According to the manuscript of Jena, a certain Giacomo Colonna found the letter in an ancient Roman document sent to Rome from Constantinople. It must be of Greek origin and have been translated into Latin during the thirteenth or fourteenth century, though it received its present form at the hands of a humanist of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The description agrees with the so-called Abgar picture of Our Lord. It also agrees with the portrait of Jesus Christ drawn by Nicephorus, St. John Damascene, and the Book of Painters (of Mt. Athos). Munter, (_Die Sinnbilder und Kunstvorstellungen der alten Christen_, Altona, 1825, p. 9), believes he can trace the letter down to the time of Diocletian, but this is not generally admitted. The Letter of Lentulus is certainly apocryphal; there never was a governor of Jerusalem; no procurator of Judea is known to have been called Lentulus; a Roman governor would not have addressed the Senate, but the Emperor; a Roman writer would not have employed the expressions, “prophet of truth,” “sons of men,” “Jesus Christ.” The former two are Hebrew idioms, the third is taken from the New Testament. The letter, therefore, shows us a description of Our Lord such as Christian piety conceived him. There is considerable literature touching on this letter, for which see the _Catholic Cyclopædia_. Although we cannot credit the letter as genuine, it is interesting, as the article indicated, in showing the popular attitude to the traits in question, and in attributing these Nordic characters to Christ, as are the occasional efforts to bring the matter up again in the journals of to-day. CHAPTER XII. ARYA 233 : 4. Synthetic. See the note on languages, p. 242 : 5. 233 : 13. Tenney Frank, 2, pp. 1, 2, and the authorities quoted at the end of the chapter. Also Peake, 2, pp. 154–173; Freeman, _Historical Geography of Europe_, pp. 44–45. 233 : 20. See the note to p. 99 : 27. 233 : 24. Ridgeway, 1; Conway, 1; Peake, 2; and numerous other authorities. 234 : 2. The Messapians, according to Ridgeway, 1, p. 347, were the remnants of the primitive Ligurians, who once occupied central Italy but who migrated, under the pressure of the Umbrians, toward the south. There some of them survived under the name Iapyges or Messapians, in the heel of the peninsula. “The name Iapyges seems identical with that of the Iapodes, that Illyrian tribe which dwelt on the other side of the Adriatic, largely contaminated with the Celts (Nordics) who had flowed down over them. That the Umbrians had a deadly hatred of a people of the same name, who had survived in their coast area, is proved by the Iguvine Tables, where the _Iapuzkum numen_ is heartily cursed along with the Etruscans and the men of Nar.” See also Giuffrida-Ruggeri. 234 : 3 _seq._ See the notes to pp. 157 : 10 and 157 : 14. 234 : 7. See the note to p. 192 : 1–4. 234 : 12. See pp. 174, 199 and 247 of this book.