The latter records he was made high priest by the Roman procurator Valerius Gratus after Simon ben Camithus had been deposed.

[5] Annas and Caiaphas may have sympathized with the Sadducees, a religious movement in Judaea that found most of its members among the wealthy Jewish elite.

Pilate then offers the gathered crowd the choice of one prisoner to release—said to be a Passover tradition—and they choose a criminal named Barabbas instead of Jesus.

Caiaphas' position, therefore, was to establish that Jesus was guilty not only of blasphemy, but also of proclaiming himself to be the Messiah, which was understood as the return of the Davidic kingship.

When Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, answered that Jesus of Nazareth was the source of their power, Caiaphas and the other priests realized that the two men had no formal education yet spoke eloquently about the man they called their saviour.

[14] According to Josephus, Caiaphas was appointed in AD 18 by the Roman prefect Valerius Gratus[2] who preceded Pontius Pilate.

According to John, Caiaphas was the son-in-law of the high priest Annas, who is widely identified with Ananus the son of Seth, mentioned by Josephus.

[16] In November 1990, workers found an ornate limestone ossuary while paving a road in the Peace Forest south of the Abu Tor neighborhood of Jerusalem.

[2][18] Since the original discovery, this identification has been challenged by some scholars on various grounds, including the spelling of the inscription, the lack of any mention of Caiaphas' status as High Priest, the plainness of the tomb (although the ossuary itself is as ornate as might be expected from someone of his rank and family), and other reasons.

[20] It is inscribed with the text: "Miriam, daughter of Yeshua, son of Caiaphas, Priest of Ma’aziah from Beth ‘Imri".

[21] In the thirteenth-century French text Estoire del Saint Graal, Caiaphas is responsible for imprisoning Joseph of Arimathea.

In Inferno, Dante Alighieri places Caiaphas in the sixth realm of the eighth circle of Hell, where hypocrites are punished in the afterlife.

[22] Caiaphas is mentioned in the 19th verse of The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde: He does not stare upon the air Through a little roof of glass; He does not pray with lips of clay For his agony to pass, Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek The kiss of Caiaphas He is also depicted having an argument with Pontius Pilate regarding the passing of the death sentence against Jesus in The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Christ before Caiaphas, c.1490, is one of only a handful of works attributed to Antonio della Corna, who was active primarily in his native Lombardy in northern Italy.