(856 WORDS) — In his just-released masterpiece entitled “The Jesus Discoveries: 10 Historic Finds That Bring Us Face-to-Face With Jesus,” Dr. Jeremiah Johnston of christianthinkers.com shares a revealing vignette from 1840 involving Karl Marx and his tutor, Professor Bruno Bauer.

Marx was then 22-years old and an atheist working on a dissertation focused on religion. Bauer, also an atheist, was an advocate, according to Johnston, of “the eccentric view that Jesus of Nazareth was not a historical person.

“In the annals of German Higher Criticism, few figures stirred as much controversy as Bauer, who brazenly denied not only the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, but also anyone who intersected with him in the Gospels.”

Among the individuals who intersected with Jesus in the Gospels, of course, is the Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate, who found no guilt in Jesus but still caved to mob pressure and sentenced Him to death by scourging and crucifixion. (See John 18:1-19:37 ESV)

“Bauer even went so far as to argue that Pontius Pilate himself — a figure featured in all four canonical Gospels as the Roman Prefect who sentenced Jesus to death — was merely a fictional construct,” Johnston explains.

Even when his contemporary colleagues pointed out non-Biblical sources like Josephus and Tacitus mention Pilate, Bauer insisted that Christians had somehow managed to insert the fictitious Roman official’s name and alleged deeds in the works of the Jewish and Roman historians, according to. Johnston.

Bauer is still relevant 186 years later because the argument that Jesus never actually existed is still around, along with claims His disciples made up the resurrection account and similar related claims made by contemporary skeptics.

Too bad neither Bauer nor Marx lived long enough to hear about two hugely important archeological discoveries in the 20th century that confirm, entirely apart from biblical sourcing, the real existence of Pontius Pilate.

The first of these discoveries came in 1961 when an archeological team led by Antonio Frova was excavating a Roman theatre at Caesarea Maritima, the Roman Empire Judean administrative center. The team found a limestone block measuring two feet by four feet that bore an inscription:

“To the Divine Augusti [this] Tibericum

… Pontius Pilate

… Prefect of Judea

… has dedicated [this] ”   

“It was a watershed moment in biblical archeology. For the first time, we possessed physical, non-literary evidence of the historical existence of the man who sentenced Jesus to death,” Johnston writes.

“Here was an official inscription, in stone, referring to ‘Pontius Pilate’ and explicitly naming his title as Praefectus Judaea – Prefect of Judea. This corresponds precisely with the Gospel accounts and Josephus’s writings, as well as with Tacitus’ confirmation that ‘Christus … suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius, at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate.”

Then there is the Pilate Ring, found later in the 1960s by archeologist Gideon Foerster while excavating Herodium, King Herod’s desert fortress complex southeast of Bethlehem. The small copper alloy ring was most ignored among the thousands of large and small artifacts uncovered during the excavation, according to Johnston.

“Decades later, in 2018, Israeli archeologists using sophisticated photographic technology, reanalyzed the ring at the Israel Antiquities Authority’s labs.” Johnston tells us. “Under the magnification, a worn Green inscription emerged around the image of a wine vessel. The letters read ‘Pilato,’ the Greek term for Pilate.”

Since it was only made of copper alloy, odds are slim that Pilate ever even saw that particular ring. His would have been made of gold or silver. But the significance of the Pilate ring is, Johnston writes, the fact “it idenfies the governing authority [Pilate] for whom the user worked. The most plausible conclusion then is that this ring belonged to someone in Pilate’s administrative circle, serving under his authority, operating in the orbit of his name.”

Why should you care about these archeological finds?

“These discoveries do more than affirm Pilate’s existence. They remind us that the Gospel is grounded in historical reality. Jesus of Nazareth stood trial before a real Roman governor, under real political tension, in a real location we can still excavate.

“And that governor’s name wasn’t lost to time. It was preserved, perhaps unknowingly by a bureaucrat with a ring and by stonemasons at a seaside city … and, not to mention, in the historical biblical Gospels,” Johnston says in his fifth chapter.

And if the Gospels are accurate in reporting the details of that trial and of the life and deeds of the man thus convicted by the real official named Pontius Pilate, then this fact is yet another reason all men and women everywhere on this Earth do well to ponder how the executed man described Himself:

“I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me.” – Jesus at John 14:6.

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WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS?

Have questions or want to talk more about these facts? I am happy to sit down with you over a cup of coffee for an absolutely off-the-record, totally non-judgmental conversations. Your doubts and questions are almost certainly similar to my own before Jesus Christ saved and changed my life. Email me at mark.tapscott@hillfaith.org.