Skip to main content

Pontius Pilate


I happened across this short article on what we do and don't know about the historical Pontius Pilate.  Good reading for Holy Saturday evening.

The author notes at the end that authors and artists have always been fascinated by Pilate.  One he doesn't mention--a favorite of mine--is the Swiss author and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who wrote a short early play entitled Pilatus.  Dürrenmatt, who initially hoped to become a painter before turning to writing, also painted the image of Pilate above.  I don't believe there is an English version of the play, however.

The author also mentions various legends about what happened to Pilate, but not my own preferred favorite.  According to one story his corpse eventually found its last resting place in Lake Lucerne, at the base of Mount Pilatus, in Switzerland.  Several years ago, in 2013, my family spent a few weeks in Switzerland during the summer, and we wanted to take a special outing before we left, and also give our children a chance to go up a mountain.  So we took a boat ride across Lake Lucerne and then rode the cogwheel railway--the world's steepest!--up the side of Pilatus.  Our route was in fact the "Golden Round Trip" referred to in the Wikipedia article I linked to a few lines above.  It was quite an experience.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chinese Painting

The Wall Street Journal  has been running some interesting articles under the heading of "The Staying Inside Guide," offering suggestions for artistic or cultural resources to view online during the pandemic.  Yesterday I came across an interesting one entitled "Immersive Painted Worlds," on Chinese painting, about which I know virtually nothing.  (The article may be behind a subscription firewall.) The article has an impressive number of links to various things online, and I watched the first couple, a pair of 15-minute videos from a former BBC program called "The Culture Show," which together form an episode on "The Art of Chinese Painting."  I thought they were quite interesting.  The first episode introduced me to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , which I had never heard of before.  Located in the Gobi Desert, they contain a wealth of wall paintings and statues that are well over 1000 years old and were unknown to the outside world for cen...
Post a Comment
Read more

Paris Cafes Open Again

Now this is good news: I just read in the Times  that cafés in Paris are once again able to open for outdoor service .  I've never even been to Paris, but that is still a welcome sign. I have written before--it probably deserves another reflection sometime--that this lockdown has not been a big deal for me.  I worry about the college, and naturally I'm not thrilled about a salary cut forced by the college's losses.  But in terms of my day-to-day life, the lockdown is more or less irrelevant.  It makes grocery shopping more of a pain, and it keeps me away from my office, but otherwise interferes with little that I want to do. But the thing that I do miss is the opportunity to get to Europe once in a while.  I had to cancel a planned trip to Germany with students over Easter.  And this very morning, as it happens, I was supposed to arrive in Poland for a conference of the Austrian Studies Association.  Alas, those trips were not to be. And ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dursli

Back to Gotthelf!  I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink.  Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend  ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ).  This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor.  But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution.  Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...
Post a Comment
Read more