Jesus Broadsided: Three New Testament Pseudepigrapha
Despite the rich harvest of New Testament biblical and apocryphal texts that survived Christian antiquity, there were gaps that many true believers were eager to fill. Whether written in antiquity or invented in the Middle Ages, their staying power in the popular imagination is attested in numerous ephemeral broadsheets that anthologize, in particular, several memorable New Testament pseudepigrapha (spurious letters attributed to biblical figures, particularly in the first two hundred years following Christ’s birth).
Among the irresistible gaps to fill was proof, despite contrary evidence from the Gospels and the opinions of Augustine and Jerome, that Christ actually did write things down in his own hand—documents that might indeed be recovered from the historical record after all. Enter the legend, most famously launched in the fourth century by the early Christian historian and apologist Eusebius, of King Abgar of Edessa. Abgar, it was claimed, had heard of Jesus’s many miracles and written to him asking that he come and heal a malady that was troubling the king gravely. Jesus wrote a reply explaining that he was unable to come himself because of his imminent ascension into heaven but assuring him that he would send one of his disciples to the king after his resurrection. After Jesus’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection, the apostles sent Thaddaeus, who quickly healed Abgar and converted the kingdom of Edessa to Christianity. All manner of lore subsequently grew up around this story, including the tale that copies of the letter had been made that had miraculous apotropaic powers. According to another tradition, one Ananias, who had carried Abgar’s letter to Jesus, also painted the only known portrait of him done from life, which he delivered to his king upon his return to Edessa.
While the correspondence of Abgar and Jesus may date from as early as the second century, others of these colorful New Testament pseudepigrapha were of a much later vintage, among them the thirteenth-century imposture of an ersatz ancient Roman official, Publius Lentulus, a “Prefect of Judea” in the time of Jesus and Tiberius Caesar. Having witnessed the visage and manner of Jesus and his many remarkable qualities, Lentulus wrote back to the Roman Senate describing him in considerable detail:
“There appeared in these our days a man of great virtue called Jesus Christ . . . comely, with a reverend countenance such as the beholders may both fear and love. His hair is the color of chestnut full ripe, and is plain almost down to his ears, but from then downwards it is something curled . . . waving about his shoulders . . . his face without either wrinkle or spot . . . his beard is thick, the color of the hair of his head; his eyes grey, clear, and quick . . . never seen by any to laugh.”
Hundreds of copies of this most popular epistolary forgery survive in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and likely gave considerable inspiration to the ubiquitous iconography of Christ in European art, including at least one explicit wood-panel painting juxtaposing a portrait of Jesus in profile along with the text of the letter in the Museum Catherijne Convent in Utrecht, ca. 1490. The ubiquity of the Letter of Publius Lentulus extended even to manuscript as late as the eighteenth century, as is attested by a fine French-language redaction of the text also in the Bibliotheca Fictiva.
In contrast to the simple iconography of the central image of Christ in an eighteenth-century broadside anthology of these pseudepigrapha in English translation, another earlier bilingual Dutch and German broadside in the collection (apparently one of only two recorded copies), singles out the Lentulus forgery alone. The text flanks on both sides a bright and triumphant image of Jesus Christ radiating light from inside a classical architectural niche.
The third part of the English broadside anthology of pseudepigrapha is also perhaps the most audacious: Jesus’s so-called Letter from Heaven. This might possibly be the first if not also the most preposterous “chain letter” in Western history. Invented perhaps as early as the sixth century, the text tells the story of how this divine epistle was first deposited by the Angel Gabriel under a large, round stone with the visible inscription “Blessed is he that shall turn me over.” Many who took up the challenge were thwarted (shades of the future King Arthur’s sword in the stone) until one day, exactly fifty-three years after the crucifixion of Christ, an innocent child of six or seven years turned it over easily and carried it thence to the city of Iconium. Though its true purpose was to confirm Sunday as the Sabbath in place of the Jewish Saturday, the letter’s internal demand for its own proliferation and dissemination is explicit:
“He that hath a copy of this my own letter, written with my own hand, and spoken with my own mouth, and keep it without publishing it to others shall not prosper, but he that publisheth it to others, shall be blessed of me. . . . whosoever shall have a copy of this letter . . . and keep it in their houses nothing shall hurt them, neither lightning, pestilence, nor thunder.”
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. 538–43; Stijn Bussels, “Diptych of the Lentulus Letter: Building Textual and Visual Evidence for Christ’s Appearance,” in Thérèse de Hemptinne et al. (eds.), Speaking to the Eye: Sight and Insight through Text and Image, 1150–1650 (Brepols, 2013), 241–57; Cora E. Lutz, “The Letter of Lentulus Describing Christ,” The Yale University Library Gazette 50:2 (October 1975), 91–97.
