might at least have honoured him as a physician. Your own deceitful writing to me has condemned you.
As you unjustly sentenced him, I shall justly sentence you, and your accomplices as well.
Pilate, Archelaus, Philip, Annas, and Caiaphas were arrested.
Rachaab and the soldiers slew all the Jewish males, defiled the women, and brought the leaders to Rome. On the way Caiaphas died in Crete: the earth would not receive his body, and he was covered with a cairn of stones.
It was the old law that if a condemned criminal saw the face of the emperor he was spared: so Tiberius would not see Pilate, but shut him up in a cave.
Annas was sewed into a fresh bull's-hide, which, contracting as it dried, squeezed him to death. The other chiefs of the Jews were beheaded: Archelaus and Philip were crucified.
One day the emperor went out to hunt, and chased a hind to the door of Pilate's prison. Pilate looked out, trying to see the emperor's face, but at that moment the emperor shot an arrow at the hind, which went in at the window and killed Pilate.
The same tale is told in a Greek life of Mary Magdalene, which I have transcribed from a manuscript at Holkham, and which is evidently under strong Western influence, since it tells the story of her mission to Marseilles and of a miracle wrought on a prince there, which is a very favourite subject with French mediaeval artists.
THE DEATH OF PILATE
The Latin legend of Pilate's death hardly ranks as an apocryphal book. It is printed by Tischendorf from a Milan manuscript of the fourteenth century—the illustrated manuscript mentioned above (p. 66) under the heading of Infancy Gospels, facsimiled under the title of Canonical Histories and Apocryphal Legends. It is also found in the Golden Legend, cap. 53, as the conclusion of the fabulous life of Pilate, and is there said to be taken from 'a certain history, though an apocryphal one'. This life is found separate—usually in company with a similar life of Judas Iscariot—in manuscripts of an earlier date than the Golden Legend; but the whole composition is thoroughly mediaeval and has nothing antique about it.
The story is this:
The Emperor Tiberius, being sorely diseased, heard that there was a wonderful physician in Jerusalem, named Jesus, who healed all sicknesses. He sent an officer of his named Volusianus to Pilate to bid him send the physician to him. Pilate was terrified, knowing that Jesus had been crucified (and begged for fourteen days delay, Golden Legend). On the way back to his inn, Volusianus met a matron called Veronica and asked her about Jesus. She told him the truth, to his great grief, and, to console him added that when our Lord was away teaching she had
