Tiberius

132:0.1Since Gonod car­ried greet­ings from the princes of In­dia to Tiberius, the Ro­man ruler, on the third day af­ter their ar­rival in Rome the two In­di­ans and Je­sus ap­peared be­fore him. The mo­rose em­peror was un­usu­ally cheer­ful on this day and chat­ted long with the trio. And when they had gone from his pres­ence, the em­peror, re­fer­ring to Je­sus, re­marked to the aide stand­ing on his right, “If I had that fel­low’s kingly bear­ing and gra­cious man­ner, I would be a real em­peror, eh?”

136:2.8(Je­sus was al­most thirty-one and one-half years old when he was bap­tized. While Luke says that Je­sus was bap­tized in the fif­teenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cae­sar, which would be A.D. 29 since Au­gus­tus died in A.D. 14, it should be re­called that Tiberius was co­em­peror with Au­gus­tus for two and one-half years be­fore the death of Au­gus­tus, hav­ing had coins struck in his honor in Oc­to­ber, A.D. 11. The fif­teenth year of his ac­tual rule was, there­fore, this very year of A.D. 26, that of Je­sus’ bap­tism. And this was also the year that Pon­tius Pi­late be­gan his rule as gov­er­nor of Judea.)

185:1.6It is sig­nif­i­cant that, while this vac­il­lat­ing Ro­man ruler sac­ri­ficed Je­sus to his fear of the Jews and to safe­guard his per­sonal po­si­tion, he fi­nally was de­posed as a re­sult of the need­less slaugh­ter of Samar­i­tans in con­nec­tion with the pre­ten­sions of a false Mes­siah who led troops to Mount Ger­izim, where he claimed the tem­ple ves­sels were buried; and fierce ri­ots broke out when he failed to re­veal the hid­ing place of the sa­cred ves­sels, as he had prom­ised. As a re­sult of this episode, the lega­tus of Syria or­dered Pi­late to Rome. Tiberius died while Pi­late was on the way to Rome, and he was not reap­pointed as procu­ra­tor of Judea. He never fully re­cov­ered from the re­gret­ful con­dem­na­tion of hav­ing con­sented to the cru­ci­fix­ion of Je­sus. Find­ing no fa­vor in the eyes of the new em­peror, he re­tired to the prov­ince of Lau­sanne, where he sub­se­quently com­mit­ted sui­cide.

185:1.1If Pon­tius Pi­late had not been a rea­son­ably good gov­er­nor of the mi­nor prov­inces, Tiberius would hardly have suf­fered him to re­main as procu­ra­tor of Judea for ten years. Al­though he was a fairly good ad­min­is­tra­tor, he was a moral cow­ard. He was not a big enough man to com­pre­hend the na­ture of his task as gov­er­nor of the Jews. He failed to grasp the fact that these He­brews had a real re­li­gion, a faith for which they were will­ing to die, and that mil­lions upon mil­lions of them, scat­tered here and there through­out the em­pire, looked to Je­ru­sa­lem as the shrine of their faith and held the San­hedrin in re­spect as the high­est tri­bu­nal on earth.