Saint Pontius Pilate's wife

The unnamed wife of Pontius Pilate appears only once in the Gospel of Matthew (27:19), where she intercedes with Pilate on Jesus' behalf. It is uncertain whether Pilate was actually married, although it is likely. In later tradition, she becomes known as Procula (Latin: Procula), Procla (Ancient Greek: Πρόκλα) or Procle and plays a role in various New Testament Apocrypha. At a later date, she acquires the name Claudia Procula in Western tradition, as well as other names and variants of these names. She is venerated as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Eastern Catholic Church, the Coptic Church, and the Ethiopian Church. She has also frequently been featured in literature and film. Pilate's wife is left nameless in her only early mention, the Gospel of Matthew. She is one of several women identified in the Bible only by their relationship to their husband. The cognomen Procula (in Latin) or Prokla (in Greek) for Pilate's wife first appears in the Gospel of Nicodemus (5th c.) and the chronicle of John Malalas (6th c.). This name is relatively stable for her both in eastern and western Christianity. Ernst von Dobschütz suggested that the name might have come from the Fasti consulares for 37 CE, which records the death in that year of Gnaeus Acerronius Proculus, co-consul of Gaius Petronius Pontius Nigrinus, thus providing the names Proculus and Pontius together. Heinrich Paulus, among others, has proposed that the name arose from a transcription error in the Latin text that took the Latin word procul (far off) to be the name Procula. Others believe that it may accurately reflect the cognomen of Pilate's wife. Jill Carington Smith, seconded by Tibor Grüll, assert that the name first appears in the works of Saint Jerome (347 to 430). Roland Kany has however argued that the earliest extant reference to her as Claudia Procula is the Pseudo-Dexter Chronicle, a forgery first published in 1619.