The events of the Passion hardly appear in early Christian art, at least before the fifth century, except through the image of Christ before Pilate, as the Roman governor washes his hands. And even after the rise of powerful Passion imagery from the crucifixion to the Man of Sorrows to the resurrection, the theme of Pilate never lost its ability to inspire and to offer food for thought. In the modern era, one thinks of the riveting dialogue between Pilate and Yeshua in Mikhail Bulgakov's masterly novel, The Master and Margarita (written in the 1920s and 1930s).

The long history of the representation of Pilate in the Christian visual and textual tradition from antiquity until the Renaissance is the subject of Colum Hourihane's formidably learned and beautifully produced account, with numerous illustrations and a command that extends over a millennium of image-making in all media. The volume is in fact a tour de force of bringing together visual images and primary literary texts related to the Pilate story across the full extent of the middle ages. Hourihane's argument is controversial in places, even radical. He claims that in the early church, Pilate was an important figure whose washing of hands signified baptism and Christian conversion, and that at some point in the early middle ages (by the end of the tenth century) Pilate was assimilated along with the Jews as a persecutor of Christ to the extent that he was presumed Jewish and subjected to the habitual anti-Semitism of medieval west as a hate figure. I am sure Hourihane is right that Pilate was always a hugely complex and controversial figure, “a mass of contradictions,” wavering between being a “Pawn in God the Father's plans” and “an agent of the Devil” (1–4), but there is much that is necessarily contestable in his claims.

The weakness of the argument lies primarily in its method, which is insufficiently complex, historically nuanced, or methodologically sophisticated to cope with the extraordinary wealth and range of empirical materials, across a complex historical span, that Hourihane has so admirably gathered. Hourihane's method is to set texts beside images and to impute the arguments they make in any one period to the images that the book proposes illustrate them. “For reasons of simplicity,” he writes, “I have adopted a linear stance, moving from the fourth to the late fifteenth century. This is ideal for handling a large corpus of iconographical material and shows how Pilate changed in response to different influences and movements” (4). But what if Christianity and its attitudes to those responsible for the death of the Lord were not monolithic or linear? What if each of those “different influences and movements” has its own particular history, which interlinks with others in a complex way that allows neither simplicity nor linearity?

The flaw in the method is most directly apparent at the opening of Hourihane's story, which contains his most controversial claim—that Pilate was regarded in the early church as “a believer in Christ and possibly a baptized Christian” (371)—for a different reading of the relevant early sarcophagi, see my own paper titled, “Apology and Polemic in Early Christian Sarcophagi: Reflections on Jesus' Trial,” in Life, Death, and Representation: Some New Work on Roman Sarcophagi, ed. J. Huskinson and J. Elsner (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 359–86. Hourihane adduces a great wealth of apocryphal material to build a picture of early Christian attitudes toward Pilate. But what sort of generalization is possible from such a method? It assumes some kind of uniformity, or at least commonsense consensus, can be built out of eccentric, competing texts, about which we have relatively little empirical evidence, some of which had very small constituencies, and all of which were defined by various forms of doctrinal opposition to the non-uniform positions of more mainstream Christianities. The assumption that Pilate's washing of hands signifies Christian conversion or even baptism is a good example of the problem: I am sure that the evidence presented shows that it meant this for somebody; but it may have signaled conversion only for a very small group of consenting adults, and need have absolutely none of the larger or collective impact that Hourihane claims for it. His arguments in support of his proposition, on the basis of the visual material, are no such thing: the parallelism of the scene in which Jesus stands before Pilate as he washes his hands with the scene in which Jesus washes the feet of St. Peter—as is the case in at least four surviving sarcophagi of the late fourth century—may not be the incremental claim for baptism that Hourihane reads it as. It may equally be a visual argument by contrast and opposition with Pilate and Peter juxtaposed, as the temporal representative of imperial paganism and the spiritual representative of episcopal tradition, the former washing himself in rejection of Jesus and the latter anointed by Jesus as his successor through the washing of his feet. These kinds of problems, mutatis mutandis, apply across the scope of the book and mean that—despite its admirable survey and range of material—it needs to be handled with some care.