Recently I have been researching and writing an article on Pontius Pilate to post on this site. I have found a good bit of material, a lot of it myth only, but some hard kernels of history also. In reading and writing of this individual, dead for nearly 20 centuries, I have come to admire him. He was a Roman provincial administrator, undoubtedly a military man and by his family name; a member of a prominent Samnite family with a strong tradition of military service. He seems to have been a hard-nosed administrator, but willing to consider the beliefs and traditions of native population of the province. I feel sorry for him, in that he was assigned what was probably the toughest-to-govern province in the Empire at that time. Yet, he evidentially did a great job of it. The average assignment as a Prefect (his title) was about 18 months and he remained in office for 10 years (26 – 36 CE) with only three major incidents (the condemnation of Jesus as a Jewish rebel would not have been more than a normal day-to-day operation) occurring during his tenure. Josephus paints a very negative picture of the man, but then his information was second hand and very obviously biased, the same could be said of Philo of Alexandria. I have just reread my article and see that I have spent way too much time on the trial and execution of Jesus the Nazarene, but the theories of Dr. Maghee are quite fascinating and I had to include them almost word for word. This Roman, this man who would be a brother-in-arms with myself and the webmaster except for the passage of 2000 years, was one of the reasons that the Roman Empire reached the heights it reached and lasted the centuries that it lasted. He, and men like him, came behind the seemingly invincible Legions and turned the native people from Gauls, Britons, Egyptians, Greeks and yes, even Jews into ROMANS! We need men cut from the same cloth as Pilate in these trying times that this old world faces today. Men that are willing not only to do the duty assigned them, but to do it with understanding and honor! - Heimdall