Anne-Catherine Baudoin, Ponce Pilate: La construction d’une figure dans la littérature patristique et apocryphe. Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2023, 878 pp.

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion in scholarly interest in the reception of apocryphal literature in the medieval world. Concomitant with renewed attention to the textual traditions of anonymous and pseudepigraphical gospels and epistles from antiquity are new studies of ancient narratives about the apostles and their followers, in which they appear as characters. While the lion’s share of these characters were Christians, one of the most popular figures in patristic and apocryphal literature was Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea who presided over the trial of Jesus Christ and reluctantly ordered his execution. In a massive volume almost nine hundred pages in length, Anne-Catherine Baudoin offers an encyclopedic study of the many different representations of Pilate in Christian literature from eastern and western traditions. What emerges from this study is the plasticity (la plasticité) of Pilate’s image in the hands of numerous exegetes and authors, who returned to this pivotal and enigmatic character time and again to answer questions about who was culpable for the death of Jesus.