The life of St Procla, the wife of Pontius Pilate
It was later Christian memory that gave her a name to hold onto, Procula, sometimes written Proculla or Procla, elsewhere Claudia, and the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, a composite text assembled sometime across the fourth and fifth centuries, expanded that single brief warning into a fuller telling of the dream and what it meant.
Tradition beyond Scripture holds that she came to believe in Christ, whether during his trial itself or in the time that followed it, and the Eastern Orthodox Church has kept her memory as a saint ever since, her commemoration falling on October 27, alongside similar veneration in the Coptic and Ethiopian churches, though not within the Western Church. The Ethiopian tradition carries the story furthest of all, holding that Procula and Pilate himself both accepted the Christian faith in time and were together put to death for refusing to worship an image of the Roman emperor, a joint commemoration kept in that tradition each June.
She is remembered as a solitary voice of conscience raised, however briefly, inside a household that condemned an innocent man.
