What seems unaccountably strange is that Pilate should have been heedless of such factors later on, in the case of the Samaritan Taheb, if he had already learned prudential caution in the earlier case of Jesus the King of the Jews. This makes one start to wonder whether perhaps the Samaritan incident is factual and the Jesus incident a fictive rewriting of it by Christians who were casting about for any likely-sounding historical details to fill in the spare outlines of their earlier, more abstract, salvation myth.
https://books.google.it/books?id=C9_hDw ... &q&f=false
So until now I have discovered two sound reasons to explain the introduction of Pilate in the Gospel story:
- the Samaritan Incident reported by Josephus explained where the inventors had derived the idea of a Roman governor who surrendered to an angry Jewish mob;
- the Samaritan incident reported by Josephus explained where the inventors had derived the name of the best candidate for the role of the material killer of the "Son of Joseph" (the Samaritans being notoriously the 'sons of Joseph', Pilate having slaughtered them en masse and the Jew Josephus having approved the extermination).