other · 36 · Caesarea Maritima
A Samaritan prophet gathered a crowd at Mount Gerizim to dig for vessels Moses was said to have buried there. Pilate met them with cavalry and infantry, killed some in the fighting and executed the leaders. The Samaritan council complained to Vitellius, the legate of Syria, who sent Pilate to Rome to answer to the emperor. Josephus says Tiberius died before he arrived. That is the last of him in any reliable source: everything afterwards — the suicide, the conversion, the Ethiopian tradition that makes him a saint — is later and is not recorded here. Ten years is a long prefecture for Judaea, which is worth noticing against the gospel portrait of a man who cannot control a crowd.
To answer a Samaritan complaint to the legate of Syria.
The end of a ten-year prefecture, and the last thing anybody reliably knows about him.