Who was to blame for the death of Jesus?

In 1866, the Russian historian Alexander Popov made an astonishing discovery. Leafing through a Renaissance Slavonic translation of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, Popov found detailed notes on the trial of Jesus written by none other than Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who sentenced Jesus to death. The notes, finally published in a German edition 60 years later, were impressively detailed. They described Jesus as a ‘crooked’ and ‘horse-faced’ man whose eyebrows met over his nose. They showed how he had arrived in Jerusalem in the week before his death in the company of secretly armed partisans, intending to occupy the Temple. And they proved that Pilate had been forced to act to keep the peace. The sentence he passed was lawful. Jesus was guilty, Pilate innocent.

The notes were, of course, a fabrication and they fooled few, but their declaration of Pilate’s innocence was no innovation, being part a longstanding tradition.