i just finished the best thing i've read in a long time: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, wherein the Devil and his entourage wreak some serious -- and some not-so-serious -- havoc in Stalinist Moscow over a few days in the 1930s. And interwoven into it is a story of Pontius Pilate and his relationship with one Yeshua Ha-Nozri. Quite an amazing book, unpublished until 1965, 25 years after Bulgakov died. the Pevear and the Burgin translations seem to be preferred.