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Claudia Procula, the star of Antoinette May's new historical novel, Pilate's Wife, has a cameo in Matthew 27:19: "Just then, as Pilate was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent him this message: 'Leave that innocent man alone. I suffered through a terrible nightmare about him last night.'"
From this reference, May creates a portrait of an intriguing woman. Claudia is blessed and cursed with the ability to see into the future. She is married to the Roman governor of Judea when Jesus seizes center stage.
Mr. & Mrs. Pilate's biblical role makes them significant in religious history. But it is her journey from childhood to marriage to exile as imagined by the author that gives the novel tang. Like Anita Diamant's Old Testament blockbuster The Red Tent, Pilate's Wife makes the female experience of past millennia exotic yet universal.
The future seer of Jerusalem grows up as the cherished child of happily married Roman aristocrats related by blood to the Emperor Augustus. While various famous psychopaths such as the Empress Livia and Caligula play a role in shaping Claudia's future, May gives a sense of everyday family life around the year 16.
May effectively captures how the values of the Romans differed from ours. For example, courage was valued far more than empathy. There were no egalitarian impulses, so Claudia and her sweet mother go slave shopping without a qualm. And pre-Christian sex was not accompanied by guilt.
While watching gladiatorial combat with Emperor Tiberius, Claudia discovers her second sight. May makes this gift credible, helped perhaps because she co-wrote Sylvia Browne's best-selling Adventures of a Psychic.
The clairvoyant Claudia also is a spiritual seeker. She connects with the Egyptian goddess Isis and samples a few of the ancient world's creepier cults and rituals.
Marriage Roman-style proves to be rocky terrain for Claudia after she weds the attractive, ambitious Pontius Pilate. The shifting tides of affection and power are influenced by Claudia's family's disastrous fall from political power.
It is a jarring if necessary element that Claudia is always meeting many of Bible's biggest names: Herod, Salome and Mary, among others. 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 who thrilled to the savage Imperial pomp of Russell Crowe's Gladiator just might give Pilate's Wife the thumbs-up.
Pilate's Wife
By Antoinette May
Morrow, 368 pp., $24.95
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