seized the sacred money at the Temple and employed it in building an aqueduct, a piece of utilitarian profanity which enraged the Jews to such an extent that a vast crowd gathered, clamouring against Pilate and insisting on the stoppage of the works.  Then the governor sent soldiers among the people, disguised in the garb of civilians, who at a given signal drew their clubs and attacked them more savagely than Pilate had intended, killing and wounding a great number.  Although Josephus does not mention the incident recorded by St Luke (xiii. 1), in which Pilate mingled the blood of some Galilean pilgrims with their sacrifices, this is entirely in accordance with his brutality of conduct in the events the historian records.  Philo goes further, giving a story told by Agrippa, according to which Pilate hung gilt shields in the palace of Herod at Jerusalem, but was compelled to take them down as the result of an appeal to Tiberius Caesar, and adding that Agrippa described Pilate as “inflexible, merciless, and obstinate.”  He says that Pilate dreaded lest the Jews should go on an embassy to the emperor, impeaching him for “his corruptions, his acts of insolence, his rapine, and his habit of insulting people; his cruelty, and his continual murders of people untried and uncondemned, and his never-ending, gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity.”  Josephus is not trustworthy, always writing “with a motive,” and Philo must be considered prejudiced, since he saw too much of the worst side of the Roman treatment of Jews; and the wholly unfavourable verdict of these two writers should be qualified by what we read in the New Testament concerning the subject of them.  The interesting point is that we have to go to the Christian documents for the more calm and just estimate of the man who crucified Christ.  This fact should deepen our sense of the fairness of the evangelists.  They evince nothing of that bitterness of resentment which the Jews, quite naturally, as the world judges, cherished towards their oppressors.  They were the followers of One who had taught them to love their enemies, and who, when in mortal agony, prayed to God to forgive the men who had inflicted it.  But further, the early Christians discriminated between the Jewish authorities, who planned and purposed the death of Christ and really compassed it, and Pilate, who was but a weak instrument in the hands of these men.  The fact that the evangelists so clearly mark this distinction is a sign that they are in close touch with the events, and that they faithfully record what they know to have taken place.  In a word, it is clear that we have a more just and accurate portrait of Pilate in our Gospels than the representations of him by Josephus and Philo, who are thus seen to be less trustworthy historians than the New Testament writers.