17 A salamander-conjurer: The salamander enjoyed the reputation during the Middle Ages and Renaissance of being able to go through fire without getting burned.
18 the same dirty, patched shirt: According to one of Bulgakov’s sources, M. N. Orlov’s History of Man’s Relations with the Devil (St Petersburg, 1904), Satan always wears a dirty shirt while performing a black mass.
19 it will be given to each according to his faith: A common misapplication of Christ’s words, ’According to your faith be it done to you’ (Matt. 9:29).
Chapter 24: The Extraction of the Master
1 wandered in the wilderness for nineteen days: A comic distortion of well-known examples: the period of wandering is usually a round figure - forty days or forty years - and the usual sustenance is manna or locusts and wild honey (see Numbers 33:38, Amos 5:25, Matt. 3:1-4).
2 manuscripts don’t burn: This phrase became proverbial among Russian intellectuals after the publication of The Master and Margarita, an event which in itself seemed to bear out the truth of Woland’s words.
3 Aloisy Mogarych: An absurd combination of the Latinate Aloisius with the slangy ‘Mogarych’, the word for the round of drinks that concludes a deal, which happens to have the form of a Russian patronymic.
4 bruderschaft: A special pledge of brotherhood drunk with interlaced right arms, after which the friends address each other with the familiar form ty.
Chapter 25: How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath
1 Falerno: A rich and strong red wine, named for the ager falernur in the Roman Campagnia where it was produced in ancient times (not to be confused with the white Falerno now produced around Naples).
2 Caecuba: Also a strong red wine, product of the ager caecubus in southern Latium.
3 the feast of the twelve gods: The twelve senior gods of the Roman pantheon: Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo, Diana, Ceres, Venus, Mars, Vesta, Mercury and Minerva.
4 lares: A word of Etruscan or Sabine origin, referring to the nameless protective deities of the house and hearth in Roman religion.
5 messiah: From the Hebrew mashiah, meaning ‘the anointed one’, referring to the redeemer and deliverer of Israel to be born of the royal house of David, prophesied by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah and others, and awaited by the Jewish nation. Christians believe that this prophecy was fulfilled in Christ (christos being Greek for ‘the annointed one’).
6 were they given the drink before being hung on the posts?: Thought by some commentators to be a legal mercy granted to the condemned to lessen the suffering of crucifixion, as Pilate means it here, though in the Gospels it has more the appearance of a final mockery. Jesus also refuses to drink it (see Matt. 27:34, Mark 15:23).
7 among human vices he considered cowardice one of the first: This saying, not found in the Gospels, is of great thematic importance for the novel. Bulgakov himself, according to one of his friends, regarded cowardice as the worst of all vices, ‘because all the rest come from it’ (quoted in a memoir in Vospominaniya o Mikhaile Bulgakove, Moscow, 1988, pp. 389- 90). Interestingly, all references to this ’worst of vices’ were removed from the original magazine publication of the novel.
Chapter 26: The Burial
1 thirty tetradrachmas: The ‘thirty pieces of silver’ mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew (26:15) as Judas’s reward from the high priest for betraying Jesus. A tetradrachma was a Greek silver coin worth four drachmas and was equivalent to one Jewish shekel.
2 Now we shall always be together: Yeshua’s words are fulfilled in the Nicene creed: ’... one Lord Jesus Christ ... who was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate ...‘ — words repeated countless times a day for nearly two thousand years in every liturgy or mass. Later in the novel, Pilate will say that nothing in the world is more hateful to him than ’is immortality and his unheard-of fame‘.
3 the son of an astrologer-king ... Pila: Details found in the poem Pilate by the twelfth-century Flemish poet Petrus Pictor (noted by Marianne Gourg in her commentary to the French translation of the novel, R. Laffont, Paris, 1995). The name of Pila thus becomes the source of the procurator’s second name.
4 En-Sarid: Arabic for Nazareth.
5 Valerius Gratus: According to Flavius Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews (Book 18, Chapter 2), Valerius Gratus was procurator of Judea starting from sometime around AD 15, and was thus Pilate’s immediate predecessor.
6 might he not have killed himself?: Here Pilate prompts Aphranius with what is in fact the Gospel account of Judas’s death (Matt. 27:5).
