Note 9 — Chapter I · HISTORICAL METHOD

The Pilate myth Why was Jesus crucified by Pilate? For an answer to this let us for a little quit “the very stimulating and informing works,” as Dr. Drews calls them, of Mr. Robertson, and turn to Dr. Drews’s own work on The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus.9 For there we find the true “astral myth interpretation” in all its glory. The Pilate of Christian legend was, so we learn, not originally an historical person at all; the whole story of Christ is to be taken in an astral sense; and Pilate in particular represents the story of Orion, the javelin-man (Pilatus), with the Arrow or Lance constellation (Sagitta), which is supposed to be very long in the Greek myth, and reappears in the Christian legend under the name of Longinus …. In the astral myth the Christ hanging on the cross or world-tree (i.e., the Milky Way) is killed by the lance of Pilatus …. The Christian population of Rome told the legend of a javelin-man, a Pilatus, who was supposed to have been responsible for the death of the Saviour. Tacitus heard the myth repeated, and, like the fool he was, took it that Pilate the javelin-man was no other than Pilate the Roman procurator of Judæa under Tiberius, who must have been known to him from the books of Josephus.10 Accordingly, Tacitus sat down and penned his account of the wholesale massacre and burning of Christians by Nero in the fifteenth book of his Annals.