Pontius Pilate's wife is the unnamed spouse of Pontius Pilate, who appears only once in the Gospel of Matthew, 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 () or Procla () 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. Name 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 (far off) to be the name Procula. Others believe that it may accurately reflect the cognomen of Pilate's wife. Roland Kany argues that the earliest extant reference to her as Claudia Procula is the Pseudo-Dexter Chronicle, a forgery first published in 1619. However, Tibor Grüll and Jill Carington Smith both assert that the name first appears in the works of Saint Jerome (347 to 430). Ian Boxall writes that the name probably became Claudia Procula with Pseudo-Dexter "regular claims to the contrary notwithstanding." Claudia Procula was not an uncommon name in antiquity: the graves of several women named Claudia Procula have been uncovered, from Beirut (Syria), Cyrene (Libya), and Patara (modern Turkey), and it is also a plausible name for a daughter of a certain Claudius Proculus named in a letter by the emperor Hadrian. The twelfth-century Syrian theologian Dionysius Bar-Salibi gives her name as Longina.