On Thought For the Day on Thursday, John Bell, a member of the Iona community, made the assertion that women make fairer judges than men. Might the course of history have been different, he wondered, “if Jesus’s fate had been decreed not by Pilate, who feared his political paymasters, but by Pilate’s wife who, given the same evidence, was convinced that Jesus was innocent”?
Mr Bell presumably imagines Mrs Pilate as a kind of biblical Cherie Booth, studying the Human Rights Charter before concluding that in seeking to undermine the Romans, Jesus was merely exercising his right to self-expression. Maybe that is exactly what Mrs Pilate would have been like, but it is unfair not to point out that Pontius, too, was a pioneer of the principles of liberal justice: he let the thief go free.