The Lentulus Letter
The letter alleged to have been sent to the Senate of Rome by Publius Lentulus, “President of Judea in the reign of Tiberius Cæsar,” describing the person of Jesus Christ, is now generally admitted to have been written by a monk in the fourteenth century. In the works of the Greek historian, Nicephorus, who lived in that century, and whom Weismann considers a credulous, uncritical writer, is a description of the personal appearance of Jesus Christ, for which no authority is given, and which is said to be derived from the ancients. This passage bears a strong resemblance to the apocryphal letter of Lentulus, and possibly served as a basis for it. It is most likely that the letter was a Latin translation or adaptation of the description given by Nicephorus. Dr. Edward Robinson, after a thorough examination of the evidence, sums up the case very pointedly as follows: “In favor of the authenticity of the letter (Epistola Lentuli) we have only the purport of the inscription. There is no external evidence whatever. Against its authenticity we have the great discrepancies and contradictions of the inscription; the fact that no such person as Lentulus existed at the time and place specified, nor for many years before and after; the utter silence of history in respect to the existence of such a letter; the foreign and later idioms of its style; the contradiction in which the contents of the epistle stand with established historical facts, and the probability of its having been produced at some time not earlier than the eleventh century.”
The earliest appearance of the clumsy forgery was in the MS. writings of St. Anselm, who lived in the eleventh century. No Publius Lentulus can be identified as “President of Judea” in the reign of Tiberius. Judea had but two procurators in his reign, Valerius Gratus, from 16 to 27 A. D., and Pontius Pilate, from 27 to 37 A. D. Not only is there no contemporary witness in profane history to the appearance of Jesus, but there is none to his existence, except, perhaps, Josephus (“Antiquities,” xviii. 3). But even this has certainly been interpolated, and is regarded as spurious in toto by some of the most careful scholars. In fact, it is generally acknowledged that there is no contemporary allusion to Christ in secular history—although some defend the genuineness of the passage relating to Him in Josephus. The earliest authentic allusion to the founder of Christianity is in Pliny’s famous letter to Trajan, and in the “Annals” of Tacitus—both written in the first quarter of the second century.