For someone who's the bad guy in the New Testament, Pontius Pilate is shown as a pretty decent chap.

He probably tips well, pets the neighbour's dog, helps old ladies cross the street, that kind of thing.

But why exactly is the official who sentenced Jesus to death depicted as such a nice guy?

To try and get to the bottom of this, we are going to be taking a look at his

depiction in some non-canonical texts.

Welcome to misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show, where a six-time New York

Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, uncovers the many fascinating, little-known

facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host,

Megan Lewis. Let's begin. So as I said in my introduction, we're going to be talking about

Pontius Pilate, and we're going to be using a non-canonical text called the Act of Pilot. But when did you first come across this particular

writing? Yeah, you know, this writing is not well known, even among New Testament scholars. It turns out,

as we'll talk about, there's a whole string of books connected with Pontius Pilate not found in the New Testament, where he really is portrayed as a pretty good guy. And I guess it's a little bit odd that New Testament scholars don't know about it, but it's not really their fault. We're not taught it. I mean, I wasn't taught anything about it, except for my graduate school, my mentor, Bruce Metzger, would sometimes tell funny stories from the Apocrypha. He told some stories from the Acts of Pilot. Well, that's pretty interesting.

I didn't really know much about it or any of the other pilot literature until many years later,

and I didn't become intimately familiar with this text or the other pilot Gospels they're called

just, you know, God, I don't know, 10, 12 years

ago when I, my colleague and I, Zocoplasia, produced an addition of the Gospels not in the New

Testament. And we had to translate everything from Greek and Latin and Coptic. And so I had to

translate all of these pilot texts. And man, they're really fascinating. I was thinking at the time,

these things are so understudied. I mean, even scholars in early Christianity, let alone New

Testament, don't do much with them, but they're pretty fascinating, as we're going to see,

and important in ways for understanding, not the historical pilot so much, but understanding

how Christianity developed and how Christian hatred of Jews

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