Joseph Caiaphas is the high priest before whom, in the Gospel accounts, Jesus is brought after his arrest and interrogated on the night before the crucifixion. Matthew and John name him explicitly as the presiding priest; John adds that he was the son-in-law of Annas, the powerful former high priest, and attributes to him the coldly political reasoning that "it is expedient that one man should die for the people", a line the evangelist reads, with irony, as an unwitting prophecy of the atonement.
In the Gospel narratives Caiaphas functions as the chief priestly antagonist: he convenes the council, presses the charge, and delivers Jesus to the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, without whose authority a capital sentence could not be carried out. The accounts are written by Jesus' followers and shaped by their theology, and modern historians read them critically, weighing the Gospel portrait against what is known of the priestly aristocracy and of Roman judicial practice in the province.
The atlas records Caiaphas as a historical figure of the Passion. He is not classed as a supernatural adversary or a "dark" being, he was a real Jerusalem high priest and political leader, but as a human participant in the events the Gospels narrate, treated with the same neutral care as any other.