Pilate Stone

For most of the twentieth century, sceptics could plausibly argue that Pontius Pilate — the Roman governor at the centre of the Passion narratives — was attested only in the New Testament and in a handful of later Roman writers like Tacitus and Josephus. That changed in June 1961. An Italian archaeological team excavating the Roman theatre at Caesarea Maritima, the coastal capital of Roman Judea, recovered a slab of limestone that had been re-used as a step in a fourth-century renovation. When they turned it over, they found a partly damaged Latin inscription of four lines: "[…]S TIBERIEVM / [PON]TIVS PILATVS / [PRAEF]ECTVS IVDA[EA]E / […]". The stone is part of a dedication of a building, the "Tiberieum," in honour of the emperor Tiberius, by Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judea. It is the only contemporary archaeological mention of Pilate yet found and the first epigraphic confirmation of his correct Roman title — "prefect," not "procurator" as later Roman writers anachronistically called him. The original is in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; replicas stand on the original site at Caesarea.