Pilate's Wife: A Novel of the Roman Empire

Claudia's dreams have an uncanny way of coming true. She often "sees" things, real things, before they happen. But her gift can also be a curse in a time of deadly politics and social unrest. While destiny leads her to the temple of Isis, to Pompeii's Villa of Mysteries, the infamous snake pit of Pergamon, and into the arms of the Roman magistrate, Pontius Pilate, her heart always seems to belong somewhere else.

As a rebellious child seated beside the Emperor Tiberius, Claudia first sees the powerful gladiator, Holtan, who will become her one true love. But, young and impressionable, she evokes the power of Isis to beguile and win the ambitious Pontius Pilate. When Claudia accompanies Pilate to Judaea, she is plunged into a seething cauldron of open rebellion, and despite her deep longing for Holtan, she struggles to aid Pilate, whose career depends on his maintaining order in this troubled land.

Into this morass comes Miriam of Magdala, Claudia's longtime friend. When Miriam confides her ecstatic love for the religious radical, Jesus, Claudia is beset by terrifying premonitions. Jesus is arrested by high priests who fear his power, and in the hours before his trial, Claudia has an overwhelming dream of the crucifixion in which she hears the words "suffered under Pontius Pilate." Tormented by these visions of war, injustice, and devastation, Claudia desperately seeks to save the divine martyr.

Pilate's Wife is an impressive marriage of research and imagination in which Antoinette May introduces Claudia, one of the Bible's most enigmatic figures, in an extraordinary new light. Set in a world of political intrigue, passionate family rivalries and alliances, assassinations, and unmatched social upheaval, this visionary tale rings with historic credibility and captures the spirit of the Roman Empire. Pilate's Wife puts a provocative new spin on the "greatest story ever told."

"Biographer and journalist May (Adventures of a Psychic) turns to fiction to offer a privileged woman's view of religion, spirituality, sex and marriage in the time of Christ. May imagines 14-year-old Claudia Procula living with loving parents and holding a secret devotion to the goddess Isis and a gift for seeing the future. Six years later, Claudia marries the handsome and ambitious Pontius Pilate just before her family falls from imperial favor. While Pilate busies himself with affairs of state (and those of the extramarital variety), Claudia chats with her Jewish slave Rachel, visits her gladiator lover Holtan, tangles with the conniving Empress Livia, dines at Herod's palace and attends Jesus' wedding. Though blessed with the ability to see the future, Claudia never manages to prevent the tragedies she foresees. May is at her best when unencumbered by literary or historical precedent; Claudia's sister, the unwilling Vestal Virgin Marcella, for example, is better realized than the shallowly rendered Caligula, and descriptions of Antioch and Caesarea are more compelling than those of well-known locations like Pompeii." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Biographer and journalist May (Adventures of a Psychic) turns to fiction to offer a privileged woman's view of religion, spirituality, sex and marriage in the time of Christ. May imagines 14-year-old Claudia Procula living with loving parents and holding a secret devotion to the goddess Isis and a gift for seeing the future. Six years later, Claudia marries the handsome and ambitious Pontius Pilate just before her family falls from imperial favor. While Pilate busies himself with affairs of state (and those of the extramarital variety), Claudia chats with her Jewish slave Rachel, visits her gladiator lover Holtan, tangles with the conniving Empress Livia, dines at Herod's palace and attends Jesus' wedding. Though blessed with the ability to see the future, Claudia never manages to prevent the tragedies she foresees. May is at her best when unencumbered by literary or historical precedent; Claudia's sister, the unwilling Vestal Virgin Marcella, for example, is better realized than the shallowly rendered Caligula, and descriptions of Antioch and Caesarea are more compelling than those of well-known locations like Pompeii." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"She appears in just a single verse of the Bible, but it's a riveting inflection point, a moment that dares us to imagine that events might go either way: Jesus stands before Pontius Pilate. The leaders of the Temple have accused him of treason and want him crucified, but Pilate is wavering. Then the Gospel of Matthew adds this tantalizing detail: 'When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) sent unto him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.'

The psychic wife of a Roman governor tries to stop the crucifixion of Jesus? Sounds like a plot that would make Dan Brown fall to his knees and cry 'Hallelujah!' It's the inspiration for biographer Antoinette May's first novel. She's fleshed out a few scraps of Coptic legend to create a breathy romance about Pilate's wife. May imagines her as a young woman named Claudia, whose father serves a powerful commander of the Roman army. She's also a distant member of the emperor's family, which during this period — the reign of Tiberius and his fiendish mother — is more of a death sentence than an honor.

'First, let it be said that I did not attend his crucifixion,' Pilate's wife begins. 'If you are seeking insight into that tragic affair, you will not hear it from me.' This is like sitting down with a survivor of the Titanic who announces that she has nothing to say about the sinking, and for hundreds of pages it appears that May, in fact, won't get to the Big Moment.

In a voice that swings from melodrama to self-pity, Claudia begins with her life as a military brat. This is about as rich as material gets: the world's superpower crushing all who resist, gladiators fighting to the death, young Caligula showing signs of lascivious madness, the emperor's mother snuffing out contenders for the throne. But May seems strangely unwilling to let us enter this raw, ancient world. Despite Claudia's bird's-eye view, we often learn of deadly battles via notes sent from the front line. Where we want bacchanalia, we get Victorian exclamations of shock: '`Oh!' I gasped, my cheeks flaming as I stared at his naked body.' And the book's chronic lack of irony makes Claudia's heavy-handed feminist insights particularly grating. Watching 800 slaves rowing her boat, for instance, she says, 'I saw similarities between their lot and my own. No overseer lashed my shoulders, but was I any less a slave?' Well, Claudia, you might try asking one of them before he's whipped to death. Much of this has the earnestness of a school-approved YA novel: 'Oh, little sister, what will they do to me?'

Release the lions, I say.

Still, the faithful read on, encouraged by the sighting of an ambitious officer named Pilate — 'sleek and handsome like a young leopard.' Although he's looking for a woman with a large dowry, Claudia snags him with a magic serum. 'The potion had worked beyond my wildest dreams,' she says, and maybe circa 27 A.D. she was the first person to use these cliches. 'We were a golden couple. What could ever change that?' In fact, their marriage is quickly wracked with jealousies and betrayals on both sides. In search of solace, she becomes a follower of the Egyptian goddess Isis, which inspires some exciting scenes but also too many New Age howlers such as: 'Isis is for everyone. ... We are all part of each other like leaves in some giant tree.' In any case, neither Claudia's feminism nor her spirituality keeps her from jeopardizing her life by panting after a hunky gladiator because he's 'so, so ... masculine.'

If the bulk of this Roman romance is merely overwrought, its long-delayed climax is surprisingly offensive. Many scholars suggest that the exculpatory portrayal of Pilate in the New Testament arose from the early Christians' desire to curry favor with Rome and distinguish themselves from other Jewish groups. And so the Gospels show us Pilate, the representative of Rome, reluctant to condemn Jesus, convinced of the man's innocence, disgusted with the Jews' hatred, determined to wash his hands of the whole dirty business. All leading up to that horrible verse in Matthew when the Jews yell, 'His blood be on us, and on our children.'

Throughout the novel, May presents a wildly unorthodox version of Jesus' life: Her Jesus studies in the temple of Isis; he marries a rich prostitute in an ecumenical wedding that blends Egyptian and Jewish traditions; he's given a sleeping potion to fake his death on the cross. Of course, such inventions are all within the novelist's right — as someone once wryly asked, 'What is truth?' But when it comes to Jesus' trial, May suddenly gets religion and hews to the few blood-soaked Gospel verses that have served as the bedrock of Christian anti-Semitism for 2,000 years. Again and again, May exonerates Pilate to remove any doubt about who murdered the son of God. 'Clearly, Pilate was the one reasoning mind against a rabid mob,' Claudia tells us — despite the fact that she's estranged from him and sleeping with another man.

Long before Mel Gibson clarified his attitudes about Jews during that infamous traffic incident, he noted that the apparently anti-Semitic statements in his 'Passion of Christ' were merely lifted verbatim from the Bible texts. But May takes such license with those texts throughout most of her story that she has forfeited even that specious defense of her conclusion. And so we're left to wonder why a writer would want to resurrect this deadly old prejudice.

Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Suffers from an unlikely, sweetly sentimental conclusion, but May's vivid settings, founded in research, make this quick read of a romantic adventure enjoyable." Kirkus Reviews

"May's fiction debut is a fresh and vivid retelling of a well-known story comparable in scope to Anita Diamant's The Red Tent and Elizabeth Cunningham's The Passion of Mary Magdalene. One hopes this is the first of many novels by this excellent author." Library Journal

"Though this is an admiring depiction of Christianity's beginnings, Pilate's Wife is not for those who interpret the Bible literally. But readers with a flexible vision of Christ's divinity...just might give Pilate's Wife the thumbs-up." USA Today

The co-author of the New York Times bestselling Adventures of a Psychic, a biography of clairvoyant Sylvia Browne, makes her fiction debut with this awe-inspiring retelling of the last days of Jesus, as seen through the eyes of the wife of Pontius Pilate.

From Antoinette May, a New York Times bestselling author and striking new voice in literature, comes PILATE'S WIFE, the amazing story of Claudia, the seer who foresaw the persecution of Christians at the hand of the Romans and tried to stop the crucifixion of Jesus.

In the hours before Jesus' trial, Claudia, wife to Pontius Pilate, Roman magistrate of Jerusalem, has a vision in her sleep. She sees a man she has met before, Jesus, the husband of her friend Mary of Magdala, nailed to a crucifix, writhing in pain and offered only vinegar to quench his thirst. She sees men marching off to war, crosses emblazoned on their chests as they pillage foreign lands. She sees men and women fed to lions and burned alive. And she hears the name of her husband passed down through history... "suffered under Pontius Pilate."

Pulling from extensive research, Antoinette May recreates the known world of twoandndash;thousand years ago and puts an imaginative new twist on "the greatest story ever told." PILATE'S WIFE follows the life of Claudia as she travels to the battlefield of Gaul, the coliseum in Rome, the temples of Isis in Alexandria, and the holy temple in Jerusalem. The novel tells the story of Claudia's life as a mystic, describing the visions she saw leading up to her great vision of the crucifixion, but also her life as a woman, one torn between her duties as the wife of a Roman magistrate and her desires for the true love she has found with a gladiator.

Weaving together a vivid portrait of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the first millennium, the infighting and passions of the Roman royalty and upperandndash;class, and an aweandndash;inspiring recreation of the last days of Jesus, PILATE'S WIFE will offer a shocking new look at a story we thought we once new.

Antoinette May is the author of several books, and the coauthor of Adventures of a Psychic, a biography of contemporary clairvoyant Sylvia Browne, which spent forty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. She is a regular contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle, and has had articles published in Cosmopolitan, Country Living, Self, the San Diego Union, Los Angeles Times, and San Jose Mercury News. Pilate's Wife is her first novel.