush fathered Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before YHWH. Therefore it is said, ‘Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before YHWH’. [Genesis 10:8-9]

As we read through Genesis, there a number of these anecdotal references to individuals. The writers assumed that this information was important to their audience, although the significance is often lost on the modern reader. Unfortunately, much of Christian scholarship is tainted by the questionable scholarship of writers of a past era when often groundless theories and scant evidence often became the foundation of subsequent generations.

Some Thoughts on Critical Thinking

Consider one example. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, based much of his religion on the thesis that two Hebrews named Nephi and Lehi left southwest Asia in c. 600 BCE and settled in the Western Hemisphere. The descendants of these two men eventually merged into one church when Jesus appeared to them after His resurrection. Then a group broke off, rejected the church and became known as the Lamanites (descendants of Lehi). They eventually wiped out the Nephites and are the ancestors of the Native Americans the Europeans encountered when they “discovered” the Western hemisphere’s landmasses.

While today most scholars scoff at the idea of a Jewish settlement in the Americas for many reasons, in Joseph Smith’s day, the theory was widely hailed as possible. It was used as an explanation for the disappearance of the “lost tribes” of Israel. It was a commonly held opinion and not nearly as out of step with the known archaeology and history of the day.

The problem with this kind of thinking is it moves lock-step with an ideology. Those who follow a belief system structured around such conjecture – whether there are grounds for it or not – must adhere to it. They cannot bear the idea of rejecting it because it has become intricately connected to everything else. The Mormon church cannot reject Smith’s ideas. To do so would unravel their entire faith.

Faulty Nimrod Scholarship

Unfortunately, the Mormons are not the only ones who adhere to tenuous theories based on reading into texts and general assumptions. Nothing demonstrates this more than some of the absurd theories that have sprung up about Nimrod and, amazingly the Catholic Church. You can check out some of these ideas by reading The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop or surfing over to www.chick.com (Chick Publications has produced a number of tracts based on Hislop’s ideas.)

Without diving into too much detail, Hislop’s thesis – which was shared by a number of Puritans at the time – is that Nimrod is the archetype for any cults involving a mother goddess and male deity pairing such as the cult of Isis and Osiris/Horus in Egypt. He creates, virtually out of thin air, an entire cult of Nimrod and Semiramis (his mythical wife, possibly based on the actual Assyrian queen Shammuramat). He weaves together vague monument references, some poor linguistics and pure conjecture to create this archetypical religion that is the foundation of post-Nicean Christianity.

All of this was done in the context of Hislop’s ecclesiology, which had taken Martin Luther’s statements about the papacy as New Babylon to the extreme and classified the entire Roman system as not theologically incorrect but actually apostate. In essence, Hislop wished to restore the “pure church”, stripped of all symbol – even the cross!

Hislop’s eccentricities have unfortunately affected a lot of evangelical and fundamental thinking – both ecclesiological and eschatological. Worse, his theories are completely based on extra-biblical twigs bound together by the threads of tenuous logic and a predisposition toward hostility.

Rebuilding the Nimrod Archetype

Let’s start from the assumption that the Genesis record has something to tell us about this ancient character, Nimrod. Let’s also assume for the moment that he is an archetype – just as we have done with Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel. Again, let me caution that we are not denying that an actual figure lived in history and was truly a “mighty hunter before YHWH.” But let us assume that even if there was a historical figure, he serves as an archetype of something larger – a development in human culture.

With these assumptions in hand, let’s proceed. What do we see in the Nimrod archetype?

• He is the first mighty man (Hebrew gibbor, literally, one who rules)
• He is a mighty hunter before YHWH (Hebrew, tsayyad, derived from the word for wild game)
• He established a kingdom (Hebrew, mamlakah) that comprises well known population centers in the Fertile Crescent

This is all the Genesis record has to say about Nimrod. The only other place the name occurs in the Scriptures is a late reference to “the land of Nimrod” [Micah 6:5].

What we see then is a gibbor who presides over a mamlakah and the source of his power is apparently his hunting skills. We must ask how this fits into the archaeological record – not with an individual but with the development of human society in southwest Asia.

Social Development

In southwest Asia, human beings began to draw together into population centers around 8500-8000 BCE. Some of the first population centers, such as Akkad and Erech, are mentioned in the Nimrod list. Perhaps we need to ask the question why these people began to centralize their populations. There were a number of factors that precipitated the movement.

The Domestication of Founder Crops

The connection between crop domestication and population center development is a definite one, but it is still debated whether domestication is the cause of center development or vice versa. The two are most definitely symbiotic. You cannot have one or the other; you must have both.

Thus, in the 9th millennium BCE, we have the domestication of founder crops in southwest Asia. When you survey the various places that human society developed crop domestication, there is a broad spectrum of crops that were domesticated but they generally reduce to three categories: cereals for carbohydrates, pulses for proteins, and fibers for oils and cloth production. In southwest Asia, the following were domesticated around 8500 BCE.

• Cereals – emmer wheat, einkorn wheat and barley
• Pulses – lentils and chickpeas
• Fiber/Oil – flax

These founder crops provide a solid basis for a balanced diet. When domesticated, they also allow for greater population growth and density because more can be grown on a smaller area. In the 20th century, this was further intensified by genetics and industrialization, but even in the ancient world, it caused a population explosion.

Technological Development

Part of the domestication of crops involved the development of tools necessary to plant and harvest them.

Tools

One of the earliest challenges to agriculture was the soil itself. In natural alluvial plains, the annual flooding of rivers would provide some turn over of the soil. It also replenished the soil with nutrients for sources up river.

Agriculture would have rapidly moved population centers away from the river front. Means needed to be discovered to turn over the soil in less frequently flooded soil. The earliest tools for this were simple digging sticks or hoes, as still used in some remote areas of the world.

It was a short leap from the hoe to the ard, or hand plough. Sometime around 6000 BCE, southwest Asian farmers began to put use sharpened points of wood, stone or bronze on a shaft to provide better leverage. This allowed them to turn the soil over, circulating the nutrients and allowing the plants to take a deeper root. It also aerated the soil.

The ard would remain the primary tool for this purpose until the Greeks developed the aratrum millennia later. Even the aratrum was derivative. It would not be until the Middle Ages that a true advance – the mouldboard plough – would again change agricultural on the same scale.

Curved scythes of stone and metal began to appear around the same time. These allowed faster harvesting, which in turn encouraged greater planting.

Finally, the cultivation of flax provided these early populations with a material suitable for making cord. This allowed them a convenient, strong rope that could be used to capture and domesticate larger mammals such as oxen and camels. (Smaller mammals and birds had bee domesticated in early prehistory.)

Weapons

While the plough and scythe were revolutionizing farming, the sling and the bow were doing the same to hunting and ultimately, as we shall see, warfare.

These weapons were long-range and accurate when handled properly. Hunters could strike fleeing animals from a greater distance than they could with throwing sticks, spears and thrown rocks.

Beside this, the introduction of better techniques of making arrow and spear heads – first from stone and then from bronze – made for more effective weapons. In short, man could now keep his produce closer and kill his prey from farther away.

Hunting drove the large, wild mammals from the populated regions. The chief quarry, a type of gazelle, was hunted from the region at about the same time as agriculture began to take hold.

Population Challenges

The technologies of farming and advanced hunting were intricately linked to a sudden explosion of population. Tribes quickly organized into villages, which of course competed with each other for farm land and hunting grounds. These conflicts probably gave rise to the first gibborim – chieftains who united villages into regional governments and ultimately constructed cities and towers.

Now, Nimrod

This is what we see as the Nimrod archetype. These first chieftains emerged from the pack because they were “mighty hunters.” Perhaps their abilities on the hunting grounds made them prime candidates for warfare against other human beings. The skills required for killing game animals are much the same as those required for killing competing hunters.

As the wild game grew sparse in the Fertile Crescent, hunting would have become a more specialized endeavor. Hunters would have needed to be free to move, which means they could not have been full-time farmers. This specialization of labor is the basis of trade and economics.

Specialization of Labor

One can assume that this specialization allowed the hunters to become good at what they do, which in turn allowed them superiority over the farmers. Moreover, the farmers were probably more than happy to allow the hunters to act in defensive and then judicial roles since it allowed them to become more specialized.

If Cain and Abel represent the domestication of crops, then Nimrod represents the urbanization of human society. Strata are present in the societies; leaders become a class above the laborers.

Uniting of Cities into Regional Governments

If Nimrod represents the ruling class of the region, then it makes sense that they would unite the urban centers of Shinar (modern central Mesopotamia) and then encourage movement to other fertile areas. This may be what is represented by the statement that Nimrod, “went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah and Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city.” [Genesis 10:11-12]

Most of the urban centers are readily identified with archaeological remains, but Resen, the “great city” or major urban center, is not known. Calah is identified with the ruins of Nimrud and served as an Assyrian capital twice. Nineveh is likewise well known.

These very definite place names were well known to the readers of Genesis; and archaeology dates the earliest settlements in Calah(Nimrud) and Nineveh to 2200 and 1800 BCE respectively. Assur, the eponymous early capital of Assyria was settled sometime before both, probably around 2700 BCE.

Another Possibility

Before closing this entry, I should mention a possible theory about Nimrod. Many of the names in Genesis apply to societal movements; others are applied in a broad sense to the people perceived as descendants of an individual. This was not necessarily biological (Israel was populated mostly with people who were not related to Jacob/Israel, but people who joined the nation-confederacy).

Thus, Nimrod could simply be meant as a patronymic label for the peoples who populated the Fertile Crescent to the east and south of Aram (Syria).

What was the world like before the hunter-gatherers started to settle down? Christians tend to give little thought to this idea because they assume that the timeframe between Eden and civilization was very brief. But what if it was not?

I am aware that some of the ideas we present here might be a little controversial, so allow me a brief disclaimer. This is not a rejection of the literal interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis. There is no archaeological evidence to prove or disprove the literal interpretation of the Genesis record.

All the same, a literal reading of the Genesis record may allow for different interpretations. There is no reason to assume that the original audience of Genesis would have understood Adam and Eve to be literal individuals. The potential for alternative interpretations does exist and we are remiss not to explore them.

Hunter-Gatherers

Consider for a moment what we know about hunter-gatherers in the ancient world.

• They live in broad ranges with very low population densities
• They live off the land, consuming whatever is available to them
• If they live in an environment with sufficient, available produce they generally make it their staple, supplemented with some hunting.

It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to see Adam and Eve in the role of hunter-gatherers. They would be idealized templates for the hunter-gather, but they can be considered hunter-gatherers nonetheless. It is not hard to see them as possibly historical figures, nor is it any more difficult to see them as archetypes. They present us with a glimpse into the beginning of the end of the Neolithic hunter-gatherers in southwest Asia.

What Did Adam and Eve Eat?

Adam and Eve live off the land – which YHWH has designed to provide for them. They apparently have no need to consume animal flesh for protein. We can assume one of two things – either the need for protein was born from original sin (the theology-centric perspective) or they got their protein from pulses that grew wild. We know from archeological research that the naturally occurring flora of southwest Asia included lentils and other pulses, beside the prevalent cereal crops.

What is absent from the staple diet of the early settled inhabitants of southwest Asia is, ironically in this case, fruit. We know that there were wild apples, grapes, and figs in the region but they were among the last plants to be domesticated – some were not domesticated until the Middle Ages. This does not mean that the archetypical hunter-gatherers would not have eaten them, simply that the complexity of domesticating fruit trees did not present a necessary challenge to them. They allowed them to run wild.

Plants of the Field

One of the most interesting passages in the Adam and Eve cycle appears early in it.

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— [Genesis 2:5-6, ESV]

Why is this so interesting? Some people take this to indicate that man was created before vegetation, but that is a modern, critical reading. The phrase “there was no man to work the ground” is a clue. This passage points to the era of hunter-gatherers. The “plant of the field” and “bush of the field” are not inclusive of all vegetation. They indicate domesticated plants. The words for plant and bush could apply to wild or domesticated crops, but the Hebrew word translated as field is sadeh – a cultivated field. It is the qualifier that makes them domesticated.

So what we are reading is a reference to pre-domestication. Adam and Eve are archetypes of hunter-gatherers living off the land without cultivating it.

This ties into what we have already discussed about Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer of the land, just as his father, Adam was cursed to be. They are the domesticators of the cereal and pulse crops necessary to sustain established existence.

The Trees of the Garden

The most famous thing about Adam and Eve is that they ate fruit from a forbidden tree. Let’s leave aside the issue of the fruit and sin for the moment and just consider this from a historical perspective.

Trees require massive amounts of water, which is found either in regions with extensive drainage systems or areas under irrigation. Southwest Asia, as far back as 10,000 BCE, was not an immensely well-irrigated area. Trees would have grown near rivers.

In fact, Genesis 2 makes it clear that the Garden was in the east of Eden and given the geographical references in the same chapter, Eden was what we know today as the Middle East or southwest Asia. So, the Garden is a reference to the fertility of this region and the trees are an indication that the region was close to rivers.

We have hunter-gatherers living in a region they (or their near descendants) consider a garden. The word for garden itself has altered meaning because of its appearance here, but it is a very old word and probably means a region of self-sustaining fertility.

These hunter-gatherers prosper in the garden, but ultimately they are cast out of it. They leave the Garden and wonder to the east – again, mentioned in the Genesis record (Gen 4:24). Once expelled, they no longer eat from the trees but become “tillers of the ground” which means they cultivate the “bush of the field” and “plant of the field” rather than trees.

This is precisely what we find in archaeological digs in the region. The earliest farmers cultivated wheat and pulses, but no fruit. They ate fruit from time to time when they encountered it in the wild, but did not domesticate it. Even the grape was not domesticated until 3500-3000 BCE, after wheat and lentils.

Why Make Archetypes from the Hunter-Gatherers

The biggest question mark surrounding this idea of Adam and Eve as early hunter-gatherers is why the ancient cultures would have needed to produce such an archetype. (The absurdity of the story actually might suggest its historicity, at least in some ways. More on this later, but suffice to say that often the more illogical something in the Bible is, the more likely it passed down to us relatively unaltered.)

In reading the narratives that follow, it is clear that the “civilized” men who produced Genesis lived in a culture that longed for the simplicity of their ancient hunter-gatherer past. As hunter-gatherers, they were closer to YHWH than people seem to be able to get in their societies. These recollections make Adam and Eve the ideals of harmony with Creator and creation. The same may still be true today. People still talk about how much closer to God they feel when they are surrounded by nature.

Closing Disclaimer

Once again, I want to remind the reader that this is not a denial of the existence of actual people named Adam and Eve or a rejection of the idea that they were divinely created. It is simply a consideration that the Adam and Eve cycle also encompasses the modern archaeological research of the Neolithic-Bronze Age horizon.