The Letter of Lentulus Describing Christ

persistent tradition of an authentic portrait of Christ made during his lifetime was given new vitality in the fifteenth century by the discovery and circulation of a letter purporting to have been written to the Roman Senate during the reign of Tiberius Caesar by Publius Lentulus, procurator of Judea. In the Beinecke Library there is a manuscript, written in Italy in the fifteenth century (Marston 49), that contains this Latin epistle of Publius Lentulus, preceded by the text of Donatus's Life of Virgil. The letter gives a detailed description of the physical appearance and general bearing of Christ, as well as the impression he made upon those who came into his presence. Two additional versions of the letter, both in Italian translation, are found in other, roughly contemporary, Yale manuscripts. One occurs in a Florentine miscellany, dated about 1460 (Marston 247), among a group of letters and orations of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Filelfo, and other Italian scholars; the second is part of a comparable Renaissance miscellany of letters of the humanists, copied about 1440 (MS 329). A fourth version, in Latin, appears in a small volume written in Austria in 1485, now in the James Aiarshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collections (MS a 7). The letter of Lentulus appears also in two early printed books in the Beinecke Library: an Italian translation is included among the devotional poems, the Laudi (Venice, 15 14), of the thirteenthcentury mystic Jacopone da Todi; the Latin version occurs in a collection of moral and philosophical treatises printed in Padua in 1535. That one library should have so many versions of the Lentulus letter suggests its phenomenal popularity, especially in Italy in the fifteenth century. There are no complete statistics, but almost a century ago a German scholar listed seventy-five manuscripts, chiefly in Germany and France.1