Pontius Pilate's Name Is Found on 2,000-Year-Old Ring

[left-of-center2012]

A ring discovered 50 years ago has reignited excitement among archaeologists after new research revealed a possible connection to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea who tried Jesus. The 2,000-year-old stamping ring bears the inscription 'of Pilatus' in Greek letters and was one of many artefacts found during excavations at Herod's burial tomb half a century ago.

Professor Gideon Forster from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem discovered the copper ring during a dig in the 1960s but it is only recently that researchers using advanced photography were able to decipher the inscription, reports the New York Times.

The ring, which was also etched with the picture of a wine vessel, would have been used by officials to seal and stamp documents. The newspaper reports that it is only the second artifact to have been discovered from that period bearing Pilate's name. The location of the discovery at Herod's fortress, near Bethlehem in the West Bank, makes the clue all the more tantalising as Roman officials stationed at Jerusalem may also have been buried at the site.

Professor Danny Schwartz told Haaretz that the name 'Pilatus' was not common at the time. 'I don't know of any other Pilatus from the period and the ring shows he was a person of stature and wealth,' he said. Roi Porat, one of the authors of the report commented to The Times of Israel, 'We have a ring inscribed with the name Pilate and the personal connection just cries out.’

https://www.christiantoday.com/article/2000-year-old-ring-discovered-bearing-name-of-pontius-pilate/131102.htm

?w=634&h=380

[Jake Stern]

1. How do you get "Pontius Pilate" from that???

[3Hotdogs]

2. The same way you get "No Collusion" from Muller's report.

[Voltaire2]

3. So further down in the article

'We think it implausible that a prefect would have used a simple, all-metal, copper-alloy personal sealing ring with a motif that was already a well-known Jewish motif in Judea before and during his rule,' the report says.

It’s not.

[trotsky]

4. Faith, I guess.

[Major Nikon]

5. Except we know PP was a real person

So at least this artifact has some plausibility to it, unlike the ~1st century religious buildings they keep digging up in Israel which have a “connection” to Christian figures and coincidentally are good for the religious tourism industry.

[Act_of_Reparation]

6. Pretty interesting...

...that a relatively inconsequential Roman Prefect is attested to more thoroughly than the human form of the omnipotent creator of the universe.

I mean, it's almost like of one of them ain't real.

[Major Nikon]

8. It was at least around 70 years before anyone bothered to write anything down about him

Meanwhile we know far more about Socrates who lived 5 centuries before because people started writing things he said down at the time.

As far as Jesus goes, real or not it's a pretty safe bet at least a majority if not all of the story is manufactured out of convenience. Even after it was manufactured the story evolved from one of a Rabbi with a highly debatable messianic claim to a deity.

[MineralMan]

9. Yes. Someone noticed a minor Roman official but not

the incarnate God and Savior. That makes sense.

That there are no contemporaneous mentions of Jesus Christ or Yehushua or Yeshua or whatever his actual name might have been is telling. This is the man-god who promised people eternal life, raised people from the dead, and healed the sick with just some words.

You'd think someone would have noticed and jotted down notes about what he said, you know...A generation later, supposedly, some people who never actually saw this man-god did write some stuff down, but we have mere fragments of that. It all needed to be "fleshed out" by later writers, apparently.

Still, the story was such a good one, complete with a shortcut to salvation, that it became the dominant religion of part of the planet, in one way or another.

Hmm...

[Igel]

10. Until the 1960s there was pretty much nothing.

Just copies of histories written down after the events by people who weren't present.

That a ruler and chief administrator, even a minor one by Imperial terms, in an area that was rife with Roman public works would leave some physical traces behind is expected. Which is why, if you read critical works in the 1950s, there's doubt as to whether Pilate even existed or if he, too, was some made-up figure.

Doubt's easy. Was reading this archeological account of a dig in Jerusalem. Apparently in the 1099 First Crusade there was an attack on a Muslim fortress. Attacked from the south, the fortress held. The Crusaders had to cross a ditch, and while they tried to fill it in it still provided enough protection to the fortress and disruption to the attackers that the southern attack failed. It wasn't until there was an attack from the north that the fortress fell. That was the accounts, histories written centuries ago about that event.

However, historians were like, "WTFs a ditch doing there? Why should there be a ditch? There ain't no f-ing ditch there now. The historian wasn't personally, there, so maybe somebody just made it up. Maybe the historian made it up? C'mon, prove it to me--and if you can't prove it, then I think you're either lying or just really in error. Let me authoritatively theorize how the historian's error happened and tell you the truth about what actually happened, and that'll get me another publication for my c.v." Except that a recent dig at the location showed there was a ditch there at the time of the attack. All the critics bet on their own ego and took lack of physical evidence but with near-contemporary accounts as evidence of absence. No southern attack in 1099. No Pontius Pilate.

We're willing to believe indigenous oral traditions from the Americans and Africa that go back hundreds and hundreds of years. But if was written down from eyewitnesses, if it was written down 20 or 30 years after the fact, well, who can trust *that*? (Listened today to a historian talking about the Clotilda, and discussing accounts written down decades after the fact by writers of the last surviving male from that slave ship, in which they discussed things that happened during the man's childhood. People using those texts are working at a greater remove in time that gospel writers would have been from 30 AD. Some things we believe true because we want to; some things we believe false because we want to.)

[trotsky]

13. Ugh.

So many things wrong with that but I'll just focus on the two most glaring. For both, I'd like you to keep in mind the adage of "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

We're willing to believe indigenous oral traditions from the Americans and Africa that go back hundreds and hundreds of years.

Many oral traditions of native peoples describe locations of now-unknown civilizations. Nothing extraordinary about that. And we can confirm it - sending archaeological teams to focus on a particular site (and sometimes finding it!). Other oral traditions center around hunting areas or agricultural operations, etc. Again, ordinary and quite verifiable in many cases.

Do you have any specific examples of extraordinary claims in oral traditions that we believe without evidence? Please share them if you do.

But if was written down from eyewitnesses, if it was written down 20 or 30 years after the fact, well, who can trust *that*?

When the claims are extraordinary, AND when there is literally no evidence that any "eyewitnesses" of Jesus (let alone the guy himself) actually wrote ANYTHING, then yeah, there is no reason to believe what you as a Christian accept as testimony. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You do realize that none of the men whose names are on the gospels actually *wrote* them, right?

[MineralMan]

7. It actually reads PILATO

Remember, it would create a mirror image if used as a stamp.

ΠΙΛΑΤΟ

[Igel]

11. Some forget that Greek would have been the Imperial language in the area.

And that Greek doesn't use English.

It's the equivalent of people who think the Bible was written in KJV English.

[MineralMan]

12. Yup. It's funny, really.

[Voltaire2]

14. 1st century the official language was Latin.

[MineralMan]

15. Still, the inscription on that cheap copper ring

is in Greek. What does it mean? That's another question altogether. In reality, we have nothing - just an old ring that reads "PILATO" in Greek as a mirror image, as a ring designed to stamp something would be.

Was it Pontius Pilate's ring? Why would he have a ring made of a copper alloy. Why not silver or gold? Did he personally stamp goods with such a ring? Doubtful. If the ring has anything to do with Pontious Pilate, it was probably one used by some underling of his in some commercial way. For example, I have a Mickey Mouse ring made of pot metal that I got in 1955 at Disneyland. That ring does not prove that Mickey Mouse is a real mouse, nor that it ever existed as such.

Like most archaeological finds of this sort, what we have is an object. The story behind that object is, and will remain, unknown.

Same with a Byzantine-period church. Will they find an inscription that relates to Peter or Andrew? Well, since those weren't actually their names, probably not. And even if there was an inscription, it couldn't have been made before the middle of the fourth century, since that's when the Byzantine period starts. So, all we have is some eight century Bishop claiming that "it is said that" the church was built on the site of the home of Peter and Andrew. "It is said" is not evidence, some 700+ years later. Who said it? Nobody who actually knows, Bishop.

[NeoGreen]

16. Does "Pilato' have meaning in-of-itself in Greek? Is it a...

...name? Or some other meaning, speculatively 'Approved', 'Received', 'Noted', 'Rejected' etc. or any other meaning?

Could it be a contraction (is that a thing in historic Greek?) or some other short-form script?

[MineralMan]

17. Nope. I ran it through Google Translate, which just gave me: PILATO from

the Greek works. Now that's modern Greek, but a word like that would probably have existed in Classical Greek, if it meant something in modern Greek.

I don't doubt that it was a reference to Pontius Pilate, but what does that mean, really?

[NeoGreen]

18. I'm not willing to make such an assurance...

...I'd need to evaluate whether 'pilate' has some other usage in Greek, in the same way that in English 'Miller' or 'Potter' can be used as both names and descriptions of occupations.

I'd also want to evaluate if the word or similar words have different meanings such as 'bark' (i.e. dog vs tree) and 'nail' (wood vs finger) in English.

I's also like to research whether there are words in historic Greek that have a similar structure as the apparent inscribed word 'Pilato' similar to in English where 'tick' and 'tack' have very similar spelling/structure but very different meanings.

Also, I'd like to know if there have been similar rings unearthed and what the speculations were on their meaning and usage.

[MineralMan]

19. Sorry. I can't help you with that. I have no knowledge of Greek

from any period.

[Act_of_Reparation]

20. It's the Greek form of a Latin name.

"Pilato" is the Greek form of the Latin word "Pilatus". It could mean a couple of things. "Freeman" or "Spearman", perhaps.

[Voltaire2]

21. still if the claim is that it is a 'seal' ring for signing

it wouldn't be greek, it would be latin. It also wouldn't be copper. He was a Prefect. That was a hugely important position in the empire. The article is typical 'biblical archaeology' horseshit.

[MineralMan]

22. I agree.

[raccoon]

23. Even if it was Pilate's ring (some good posts here about

Why that’s very doubtful, to say the least) , it wouldn’t prove that Jesus existed or that Pilate tried him.

Thanks for posting this.

[uriel1972]

24. I wholeheartedley agree...

The existence of one does nothing to p[rove the existence of the other.