Did This Ring Belong to the Man Who Sentenced Jesus to Die? 

In 2018, a ring originally excavated decades earlier at the palace-fortress Herodium began to make waves in the media. A cleaning of the ring revealed that it was inscribed with an image of a vessel and Greek letters that spelled “ΠIΛATO” (Pilato), a Roman name most famously associated with Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea and the man who sentenced Jesus of Nazareth to death. Perhaps this first century A.D. ring once belonged to the Roman official himself?

From the beginning, scholars were divided. At the risk of being rude, the ring was quite cheaply made, and the formulation of the inscription was highly unusual. It was hard to believe that a wealthy Roman prefect had ever worn this. And yet, the Latin name is an unusual one in Judea, and the ring was found at a Roman administrative center in a military fortress. The debate was never settled and began to gather dust.

(Who Was the Real Pontius Pilate?)

Now UCLA professor Catherine Bonesho has put forth a new solution in an article published this month in Palestine Exploration Quarterly. Bonesho proposes that the ring belonged to a lower-level, possibly enslaved worker in the Roman administration who used the ring to mark goods destined for Pilate, as well as authorize communications and legitimize sales.

The initial problem with connecting the ring to Pilate is the caliber of the product. It’s made of an inexpensive copper alloy, the kind of metal used in signet rings for lower-status artisans and freedmen, and the craftsmanship was far from expert. The initial analysis concluded that it was “not prepared by a master smith.” Furthermore, the vessel pictured in the center of the ring, Bonesho tells me, is similar to the kinds of calyx krater vessels shown on other Jewish first- and second-century objects. This suggests, she adds, that the ring was manufactured locally. Overall, it seems too simple to have been worn by someone of Pilate’s social status.

Then there’s the Greek inscription. Three letters are set on each side of the vessel in the center and, when read clockwise, spell out ΠIΛATO. Ordinarily, if the Latin name Pilatus was translated into Greek, we would expect it to read Pilatos or perhaps Pilatou to signify “belonging to Pilate.” These are the Greek grammatical forms that we usually find on signet rings or stamps. This spelling is not found elsewhere and, as a result, scholars have been puzzled.

The confusing evidence led scholars to hypothesize that perhaps the inscription should be read as two abbreviated words rather than one. Three different reconstructions have been proposed but all of them are very rare phrases, and the comparative evidence comes from different time periods. None of them can explain how the ring came to be found at Herodium.

(Decoding the Lost Scripts of the Ancient World.)

Bonesho points to a third option for reading the ring’s inscription. She argues that it should be read in the dative form meaning “for/to Pilate.” The reason this option had not been taken seriously beforehand is that the dative form should be spelled ΠIΛATΩ with a long-o omega (Ω), whereas this inscription spells out ΠIΛATO with a short-o omicron (O). Bonesho argues it’s essentially a typo in the Greek transliteration of the Latin dative, which she tells me was very common at the time. Latin was still a fledgling language used primarily by those in the Roman administration and military, whereas Greek was widely used throughout Judea. Transliterating Latin into Greek script was important, Bonesho says, because “it increased the likelihood that someone would understand the inscription once it had been stamped onto an object.” There are many other examples of this in inscriptions from first-century Jerusalem.

However, studies of bilingualism in this period show that Latin letter forms seep into people’s Greek writing. So whoever was transliterating the Latin “o” in this instance may have assumed it should be written like the Greek “o” omicron.

If the ring reads “to/from Pilate,” then it begs the question of who owned it and what did they use it for? Here Bonesho turns to the site where the ring was found. In the first century A.D., Herodium, the palace-fortress 14 kilometers to the south of Jerusalem where the ring was found, was a Roman administrative site. In his book Class and Power in Roman Palestine, University of Texas early Christian historian Anthony Keddie shows that sites like Herodium that were close to Jerusalem were tasked with a high proportion of administrative work. There is ample evidence, Bonesho adds, of administrators using sealing rings to authenticate letters and official documents. In the case of this ring, she said, it may have been used to mark goods that were destined for or had come from Pilate.

(How Enslaved People Built the Roman Empire.)

Given that the ring was found in a Roman administrative center, is inscribed in transliterated Latin, and uses the historically and bureaucratically significant name Pilate, Bonesho thinks that the ring was used by “a low-level worker participating in the management of the Roman province on behalf of Pilate.” She adds that the ring’s user may not have been directly employed by Pilate, or have met him, but they formed part of the management of the whole region. It’s likely, she added, that this anonymous person was one of the many enslaved workers who supported the Roman bureaucratic machine.

Other scholars have found Bonesho’s arguments persuasive. Jeremiah Coogan, a historian at the Jesuit School of Theology, calls the argument “incisive” and says that "Bonesho’s examination of evidence for the day-to-day workings of finance and administration in Roman Palestine helps us get outside a focus only on “Pilate” himself to the many others (often enslaved) who labored in his name.” The ring may not have belonged to Pilate, but it does offer insight into his administration.