Note 112 — Chapter III · RETIREMENT TO THE MOUNT OF OLIVES, ARREST, TRIAL, CONDEMNATION AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS.

As a circumstance which had especial weight with Pilate in favour of Jesus, and moved him to make the proposal relative to Barabbas as urgently as possible, it is stated by Matthew that while the procurator sat on his tribunal, his wife,112 in consequence of a disturbing dream, sent to him a warning to incur no responsibility in relation to that just man (xxvii. 19). Not only Paulus, but even Olshausen, explains this dream as a natural result of what Pilate’s wife might have heard of Jesus and of his capture on the preceding evening; to which may be added as an explanatory conjecture, the notice of the Evangelium Nicodemi, that she was pious, θεοσεβὴς, and judaizing, ἰουδαΐζουσα.113 Nevertheless, as constantly in the New Testament, and particularly in the Gospel of Matthew, dreams are regarded as a special dispensation from heaven, so this assuredly in the opinion of the narrator happened non sine numine; and hence it should be possible to conceive a motive and an object for the dispensation. If the dream were really intended to prevent the death of Jesus, taking the orthodox point of view, in which this death was necessary for the salvation of man, we must be led to the opinion of some of the ancients, that it may have been the devil who suggested that dream to the wife of the procurator, in order to hinder the propitiatory death;114 if on the contrary, the dream were not intended to prevent the death of Jesus, its object must have been limited to Pilate or his wife. But as far as Pilate was concerned, so late a warning could only aggravate his guilt, without sufficing to deter him from the step already half taken; while that his wife was converted by means of this dream, as many have supposed,115 is totally unattested by history or tradition, and such an object is not intimated in the narrative. But, as the part which Pilate himself plays in the evangelical narrative is such as to exhibit the blind hatred of the fellow-countrymen of Jesus in contrast with the impartial judgment of a Gentile; so his wife is made to render a testimony to Jesus, in order that, not only out of the mouth of babes and sucklings (Matt. xxi. 16), but also out of the mouth of a weak woman, praise might be prepared for him; and to increase its importance it is traced to a significant dream. To give this an appearance of probability, similar instances are adduced from profane history of dreams which have acted as presentiments and warnings before a sanguinary catastrophe:116 but the more numerous are these analogous cases, the more is the suspicion excited that as the majority of these, so also the dream in our evangelical passage, may have been fabricated after the event, for the sake of heightening its tragical effect.