ABSTRACT
That Bacon should cite Pilate is of course prejudicial. The example aims to discredit the author's relativist adversaries-the 'discoursing wits', the sceptics and freethinking Epicureans, Bacon takes the infamous Roman governor to epitomize. But the example further invokes a salvific irony that is meant to destroy the cynical one Pilate deploys. Against the background of the silent Christ whose impending death and resurrection vindicate the Truth to which, in the essay's locus in the Gospel of John (18.37-38), the Saviour has come to 'bear witness', the ironic jest refutes itself. Though framed as a rhetorical question to which Pilate expects no answer, the governor's derisive refusal to 'stay' betrays an uneasy sense that there is one. Just because Pilate 'would not stay for an answer', peremptorily moving on before his interlocutor can reply, the cynical dismissal acknowledges the truth it denies.
