A strange new act of Pilate

"Relics of Repentance" is a short book compiled by James Forcucci. Its main item is a series of letters purportedly written by Claudia Procula, the wife of Pontius Pilate.

The letters were originally published in Pictorial Review in 1929 under the title "A letter from Pontius Pilate's Wife". The magazine classed them as fiction. The author was a certain Catherine van Dyke. However, a small book also published in 1929, claimed that the letters were genuine. The author of the book was the very same Catherine van Dyke. She also had the copyright to the "translations", together with Pictorial Review.

James Goodspeed considered Claudia's letters to be obvious forgeries, and mentions them in passing in his classic "Strange New Gospels". Nobody has seen the original documents the letters are supposedly based on, and as already mentioned, the magazine where they first appeared regarded them as a short story. On the web I found an old Adventist article from 1945, complaining about Claudia's letters being promoted by some Adventist ministers. The article quotes a correspondence with Goodspeed, who didn't considered them worthy of a detailed debunking. (The article is titled "Spurious Dream of Pilate's Wife" by Robert L. Odom, at the website of Ministry Magazine.)

Claudia's letters portray Pontius Pilate as a doubting Thomas and ivory tower philosopher who debates with Stoics and Rabbis, constantly consults his dusty books, and never reaches any firm conclusion about anything. (Oops, sounds like somebody I know.) He is also a careerist, constantly at loggerheads with Herod. For some reason, both Herod and the emperor Tiberius are portrayed as fishermen, i.e. persons who catch fish for recreational purposes.

During the trial of Jesus, Pilate turns out to be as weak, scared and easily swayed as usual. The main "plot development" is that Claudia meets Jesus already before the trial. Jesus heals Pilate's and Claudia's son Pilo. When Pilo hears about the crucifixion, he promptly dies while Herod wisks away Pilate and Claudia to Rome, where they are sentenced to perpetual banishment by an angry Tiberius. The letters themselves were purportedly written by Claudia during her exile in a small Gallic village. She prays to Jesus and asks the Virgin Mary for forgiveness. Here, the story ends but Catherine van Dyke added a note, claiming that her story was widely known all over Europe and that a manuscript was found in the private papers of the last Czarina of Russia, etc. etc. In this way, Dyke tied her little novella to the various "mysteries" surrounding the Czar and his family. (The previously mentioned article in Ministry contains excerpts from a letter from Dyke to the Adventists, in which she tries to make some sense of her own "discovery" of a medieval manuscript of the letters in an Belgian monastery. She doesn't succeed very well!)

I can't say that I liked the letters of Claudia Procula, but they probably worked as very light reading circa 1929. I'll therefore graciously bow and give these strange new "acts of Pilate" an OK rating.

UPDATE: It seems the story behind "Relics of Repentence" is more complex than I previously thought. A version of Claudia´s letter was published in a Slovenian journal already in 1865. It was supposedly based on a French original. Unfortunately, my Slovenian is very rusty, so I can´t really compare the American and Slovenian versions! I never seen the French version. Van Dyke claimed to have handled a copy of the original manuscript in a monastery at Bruges in Belgium, a manuscript in medieval French. Nobody else seems to have seen it, however, and my best guess is therefore that Claudia´s letter is some kind of 18th or 19th century forgery. Van Dyke may have edited the story and published it as "Relics of Repentence" in 1929.