Gday all,
It is sometimes argued that before the famous Pilate inscription was found in 1961, that some (atheist) sceptics argued Pilate was a myth.
I looked into this and collected references to Pilate from history which shows that he was always considered historical. I have never found any indication of a sceptic who argued otherwise.
Here is my list of Pilate references :
http://five-essences.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/did-any-sceptics-ever-consider-pilate.html
Kapyong
On the specific point of whether sceptics ever considered Pilate to be a fictional character - I have not of course read all the sceptic literature published over the past century or so, but it is/was my impression that a number of authors have pointed out that prior to discovery of the Pilate stone, there really was no reliable evidence to show that Pilate even existed, far less that he executed Jesus.
However, that was really a side issue and not the question I was raising in your other thread “The Air Beneath the Moon”.
My question was really two-fold - first, what evidence exists to show that the inscription on the Pilate Stone is genuine? Or to out that another way - who has verified that inscription?
And secondly - is there any reliable evidence of the existence of Pilate, apart from the Pilate Stone?
Leaving aside the Pilate Stone, where I already listed various suspicions and questions that I think need answering in respect of any belief that the stone is genuine, I think there are only three strands of earlier evidence for the existence of Pilate.
The first strand is the claim that we have evidence from coins. However as far as I know, those coins do not bear the name of Pilate. They merely have the date on them, either 29AD, 30AD or 31AD. Afaik, the only reason those coins are claimed to be issued by Pilate, is because of those dates 29,30,31AD. Apparently, most Roman governors’ of Judea were in the habit of issuing coins in the period circa. 6AD to 60AD, and the coins typically bear the date, but not the name of the governor. So, in that case, it seems the coins are not evidence of Pilate at all, but merely evidence that there was a Roman governor producing coins in 29AD, 30AD, 31AD as well as at most dates from 6AD to 60AD.
As far as the writing of Josephus, Tacitus and Philo is concerned - in the case of Josephus and Tacitus, neither of those authors were even born when Pilate is claimed to have executed Jesus in 30AD, so the first problem with their writing is that they could only have been repeating whatever hearsay stories were in circulation by Christians around the end of the first century. However, even worse than that - the works of both those authors are apparently only known to us from Christian copies written from the 11th century onwards, and that is far, FAR too late to be considered in any sense reliable for the few brief passages those authors wrote about Pilate and Jesus.
Afaik (without specifically checking) - although Philo is thought to have been living at the time of Jesus, and could in principle have been giving his own eye-witness memories of seeing Pilate judging Jesus, afaik nobody actually believes that Philo was an eye-witness to ever seeing or knowing Pilate. Instead, afaik, Philo was also just reporting hearsay stories of what others had claimed as a legend of Pilate executing Jesus. But even apart from that, and again with checking - afaik, the writing of Philo, like that Josephus and Tacitus, is also known only from copies made centuries after Philo had died. So that again is copying at a much later date, and which is simply not reliable because of the time delay alone.
That only leaves the earliest gospels and perhaps Paul’s Letters(?). But that biblical writing about Jesus, and it’s scant mention of Pilate executing Jesus, is completely unreliable for all the many hundreds of reasons discussed to death in the various current HJ threads, as well as numerous other earlier HJ threads on this forum and elsewhere, and as well as being discussed and explained in numerous sceptic books. I’m sure we don’t need to go over yet again why that biblical writing is so utterly unreliable as a historical source. But just ultra briefly - apart from anything else, all of the biblical NT writing is known only to us as Christian copies made centuries after Jesus had died. Earlier fragments thought to date from a time closer to the lifetime of Jesus are too few in number & too badly preserved etc. to provide much if any of the essential detail for specific incidents such as sentences saying that Pilate executed Jesus. That’s apart from the fact that even the fragments may actually be much later than their earliest “optimistically” claimed dates.
So where does all that leave us?
It seems to me that it leaves us in the position of the Pilate Stone being assumed as the most definitive evidence for the existence of Pilate. An object which puts to rest all the sort of doubts and objections which I mentioned above re. coins, gospel writing and very late copies of Josephus and Tacitus etc. But that begs the question …
… what then is the evidence that the Pilate Stone inscription is genuine?
… who actually verified that the inscription is indeed from the period 26AD to 36AD?
IOW - I’m just saying that before we decide whether Pilate did things such as executing Jesus, I’d just like to clarify that there really is good evidence for his existence. Because, after all, this a field in which many of the principal characters do in fact appear to be ficticious (see for example my earlier link to Richard Dawkins talking to bible scholar John Huddlestun). But on the face of things, the Pilate Stone looks to me very suspicious (reasons explained before). And the earlier evidence of gospel writing, coins and late copies of non-biblical writing seem to me completely unconvincing and/or highly unreliable.
Don't know how good the list is but I suspect there are people there that really don't belong.