The very contents of the letter are sufficient evidence of its spiu-iousness. Had it really been written by a Ro- man, it would not have been addressed to the senate, but to the emperor, who was the immediate master of the Syrian provinces. It appears that this objection was already noticed in former times, for in the Magde- burg Centuries it is said to have been addressed to the emperor Tiberius. A fact of still greater importance is that Lentulus is designated as Jfierosolymitanorum presses. No such office existed. There was a Prases Syricc and a Procurator Judwm but no Presses of the Roman inhabitants at Jerusalem. For this reason he is called in the Manuscr. Jen. \, Proconsul in partihus Jiidwcp, and in the Manuscr. Vatic, and Jen. ii, in a thor- oughly Roman Catholic manner, Qfficialis in p?-oviiicia Judcea, while there was no such office known in Rome at that period. But he is nowhere represented as a friend of Pilate, as Zimmermann attempts to make him in his Lehensfjeschichte d. Kirche Christi, i, 70. V\'e know most of the proconsuls or praisides of Syria, and all the procurators of Juctea. but none of them was named Lcn- tulus. In the classics there are forty-three persons of that name mentioned, but four only belonged to the times of Tiberius. One of them only, Enreus Lentulus Ga3tulicus, was, according to Tacitus (.4 nn. iv,4G), in the year 2G, consul with Tiberius, and in 34 was the chief of the legions in upper Germany (Tacitus, A mud. \i, oO) ; he may, indeed, according to Suetonius {Calif/, c. 8) and Pliny {Episl. v, 3), have been in Judaea during the years 26 to 33, but there is no proof of it. On the other hand, the Lentulus who wrote the epistle is expressly called in the ]\IS. Jen. i, Puhlius. Moreover, there is no mention at all made of the epistle b}' any of the ancient writers, whilst other epistles, even some of an apocryphal nature, are mentioned by them, and this one, had it then been known, would certainly have attracted the attention of the apologists at a time when the general impression was so strong against the fine personal appearance of the Lord. Nicephorus Xanthopulus, whose description of Christ's personal appearance we gave above, states only that it is based on old traditions, while, if such a descrip- tion as that given in the Epistle of Lentulus had been known in the Greek Church in the 14tli century, he would certainly not have failed to quote it as an author- ity. Regarding the literary merits of the work, it must be confessed that it is written in old Latin ; but as it is full of expressions which woidd not naturallj' be used by a Roman citizen — as the whole tenor of the work, more- over, is thoroughly unclassical, it is to be supposed tliat its writer aimed to imitate the style of the ancients, and pass it off as a work of their age. A Roman would nev- er have used the expression j>ro;;/(e/n veritatis. fdii hom- inum, at the beginning and at the end of the epistle. So also the appellation Christus Jesus is evidently" taken from the New Test., for the Redeemer was never thus designated during his lifetime. Jesus himself declined the name of Christ, forbade his disciples callii;g him thus, and he never was called so by his enemies. How, then, could a heathen have come to call him Christ, end even to put that appellation before that of Jesus — a change which only took place after his claim to he con- sidered as the Messiah had been established beyond cavil. If it is claimed that Christ was called by the heathen tlie prophet of truth, yet, as Christ's activity during liis life was not directed towards the heathen in general, it coidd onlj' apply to the Romans residing iit Palestine. Yet these we do not find to liave been des-
LEXTFLUS
350
LEO
ignated as heathen, but as Romans; and they did not interest themselves enough in the wandering Kabbi to render such an expression general among them. Nor was it otlierwise with the heathen residing on the fron- tiers of Palestine. ''His disciples called him the Son of God." Though they gave him occasionally that name, it was so far from being a general custom that the gov- ernor himself knew nothing of it. So this, like the fol- lowing sentences on the raising of the dead and healing of the sick, is all taken from the Gospel. It also says that his hair was parted after the manner of the Naza- ritcs : we find the substitution of Nazarene for Nazarite, which only took place afterwards. Now a Roman officer would know little or nothing about the Nazarites; more- over, Christ could not properly be called a Nazarite, for he drank wine, touched the dead, and did many other things contrary to the customs of the Nazarites. The remark that he was never seeu to laugh, but often to weep, proves him to have led a solitary life, such as we have no example of at the supposed time of the writing of this epistle, and is only an idea derived from the Gospels, and from the state of things in the Middle Ages. The last words also, " beautiful among the sons of men," are quite unsuited to tlie mouth of a Roman, who would never have made use of such a Hebraism, and it is clearly taken from the xlvth Psalm, which is the basis of the whole description. This consequently could not apply to our Lentulus, but only to a monk of the Middle Ages.