Pontius Pilate's Wife - in The Arts

In The Arts

Pilate's wife is often, but not usually, shown in medieval depictions of the scenes including her husband, typically standing behind him, and sometimes whispering in his ear.

She is a major character in the Tapiters' and Couchers' Play of the York Mystery Plays cycle, where she introduces herself as "Dame Precious Percula". Her dream is dictated by the Devil. He first soliloquises to the effect that if Jesus dies, he, the Devil, will lose control of men's souls. He then tells the sleeping Percula that Jesus is innocent, and that if he is condemned, she and Pilate will lose their privileged position. She wakes and sends a message to Pilate, but Annas and Caiaphas succeed in convincing him that her dream was inspired by Jesus's witchcraft.

Pilate's wife has been featured in later literature, theatre, film and television. Charlotte Brontë wrote the poem "Pilate's Wife's Dream" in 1846. The Biblical scholar Paul Maier, in Pontius Pilate: A Biographical Novel (1968), attempts to take what is known from the documented record and from there construct a fictional narrative as connective material. Maier refers to Pilate's wife as "Procula" arguing that the name "Claudia" only comes from a later tradition.

Novels inspired by Pilate's wife include The Bride of Pilate (1959) by Esther Kellner and Pilate's Wife: A Novel of the Roman Empire (2006) & Claudia: Daughter of Rome (2008) both by Antoinette May. All books use the name Claudia, and May's book depicts her parents as Roman aristocrats related by blood to Emperor Augustus. Pilate's Wife by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), written between 1929 and 1934 but posthumously published in 2000, presents Pilate's wife with the name Veronica.

In theater, the life of Pilate's wife has been the subject of the dramas “A Play for Easter” by Jewell Ellen Smith and “Claudia Procula” by Curt M. Joseph. The Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice stage musical Jesus Christ Superstar and the subsequent film version omits Pilate's wife and gives the dream about Jesus to her husband in the song Pilate's Dream.

In films, Pilate's wife was called “Proculla” in the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille epic The King of Kings; Majel Coleman played the role. She is mentioned briefly in Pilate's hand-washing scene in 1953's The Robe ("Even my wife had an opinion").Other notable cinematic references include Barbara Billingsley in the 1954 Day of Triumph, Viveca Lindfors in the 1961 King of Kings (where she is identified as the daughter of the Emperor Tiberius), Jeanne Crain in the 1962 Italian film Ponzio Pilato, and Angela Lansbury in the 1965 epic The Greatest Story Ever Told.)

In the 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ she is known as Claudia Procles (played by Claudia Gerini). In this film, Claudia fails in her effort to lobby her husband to save Jesus, and consoles Jesus' mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, as she generously hands them towels to clean up the blood from his scourging.

Pontius Pilate's wife also appeared in comedy: John Case played her in Monty Python's 1979 Life of Brian.

On television, Pilate’s wife was played by Joan Leslie in the 1951 Family Theater episode "Hill Number One" (also starring James Dean as John the Apostle) and by Geraldine Fitzgerald in the 1952 Studio One episode "Pontius Pilate" (where Procula is depicted a half-Jewish, and is brought before Pilate as a Christian rebel herself, 15 years after Jesus' death.) Hope Lange played her in the 1980 made-for-television film The Day Christ Died. More recently, Pilate's wife is featured in the 2008 TV serial The Passion, played by Esther Hall.