Pilate, Barabbas, and the Privilegium Paschale: law and leverage in Roman Judaea

Pilate’s Passover offer to release ‘Barabbas’ has long been considered one of the least historically credible details of the Passion narrative. This paper returns to the so-called privilegium paschale once more and argues that new perspectives on law in the provinces of Rome, further reflection on the realities of government in Judaea, and the deployment of some comparative legal thinking may be able to retrieve Pilate’s offer for the historical record.