Showing posts with label Saint Pilate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saint Pilate. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Saint Pilate and Mrs. Saint Pilate?

Here's an odd factoid I came across:

The tendency, already discernible in the canonical Gospels, to lay stress on the efforts of Pilate to acquit Christ, and thus pass as lenient a judgment as possible upon his crime, goes further in the apocryphal Gospels and led in later years to the claim that he actually became a Christian. The Abyssinian Church reckons him as a saint, and assigns 25 June to him and to Claudia Procula, his wife. The belief that she became a Christian goes back to the second century, and may be found in Origen (Hom., in Mat., xxxv). The Greek Church assigns her a feast on 27 October. Tertullian and Justin Martyr both speak of a report on the Crucifixion (not extant) sent in by Pilate to Tiberius, from which idea a large amount of apocryphal literature originated. Some of these were Christian in origin (Gospel of Nicodemus), others came from the heathen, but these have all perished. [source]

Addendum: I've yet to locate Origen (Hom., in Mat., xxxv). I have though noticed, after about 45 minutes of searching, that no one else appears to have it either.  There are plentiful references to Origen (Hom., in Mat., xxxv), but not any pay-off. I'm open to suggestions... I'm tempted to say... it doesn't exist, or is some sort of typo. This document  is numbered "35" by Migne, but doesn't appear to be the source.