TO GET AHEAD IN ROME, you had to know the right people. In Pontius Pilate, Anne Wroe describes what she calls the "essential etiquette of Roman life: all paths to advancement lay through politeness, persistence, and the favor of richer and nobler men." Anne Wroe, Pontius Pilate (New York: Modern Library, 1999), p. 18 . And Pilate knew how to use those paths.
Now known to Christians as the man who condemned Jesus to death, Pilate was a fairly ordinary Roman civil servant. As he was growing up, it's unlikely that anyone would have predicted that one day he would be familiar to many people around the globe. Yet when he took up the Judean post as governor in about AD 26, he unwittingly became a key player in the world's most important trial.
Judea was a small, unglamorous posting, richer in bitumen than in culture. And then there was the problem of dealing with the feisty Jewish population.
