one, and questioned them in private singly. And they agreed, and the three of them told one tale. The chief priests answered and said: Our scripture saith that every word shall be established by two or three witnesses. Joseph therefore confessed that he tended him and buried him, with Nicodemus; and how it is true that he rose again.
This leads on to the opening words of Part II:
Joseph saith: And why marvel ye that Jesus is risen? &c.
The fact is that the two forms (Greek B and Latin) which have the Second Part—the Descent into Hell—attached to them, have been obliged on that account to modify the end of the First Part, so as to manage a plausible transition.
ACTS OF PILATE
PART I. RECENSION B OF THE GREEK
It has been said that this is a later working-over of the original text. No known copy of it is earlier than the fifteenth century, and the language in some of them is very mediaeval. A short review only of the principal additions to the story will be given here.
The title runs thus:
A narrative concerning the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ and his holy Resurrection. Written by a Jew named Aeneas, which Nicodemus, a Roman toparch, translated out of the Hebrew tongue into the Roman speech.
In two copies there is this prologue:
After the kingdom of the Hebrews was dissolved, and four hundred years had gone by, and the Hebrews also were subject to the empire of the Romans, the Emperor of the Romans appointing them aking: afterward, when Tiberius Caesar wielded the sceptre of the Romans, in the eighteenth year of his reign, when he had appointed Herod king in Judaea, the son of that Herod who aforetime killed the children in Bethlehem: and when he had Pilate as governor in Jerusalem, and Annas and Caiaphas had the high-priesthood of Jerusalem; Nicodemus, a Roman toparch, called unto him a Jew named Aeneas, and sought to record the things that were done in Jerusalem in the days of Annas and Caiaphas concerning Christ: which also the Jew having done and delivered it to Nicodemus, he translated these things from the Hebrew writing into the Roman speech: and the matter of this history is thus:
(Where it will be noted that Nicodemus is no longer the Biblical personage, but a Roman official. Roman (Romaïc) speech means here not Latin but Greek, and the term is an indication of very late date.)
Cap. i begins:
When our Lord Jesus Christ had wrought many and great and unwonted wonders in Judaea, and for that cause was envied by
