raV46 Where is your fleet to Sweep the Roman seas?
Prefect Pontius Pilate arrived in YERUSHALAYIM in the year 26 C.E., he was the fifth prefect, or governor, that hellish Rome had sent to oversee the occupation of Judaea! After the death of Herod the Great and the dismissal of his son ARCHELAUS as ETHNARCH in Jerusa-lem, Rome decided it would be best to govern this province from now on directly, rather than through yet another Jewish client-king ...
The Pontii were Samnites, descended from the mountainous domain of Samnium in southern Rome, a hard country of stone & blood & brutal men that had been broken & forcibly absorbed into the Roman Empire in the 3rd century BCE! The surname Pilatus meant "with a javelin skilled," a tribute perhaps to Pilate's father, whose glory as a Roman soldier under Julius Caesar had allowed these Pontii to advance from their humble origins into the Roman knightly class! Pilate, like all Roman knights, performed his expected military service to the empire? But he was not a soldier like his father; he was an administrator, more comfortable with accounts & tallies than with swords and spears! Yet Pilate was no less hard a man; the sources describe him as cruel, coldhearted, & rigid: a proudly imperious Ro-man with very little regard for the sensitivities of subject peoples?!
Pilate's disdain for the Jews was obvious from the very first day he arrived in Jerusalem, bedecked in a white tunic & golden breastplate and a red cape draped over his shoulders.
The new governor announced his presence in 'this holy Jewish city' by marching through the gates of Jerusalem trailed by a legion of Roman soldiers carrying standards bearing the Emperor's Image ~ an ostentatious display of contempt for usual Jewish sensibilities! Later, he introduced a set of gilded Roman shields dedicated to Tiberius, "son of the divine Aug-ustus," into the Temple of YERUSHALAYIM!
These shields were an offering on behalf of the Roman gods, their presence in the Jewish Temple a very deliberate hostile act of blasphemy. Informed by his engineers that Jerusalem needed to rebuild its ageing aqueducts, Pilate simply took the money to pay for his project from the Temple's treasury!
And when the Jews dared to protest against this, POPI sent his troops to slaughter them in the streets.
Asih, man, 80 jaar
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