By ARIEL DAVID
The Associated Press
ROME (AP) — A Vatican researcher has rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus.
Experts say the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.
Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives, says in a new book that she used computer-enhanced images of the shroud to decipher faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic scattered across the cloth.
She asserts that the words include the name “(J)esu(s) Nazarene” — or Jesus of Nazareth — in Greek. That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic.
“Even someone intent on forging a relic would have had all the reasons to place the signs of divinity on this object,” Frale said Friday. “Had we found ‘Christ’ or the ‘Son of God’ we could have considered it a hoax, or a devotional inscription.”
The shroud bears the figure of a crucified man, complete with blood seeping from his hands and feet, and believers say Christ’s image was recorded on the linen’s fibers at the time of his resurrection.
The fragile artifact, owned by the Vatican, is kept locked in a protective chamber in a Turin cathedral and is rarely shown. Measuring 13 feet (four meters) long and three feet (one meter) wide, the shroud has suffered severe damage through the centuries, including from fire.
The Catholic Church makes no claims about the cloth’s authenticity, but says it is a powerful symbol of Christ’s suffering.
There has been strong debate about it in the scientific community.
Skeptics point out that radiocarbon dating conducted on the cloth in 1988 determined it was made in the 13th or 14th century.
But Raymond Rogers of Los Alamos National Laboratory said in 2005 that the tested threads came from patches used to repair the shroud after a fire. Rogers, who died shortly after publishing his findings, calculated it is 1,300 to 3,000 years old and could easily date from Jesus’ era.
Another study, by the Hebrew University, concluded that pollen and plant images on the shroud showed it originated in the area around Jerusalem sometime before the eighth century.
While faint letters scattered around the face on the shroud were seen decades ago, serious researchers dismissed them, due to the results of the radiocarbon dating test, Frale told The Associated Press.
But when she cut out the words from enhanced photos of the shroud and showed them to experts, they concurred the writing style was typical of the Middle East in the first century — Jesus’ time.
She believes the text was written on a document by a clerk and glued to the shroud over the face so the body could be identified by relatives and buried properly. Metals in the ink used at the time may have allowed the writing to transfer to the linen, Frale said.
She said she counted at least 11 words in her study of enhanced images produced by French scientists in a 1994 study. The words are fragmented and scattered on and around the image’s head, crisscrossing the cloth vertically and horizontally.
One short sequence of Aramaic letters has not been fully translated. Another fragment in Greek — “iber” — may refer to Emperor Tiberius, who reigned at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, Frale said.
She said the text also partially confirms the Gospels’ account of Jesus’ final moments. A fragment in Greek that can be read as “removed at the ninth hour” may refer to Christ’s time of death reported in the holy texts, she said.
In her book “The Shroud of Jesus Nazarene,” published in Italian, Frale reconstructs from the lettering on the shroud what she believes Jesus’ death certificate said: “Jesus Nazarene. Found (guilty of inciting the people to revolt). Put to death in the year 16 of Tiberius. Taken down at the ninth hour.”
She said the text then stipulates the body will returned to relatives after a year.
Frale said her research was done without the support of the Vatican.
“I tried to be objective and leave religious issues aside,” Frale told the AP. “What I studied was an ancient document that certifies the execution of a man, in a specific time and place.”
Frale’s work usually focuses on medieval documents. She is noted for research on the order of the Knights Templar and her discovery of unpublished documents on the group in the Vatican’s archives.
Earlier this year, she published a study saying the Templars once had the shroud in their possession. That raised eyebrows because the order was abolished in the early 14th century and the shroud is first recorded in history around 1360 in the hands of a French knight.
Her latest book on the shroud raised even more doubts among some experts.
On one hand, it is true that a medieval forger would label the object with Christ’s name, as were all relics produced at the time, said Antonio Lombatti, a church historian who has written about the shroud. The problem is that there are no inscriptions to be seen in the first place.
“People work on grainy photos and think they see things,” Lombatti told the AP. “It’s all the result of imagination and computer software. ... If you look at a photo of the shroud, there’s a lot of contrast between light and dark, but there are no letters.”
Further criticizing Frale’s work, Lombatti said that artifacts bearing Greek and Aramaic texts were found in Jewish burials from the first century, but the use of Latin is unheard of.
He also rejected the idea that authorities would officially return the body of a crucified man to relatives after filling out some paperwork. Victims of that form of execution used by the Romans would usually be left on the cross or were disposed of in a dump to add to its deterrent.
Lombatti said “the message was that you won’t even have a tomb to cry over.”
Another shroud expert, Gian Marco Rinaldi, said that even scientists who believe in the relic’s authenticity have dismissed as unreliable the images on which Frale’s study was based.
“These computer enhancements increase contrast in an unrealistic way to bring out these signs,” he said. “You can find them all over the shroud, not just near the head, and then with a bit of imagination, you see letters.”
Unusual sightings in the shroud are common and are often proved false, said Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pavia. He recently led a team of experts that reproduced the shroud using materials and methods available in the 14th century — proof, they said, that it could have been made by a human hand in the Middle Ages.
Decades ago, entire studies were published on coins purportedly seen on Jesus’ closed eyes, but when high-definition images were taken during a 2002 restoration, the artifacts were nowhere to be seen and the theory was dropped, Garlaschelli said.
He said any theory about ink and metals would have to be checked by analysis of the shroud itself.
The last public display of the shroud was in 2000, when more than 1 million people turned up to see it. The next is scheduled for 2010, and Pope Benedict XVI has been asked to visit it.
SOURCE: Ariel David, "Faint writing seen on Shroud of Turin," TimesHerald.com (20 Nov 2009).
Friday, November 20, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
Italian Scientist Claims to have Reproduced Shroud of Turin
Philip Pullella has the following Reuters story at Yahoo! News. This writer is skeptical that the scientist, Luigi Garlaschelli, has reproduced all of the physical and chemical aspects of the Shroud. Contact images in the past have not passed the 3D test and have typically had a distorted appearance.
ROME (Reuters) – An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ's burial cloth is a medieval fake.See also:
The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ.
"We have shown that is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud," Luigi Garlaschelli, who is due to illustrate the results at a conference on the para-normal this weekend in northern Italy, said on Monday.
A professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, Garlaschelli made available to Reuters the paper he will deliver and the accompanying comparative photographs.
The Shroud of Turin shows the back and front of a bearded man with long hair, his arms crossed on his chest, while the entire cloth is marked by what appears to be rivulets of blood from wounds in the wrists, feet and side.
Carbon dating tests by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona in 1988 caused a sensation by dating it from between 1260 and 1390. Sceptics said it was a hoax, possibly made to attract the profitable medieval pilgrimage business.
But scientists have thus far been at a loss to explain how the image was left on the cloth.
Garlaschelli reproduced the full-sized shroud using materials and techniques that were available in the middle ages.
They placed a linen sheet flat over a volunteer and then rubbed it with a pigment containing traces of acid. A mask was used for the face.
PIGMENT, BLOODSTAINS AND SCORCHES
The pigment was then artificially aged by heating the cloth in an oven and washing it, a process which removed it from the surface but left a fuzzy, half-tone image similar to that on the Shroud.
He believes the pigment on the original Shroud faded naturally over the centuries.
They then added blood stains, burn holes, scorches and water stains to achieve the final effect.
The Catholic Church does not claim the Shroud is authentic nor that it is a matter of faith, but says it should be a powerful reminder of Christ's passion.
One of Christianity's most disputed relics, it is locked away at Turin Cathedral in Italy and rarely exhibited. It was last on display in 2000 and is due to be shown again next year.
Garlaschelli expects people to contest his findings.
"If they don't want to believe carbon dating done by some of the world's best laboratories they certainly won't believe me," he said.
The accuracy of the 1988 tests was challenged by some hard-core believers who said restorations of the Shroud in past centuries had contaminated the results.
The history of the Shroud is long and controversial.
After surfacing in the Middle East and France, it was brought by Italy's former royal family, the Savoys, to their seat in Turin in 1578. In 1983 ex-King Umberto II bequeathed it to the late Pope John Paul.
The Shroud narrowly escaped destruction in 1997 when a fire ravaged the Guarini Chapel of the Turin Cathedral where it is held. The cloth was saved by a fireman who risked his life.
Garlaschelli received funding for his work by an Italian association of atheists and agnostics but said it had no effect on his results.
"Money has no odor," he said. "This was done scientifically. If the Church wants to fund me in the future, here I am."
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin, says Vatican
The Knights Templar, a crusading order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy.
Medieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years.
The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers.
The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative.
Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.
However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”.
There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times.
Dr Frale said that among other alleged offences such as sodomy, the Knights Templar had been accused of worshipping idols, in particular a “bearded figure”. In reality however the object they had secretly venerated was the Shroud.
They had rescued it to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of heretical groups such as the Cathars, who claimed that Christ did not have a true human body, only the appearance of a man, and could therefore not have died on the Cross and been resurrected. She said her discovery vindicated a theory first put forward by the British historian Ian Wilson in 1978.
The Knights Templar were founded at the time of the First Crusade in the eleventh century to protect Christians making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Order was endorsed by the Pope, but when Acre fell in 1291 and the Crusaders lost their hold on the Holy Land their support faded, amid growing envy of their fortune in property and banking.
Rumours about the order’s corrupt and arcane secret ceremonies claimed that novices had to deny Christ three times, spit on the cross, strip naked and kiss their superior on the buttocks, navel, and lips and submit to sodomy. King Philip IV of France, who coveted the order’s wealth and owed it money, arrested its leaders and put pressure on Pope Clement V to dissolve it.
Several knights, including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake. Legends of the Templars’ secret rituals and lost treasures have long fascinated conspiracy theorists, and figure in The Da Vinci Code, which repeated the theory that the knights were entrusted with the Holy Grail.
In 2003 Dr Frale, the Vatican’s medieval specialist, unearthed the record of the trial of the Templars, also known as the Chinon Parchment, after realising that it had been wrongly catalogued. The parchment showed that Pope Clement V had accepted the Templars were guilty of “grave sins”, such as corruption and sexual immorality, but not of heresy.
Their initiation ceremony involved spitting on the Cross, but this was to brace them for having to do so if captured by Muslim forces, Dr Frale said. Last year she published for the first time the prayer the Knights Templar composed when “unjustly imprisoned”, in which they appealed to the Virgin Mary to persuade "our enemies” to abandon calumnies and lies and revert to truth and charity.
Radiocarbon dating tests on the Turin Shroud in 1988 indicated that it was a medieval fake. However this had been challenged on the grounds that the dated sample was taken from an area of the shroud mended after a fire in the Middle Ages and not a part of the original cloth.
After the sack of Constantinople it was next seen at Lirey in France in 1353, when it was displayed in a local church by descendants of Geoffroy de Charney, a Templar Knight burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay.
It was moved to various European cities until it was acquired by the Savoy dynasty in Turin in the sixteenth century. Holy See property since 1983, the Shroud was last publicly exhibited in 2000, and is due to go on show again next year.
The Vatican has not declared whether it is genuine or a forgery, leaving it to believers to decide. The late John Paul II said it was “an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age.” The self proclaimed heirs of the Knights Templar have asked the Vatican to “restore the reputation” of the disgraced order and acknowledge that assets worth some £80 million were confiscated.
The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, based in Spain, said that when the order was dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties, farms and commercial ventures belonging to knights were seized by the Church. A British branch also claiming descent from the Knights Templar and based in Hertfordshire has called for a papal apology for the persecution of the order.
SOURCE: Richard Owen, "Knights Templar hid the Shroud of Turin, says Vatican," Times Online (6 Apr 2009).
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Friday, January 30, 2009
History
One of the problems in attempting to determine the authenticity of the Shroud is that the existence of the current artifact in Turin cannot be proven before c. 1355 when it first appeared in Lirey, France. Its history since then is well documented thanks to the work of historians such as Ian Wilson and others. But what about before that? In his book, The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?, Wilson developed the theory that what is now the Shroud of Turin was once the famous Image of Edessa, later called the Holy Mandylion1 by the Byzantines. There is much circumstantial evidence to support this idea. The Cloth of Edessa is a known historical artifact. We will attempt to trace the several traditions regarding its origin.
Mandylion (c. 1100). Fresco in the Sakli Church, Goreme, Turkey.
Image courtesy of Wilson (1986:Plate 28).
In his History of the Church (c. 325), the Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (260-339) provided us with one of the earliest known accounts of an exchange of letters between King Abgar V of Edessa (died c. 50) and Jesus.2 Abgar was inflicted with a "terrible disease." Having heard of Jesus' healing abilities, he sent an envoy named Ananias (Hanan) to ask him to come to Edessa to cure him. Jesus declined to come himself but sent a letter back to Abgar saying that he will send one of his disciples. After Jesus' death the Apostle Thomas sent Thaddeus (Addai) who proceeded to cure Abgar and evangelize Edessa. Eusebius claimed to have seen the original documents and to have transcribed them from the original Syriac. He did not mention, however, a cloth with Jesus' likeness or imprint.
The Doctrine of Addai (c. 375-390) is the earliest source to mention an image on cloth, though the author stated that the image had been painted. Based on earlier versions of the Abgar story, the author wrote:
The illustration below is a detail that was originally part of a tryptych at St. Catherine's Monastery, Mt. Sinai.4 It shows King Abgar V receiving the Cloth of Edessa and has been dated to c. 945. Interesting is the disembodied frontal portrait of Christ in landscape similar to the facial area on the Shroud. The model for King Abgar is the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.
King Abgar V receiving the Cloth of Edessa (c. 945). Tryptych, St. Catherine's Monastery, Mt. Sinai. Image courtesy of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, (May 2000).
The silence surrounding the existence of the Cloth of Edessa from the late 4th to the early 6th century is deafening. Several writers from that period that one would expect to mention it, failed to do so. One of these, Egeria, a nun from Aquitania who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land c. 383, was shown around Edessa by the bishop who pointed out statues of Abgar and his son.5 The bishop also mentioned the letter from Jesus to Abgar, but there is no mention of the Cloth. Neither Joshua the Stylite, writing about 507, nor Jacob of Serug who died in 521 mentioned it.6 Wilson suspects this is because the Cloth had disappeared (c. 57) shortly after it arrived in Edessa during the reign of Abgar V's second son, Manu VI, who reverted to paganism. This disappearance could also explain the variations in accounts and why the author of The Doctrine of Addai claimed it had been painted.
Jack Markwardt believes that the Shroud may have been taken to Antioch after the Passion and then brought to Edessa around 540 by Monophysite refugees.7 In 525 there was a major flood in Edessa. It is possible that the Cloth was found at that time during reconstruction work of the city's walls (See illustration below).
Discovery of the Image of Edessa.
Image courtesy of TIME 151: 15 (April 20, 1998): 55.
The first historical mention of the Image of Edessa is around 569 in a Syriac hymn comparing the color of the marble in Edessa's new cathedral to the image "not the work of hands," or acheiropoeitos, as it was known.8 About 593, Evagrius, in his Ecclesiastical History also mentions it in a description of an unsuccessful siege of Edessa that took place in 544 by the Persian Chosroes Nirshirvan. He wrote that the Edessans' success was due to:
It should be noted that the contemporary historian Procopius of Caesarea in writing about the same event attributes the Edessan victory to their courage and resourcefulness, not a miraculous cloth.10 Sometime before 600 one of the most interesting versions of the Abgar story, The Acts of Thaddeus, relates that Jesus:
The Greek word, tetradiplon, is extremely rare and has been only found twice in classical or Byzantine Greek literature, both instances in reference to the Cloth of Edessa. It means "doubled in four" indicating that the Cloth was of some size and that very likely only a portion of it was seen, namely the face. The passage also indicates something of the superficiality of the image as on the Shroud and also that it was not painted but "imprinted."
Also at about this same time icons appear that apparently are based on the Image of Edessa and that remarkably resemble the Shroud, the most famous probably being the Christ Pantocrator (c. 590, see below) at St. Catherine's Monastery, Mt. Sinai.
Christ Pantocrator (c. 590). Monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Sinai.
Image courtesy of Byzantine Icons.
The next historical mention of the Edessa Cloth does not occur until about 730. John of Damascus, in a treatise that condemned iconoclasm, stated that:
Notable is the use of the word, himation, which was the outer garment worn by the Greeks in antiquity and usually measured approximately 10 feet long by 6½ feet wide. This again indicates a cloth of some size. Another reference to the Cloth as having some size was made by Leo the Deacon late in the tenth century who stated that the image was on a peplos, or a full-sized robe.13
In the spring of 943 Byzantine Emperor Romanus decided that he wanted the Cloth of Edessa and sent an army to negotiate with the Moslems who had conquered Edessa in 639. They were promised immunity from attack, 12,000 pieces of silver, and the release of 200 Moslem prisoners.
Emperor Romanus I Lecapenus receiving "the sacred Mandylion." Codex Skylitzes, National Library of Madrid. Image courtesy of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, (May 2000).
The Mandylion was thus brought from Edessa to Constantinople and arrived there on August 15, 944. The next day the Archdeacon of Hagia Sophia, Gregory Referendarius, gave a sermon in which he stated:
This remark would be ridiculous unless there was an image of the entire body. Though curiously the following year Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus commissioned an Official History of the Image of Edessa which contains two versions of how the facial image was transferred to the cloth, but neglects to mention the full body image:
It was obvious to the Byzantines that the image was not painted and as Mark Guscin has recently noted,17 the Byzantines also did not seem to have as a big a problem with internal contradictions as we do today. Apparently as new discoveries were made on the cloth, such as the full-body image, they were incorporated into the legends without fixing the contradictions. In 1141 the English monk, Ordericus Vitalis referred to a full-body image in his History of the Church:
Then c. 1192, approximately sixty-five years before the earliest date given from the results of the 1988 carbon-dating, it is highly probable the creator of this illumination from the Pray Manuscript below had seen the Shroud in Constantinople. Evidence of this is seen in the upper portion by: (1) the nude body, (2) the length of the cloth that continues around the neck of Joseph of Arimathea, (3) the way the right arm folds over the left as on the Shroud, (4) the hands showing only four fingers as on the Shroud, and (5) what appears to be a bloodstain above the right eye.
Entombment scene detail from the Pray Manuscript (c. 1192), National Szechenyi Library, Budapest. Image courtesy of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, (May 2000).
In the lower section the angel shows the women the burial cloths, including the Shroud which is depicted by two panels. The upper panel suggests the Shroud's characteristic herringbone weave, while some have thought the little red Greek crosses on the lower panel may represent the bloody image.
Of particular note is the L-shaped pattern of holes on the upper panel. These correspond on the Shroud to what are referred to by some as "poker holes" and are the result of fire damage prior to the 1532 Chambéry fire as they appear on the 1516 Lierre copy.
There is a reference to the Shroud by Nicolas Mesarites in 1201. Nicholas Mesarites was the person in charge of the relics in the Pharos Chapel in Constantinople's Sacred Palace. In the year 1201 a mob revolted and Mesarites was forced to defend the chapel. He mentions that:
Wilson (1979) points out that the phrase, "Christ rises again," could possibly be taken both literally and figuratively. The Byzantines may have had a device that made the "sindon" rise out of a box as French Crusader Robert De Clari also described a few years later.
In his later book, The Blood and The Shroud,21 Wilson adds that Mesarites' use of the word, "outlineless," [Gr. aperilepton] is interesting in that that is how the Shroud actually appears.
Moving ahead a few more years brings us to the Fourth Crusade. Primary sources for information about the Fourth Crusade include: Nicetas Choniates, Geoffrey de Villehardouin, and Robert de Clari. De Clari was a French soldier who participated in the sack of Constantinople on April 12, 1204.
A few months before that he described some of the sights of the city, particularly a "sydoines" that he had seen at the Church of St. Mary of Blachernae:
Dr. Peter Dembowski, Professor of Old French Literature at the University of California, states that sydoines "is a masculine singular noun. Its nominative (subject) case is denoted by the final -s." The word is derived through the Latin syndonis from the Greek sindon (usually translated as shroud). Dembowski also adds that before ca. 1650 the meaning of the French word "figure" was the same as in Latin, i.e., figure, form or outline. It only later came to mean "face."23
Robert De Clari. The Conquest of Constantinople. Detail from MS 487, folio 123b. Royal Library, Copenhagen. Illustration courtesy of Ian Wilson (1998:125).
This evidence strongly suggests that the Shroud with its full body image was present in Constantinople in 1204, approximately fifty-six years before the earliest date given from the results of the C14 dating. As to what happened to the Shroud, De Clari wrote that "no one, either Greek or French, ever knew what became of this sydoines when the city was taken."
We do, however, have further documentation of its continued presence in Constantinople. Both Nicolas Idruntino and Nicolas Mesarites mention it in lists of relics dating 1207. A reference by Gervase of Tilbury, a Rome-educated English lawyer, ca. 1211 says of the Cloth of Edessa:
Dorothy Crispino writes that the last mention of the Shroud's presence in Constantinople is dated 1247 while Baudouin II was emperor.25 After that there is no record of it until it reappears in Lirey almost a hundred years later. Wilson hypothesizes that it may have fallen into the hands of the Templars until it came into the possession of Geoffrey de Charny. For now it is still a mystery.
_______________
NOTES
1. The word, Mandylion, comes from the Arabic for handkerchief. See also Wilson (1998: Plate 37a).
2. Eusebius, History of the Church, Bk. I, Ch. XIII, "Narrative Concerning the Prince of the Edessences," trans. G. A. Williamson (Penguin, 1965): 66. This text is online at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250101.htm and also with some interesting footnotes at http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-08/anf08-139.htm#P9563_3062164.
3. The most complete of the original Syrian manuscripts still existing is from the late 4th century and is in the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg. The Doctrine of Addai the Apostle, trans. G. Phillips and Wright (1876). See also W. Cureton (ed.), Ancient Syriac Documents Relative to the Earliest Establishment of Christianity in Edessa (London: Williams & Norgate, 1864), Elibron Classics Replica Ed., pp. 6-23, from two manuscripts in the Nitrian collection, one 5th century, the other 6th century. A new translation called The Teaching of Addai by George Howard and Lububna Bar Sennak came out in 1981.
4. Below Abgar in the original tryptych are St. Basil and St. Ephraim the Syrian. Facing Abgar is Thaddaeus. Below Thaddaeus are St. Paul of Thebes and St. Antonios. See the full image at http://www29.homepage.villanova.edu/christopher.haas/Abgar%20&%20Thaddaeus.htm.
5. G. E. Gingras, trans., Egeria: Diary of a Pilgrimage, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 38 (NY: Newman, 1970): Ch. 19. See also John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels (London: SPCK, 1972).
6. J. B. Segal, Edessa: The Blessed City (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970):87-93, 170-173. A new edition came out in December 2001.
7. Jack Markwardt, "Antioch and the Shroud," The Shroud of Turin Website (1999): 1, 16. Paper presented at the 1999 Richmond Conference.
8. Codex vaticanus syriacus 95, folios 49-50. French translation by André Grabar, "Une hymme Syriaque sur l'architecture de la Cathédrale d'Edesse," L'art de la fin de l'antiquité et du moyen âge, Collège de France Fondation Schlumberger pour des études Byzantines (1968); cited in Wilson (1998:158, 266).
9. Evagrius, Historiae Ecclesiasticae. Original text in Migne, Patrologia graeca, vol. 86, 2, 2748-2749; translated in Bohn's Ecclesiastical Library (1854) and cited in Wilson (1979:137); Drews (1984:61).
10. Procopius, De Bello Persico 2, 26-27; cited in Drews (1984:65).
11. Acta Thaddaei 3, from R. A. Lipsius, ed., Acta apostolorum apocrypha I (Leipzig, 1891):274. English translation by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, The Ante-Nicene Fathers 8 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1951):558-559. Online versions of this text at: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0826.htm and http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-08/anf08-103.htm#P8319_2661690. Tetradiplon is translated as "towel" which unfortunately is not real helpful for a true understanding of its nature. STURP in 1978 performed raking light photography on the Shroud and found fold marks consistent with a "doubled in four" folding arrangement. See John Jackson, "Fold Marks as a Historical Record of the Turin Shroud," Shroud Spectrum 11 (1984):6-29 and John Jackson, "New Evidence that the Turin Shroud was the Mandylion," Actes du Symposium de Rome, 301ff.
12. John of Damascus, "De imaginibus oratorio," ch. 27 in Migne, Patrologia graeca, vol. 94, 1261. See also Bulst (1957:124), and citations in Drews (1984:39), and Wilson (1998:152).
13. Aka, Leon Diaconos, cited in Drews (1984:39) and Wilson (1998:152).
14. Mark Guscin, "The Sermon of Gregory Referendarius," The Shroud of Turin Website (January 2004): 12. See also Bulst, 134, and Dan Scavone, "Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail and the Edessa Icon," Collegamento pro Sindone (October 2002): 3, English translation based on A. M. Dubarle's French translation published in Revue des Études Byzantines 55 (1997): 5-51.
15. See Appendix C of Ian Wilson, The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ? Revised ed., (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1979): 276. Translated from the Greek by Bernard Slate and boys of Bradford Grammar School, West Yorkshire, assisted by the Reverend John Jackson. See also Migne, Patrologia cursus completus, series graeca (Paris, 1857-66), vol. CXIII, cols. 423-54.
16. Ibid., 278.
17. Guscin, op. cit., 2.
18. Ordericus Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, part III, book IX, 8, 'De gestis Balduini Edessae principatum obtinet.' Cited in Wilson (1998:144).
19. A. Heisenberg, Nicholas Mesarites--Die Palasrevolution des Johannes Comnenos (Wurzburg, 1907): 30. Cited in Wilson (1978:144).
20. Ibid., cited in Wilson (1986:145).
21. Ian Wilson, The Blood and The Shroud (NY: Free Press, 1998): 157.
22. Robert of Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople. ed. Edgar H. McNeal, (1936). Reprint ed. U. Toronto Press, 1997.
23. Peter Dembowski, "Sindon in the Old French Chronicle of Robert de Clari," Shroud Spectrum International 2 (March 1982): 15-16.
24. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperiali III, from Scriptores rerum brunsvicensium, ed. G. Liebniz (Hanover, 1707), I:966-7, cited in Wilson (1988:255), (1998:139) and Wilson & Schwortz (2000:114).
25. Dorothy Crispino, "1204: Deadlock or Springboard?" Shroud Spectrum International 4 (September 1982): 27.
Mandylion (c. 1100). Fresco in the Sakli Church, Goreme, Turkey.
Image courtesy of Wilson (1986:Plate 28).
In his History of the Church (c. 325), the Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (260-339) provided us with one of the earliest known accounts of an exchange of letters between King Abgar V of Edessa (died c. 50) and Jesus.2 Abgar was inflicted with a "terrible disease." Having heard of Jesus' healing abilities, he sent an envoy named Ananias (Hanan) to ask him to come to Edessa to cure him. Jesus declined to come himself but sent a letter back to Abgar saying that he will send one of his disciples. After Jesus' death the Apostle Thomas sent Thaddeus (Addai) who proceeded to cure Abgar and evangelize Edessa. Eusebius claimed to have seen the original documents and to have transcribed them from the original Syriac. He did not mention, however, a cloth with Jesus' likeness or imprint.
The Doctrine of Addai (c. 375-390) is the earliest source to mention an image on cloth, though the author stated that the image had been painted. Based on earlier versions of the Abgar story, the author wrote:
When Hanan the archivist saw that Jesus had spoken thus to him, he took and painted the portrait of Jesus in choice pigments, . . . and brought it with him to his lord King Abgar. When King Abgar saw that portrait he received it with great joy and placed it with great honor in one of the buildings of his palaces.3
The illustration below is a detail that was originally part of a tryptych at St. Catherine's Monastery, Mt. Sinai.4 It shows King Abgar V receiving the Cloth of Edessa and has been dated to c. 945. Interesting is the disembodied frontal portrait of Christ in landscape similar to the facial area on the Shroud. The model for King Abgar is the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.
King Abgar V receiving the Cloth of Edessa (c. 945). Tryptych, St. Catherine's Monastery, Mt. Sinai. Image courtesy of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, (May 2000).
The silence surrounding the existence of the Cloth of Edessa from the late 4th to the early 6th century is deafening. Several writers from that period that one would expect to mention it, failed to do so. One of these, Egeria, a nun from Aquitania who made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land c. 383, was shown around Edessa by the bishop who pointed out statues of Abgar and his son.5 The bishop also mentioned the letter from Jesus to Abgar, but there is no mention of the Cloth. Neither Joshua the Stylite, writing about 507, nor Jacob of Serug who died in 521 mentioned it.6 Wilson suspects this is because the Cloth had disappeared (c. 57) shortly after it arrived in Edessa during the reign of Abgar V's second son, Manu VI, who reverted to paganism. This disappearance could also explain the variations in accounts and why the author of The Doctrine of Addai claimed it had been painted.
Jack Markwardt believes that the Shroud may have been taken to Antioch after the Passion and then brought to Edessa around 540 by Monophysite refugees.7 In 525 there was a major flood in Edessa. It is possible that the Cloth was found at that time during reconstruction work of the city's walls (See illustration below).
Discovery of the Image of Edessa.
Image courtesy of TIME 151: 15 (April 20, 1998): 55.
The first historical mention of the Image of Edessa is around 569 in a Syriac hymn comparing the color of the marble in Edessa's new cathedral to the image "not the work of hands," or acheiropoeitos, as it was known.8 About 593, Evagrius, in his Ecclesiastical History also mentions it in a description of an unsuccessful siege of Edessa that took place in 544 by the Persian Chosroes Nirshirvan. He wrote that the Edessans' success was due to:
. . . the divinely made image not made by the hands of man, which Christ our God sent to King Abgar when he desired to see him.9
It should be noted that the contemporary historian Procopius of Caesarea in writing about the same event attributes the Edessan victory to their courage and resourcefulness, not a miraculous cloth.10 Sometime before 600 one of the most interesting versions of the Abgar story, The Acts of Thaddeus, relates that Jesus:
. . . asked to wash himself, and a tetradiplon was given to him; and when he had washed himself he wiped his face with it. And his image having been imprinted on the linen...11
The Greek word, tetradiplon, is extremely rare and has been only found twice in classical or Byzantine Greek literature, both instances in reference to the Cloth of Edessa. It means "doubled in four" indicating that the Cloth was of some size and that very likely only a portion of it was seen, namely the face. The passage also indicates something of the superficiality of the image as on the Shroud and also that it was not painted but "imprinted."
Also at about this same time icons appear that apparently are based on the Image of Edessa and that remarkably resemble the Shroud, the most famous probably being the Christ Pantocrator (c. 590, see below) at St. Catherine's Monastery, Mt. Sinai.
Christ Pantocrator (c. 590). Monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Sinai.
Image courtesy of Byzantine Icons.
The next historical mention of the Edessa Cloth does not occur until about 730. John of Damascus, in a treatise that condemned iconoclasm, stated that:
A certain tale is told how that when Abgar was king of Edessa he sent a portrait painter to paint a likeness of the Lord. And when the painter could not paint because of the brightness which shone from his countenance, the Lord himself put a himation over himself, imprinted his likeness on this and sent it to Abgar to satisfy his desire.12
Notable is the use of the word, himation, which was the outer garment worn by the Greeks in antiquity and usually measured approximately 10 feet long by 6½ feet wide. This again indicates a cloth of some size. Another reference to the Cloth as having some size was made by Leo the Deacon late in the tenth century who stated that the image was on a peplos, or a full-sized robe.13
In the spring of 943 Byzantine Emperor Romanus decided that he wanted the Cloth of Edessa and sent an army to negotiate with the Moslems who had conquered Edessa in 639. They were promised immunity from attack, 12,000 pieces of silver, and the release of 200 Moslem prisoners.
Emperor Romanus I Lecapenus receiving "the sacred Mandylion." Codex Skylitzes, National Library of Madrid. Image courtesy of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, (May 2000).
The Mandylion was thus brought from Edessa to Constantinople and arrived there on August 15, 944. The next day the Archdeacon of Hagia Sophia, Gregory Referendarius, gave a sermon in which he stated:
. . . This reflection, however--let everyone be inspired with the explanation--has been imprinted only by the sweat from the face of the originator of life, falling like drops of blood, and by the finger of God. For these are the beauties that have made up the true imprint of Christ, since after the drops fell, it was embellished by drops from his own side. Both are highly instructive--blood and water there, here sweat and image.14
This remark would be ridiculous unless there was an image of the entire body. Though curiously the following year Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus commissioned an Official History of the Image of Edessa which contains two versions of how the facial image was transferred to the cloth, but neglects to mention the full body image:
The Savior then washed his face in water, wiped off the moisture that was left on the towel that was given to him, and in some divine and inexpressible manner had his own likeness impressed on it.15
They say that when Christ was about to go voluntarily to death he was seen to reveal his human weakness, feel anguish, and pray. According to the Evangelist, sweat dropped from him like drops of blood. Then they say he took this piece of cloth which we see now from one of the disciples and wiped off the drops of sweat on it. At once the still-visible impression of that divine face was produced.16
It was obvious to the Byzantines that the image was not painted and as Mark Guscin has recently noted,17 the Byzantines also did not seem to have as a big a problem with internal contradictions as we do today. Apparently as new discoveries were made on the cloth, such as the full-body image, they were incorporated into the legends without fixing the contradictions. In 1141 the English monk, Ordericus Vitalis referred to a full-body image in his History of the Church:
. . . a most precious cloth with which he wiped the sweat from his face, and on which shone the Savior's features miraculously reproduced. This displayed to those who gazed on it the likeness and proportions of the body of the Lord.18
Then c. 1192, approximately sixty-five years before the earliest date given from the results of the 1988 carbon-dating, it is highly probable the creator of this illumination from the Pray Manuscript below had seen the Shroud in Constantinople. Evidence of this is seen in the upper portion by: (1) the nude body, (2) the length of the cloth that continues around the neck of Joseph of Arimathea, (3) the way the right arm folds over the left as on the Shroud, (4) the hands showing only four fingers as on the Shroud, and (5) what appears to be a bloodstain above the right eye.
Entombment scene detail from the Pray Manuscript (c. 1192), National Szechenyi Library, Budapest. Image courtesy of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, (May 2000).
In the lower section the angel shows the women the burial cloths, including the Shroud which is depicted by two panels. The upper panel suggests the Shroud's characteristic herringbone weave, while some have thought the little red Greek crosses on the lower panel may represent the bloody image.
Of particular note is the L-shaped pattern of holes on the upper panel. These correspond on the Shroud to what are referred to by some as "poker holes" and are the result of fire damage prior to the 1532 Chambéry fire as they appear on the 1516 Lierre copy.
There is a reference to the Shroud by Nicolas Mesarites in 1201. Nicholas Mesarites was the person in charge of the relics in the Pharos Chapel in Constantinople's Sacred Palace. In the year 1201 a mob revolted and Mesarites was forced to defend the chapel. He mentions that:
In this chapel Christ rises again, and the sindon with the burial linens is the clear proof. . . .19 . . . the burial shrouds of Christ: these are of linen. They are of cheap and easy to find materials, still smelling of myrrh and defying decay since they wrapped the outlineless, fragrant-with-myrrh, naked body after the Passion.20
Wilson (1979) points out that the phrase, "Christ rises again," could possibly be taken both literally and figuratively. The Byzantines may have had a device that made the "sindon" rise out of a box as French Crusader Robert De Clari also described a few years later.
In his later book, The Blood and The Shroud,21 Wilson adds that Mesarites' use of the word, "outlineless," [Gr. aperilepton] is interesting in that that is how the Shroud actually appears.
Moving ahead a few more years brings us to the Fourth Crusade. Primary sources for information about the Fourth Crusade include: Nicetas Choniates, Geoffrey de Villehardouin, and Robert de Clari. De Clari was a French soldier who participated in the sack of Constantinople on April 12, 1204.
A few months before that he described some of the sights of the city, particularly a "sydoines" that he had seen at the Church of St. Mary of Blachernae:
And among those other there was another church which was called My Lady Saint Mary of Blachernae, where there was the shroud in which Our Lord had been wrapped, which every Friday raised itself upright, so that one could see the figure of Our Lord on it.22
Dr. Peter Dembowski, Professor of Old French Literature at the University of California, states that sydoines "is a masculine singular noun. Its nominative (subject) case is denoted by the final -s." The word is derived through the Latin syndonis from the Greek sindon (usually translated as shroud). Dembowski also adds that before ca. 1650 the meaning of the French word "figure" was the same as in Latin, i.e., figure, form or outline. It only later came to mean "face."23
Robert De Clari. The Conquest of Constantinople. Detail from MS 487, folio 123b. Royal Library, Copenhagen. Illustration courtesy of Ian Wilson (1998:125).
This evidence strongly suggests that the Shroud with its full body image was present in Constantinople in 1204, approximately fifty-six years before the earliest date given from the results of the C14 dating. As to what happened to the Shroud, De Clari wrote that "no one, either Greek or French, ever knew what became of this sydoines when the city was taken."
We do, however, have further documentation of its continued presence in Constantinople. Both Nicolas Idruntino and Nicolas Mesarites mention it in lists of relics dating 1207. A reference by Gervase of Tilbury, a Rome-educated English lawyer, ca. 1211 says of the Cloth of Edessa:
The story is passed from archives of ancient authority that the Lord prostrated himself with his entire body on whitest linen, and so by divine power there was impressed upon the linen a most beautiful imprint of not only the face, but the entire body of the Lord.24
Dorothy Crispino writes that the last mention of the Shroud's presence in Constantinople is dated 1247 while Baudouin II was emperor.25 After that there is no record of it until it reappears in Lirey almost a hundred years later. Wilson hypothesizes that it may have fallen into the hands of the Templars until it came into the possession of Geoffrey de Charny. For now it is still a mystery.
_______________
NOTES
1. The word, Mandylion, comes from the Arabic for handkerchief. See also Wilson (1998: Plate 37a).
2. Eusebius, History of the Church, Bk. I, Ch. XIII, "Narrative Concerning the Prince of the Edessences," trans. G. A. Williamson (Penguin, 1965): 66. This text is online at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250101.htm and also with some interesting footnotes at http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-08/anf08-139.htm#P9563_3062164.
3. The most complete of the original Syrian manuscripts still existing is from the late 4th century and is in the Imperial Library in St. Petersburg. The Doctrine of Addai the Apostle, trans. G. Phillips and Wright (1876). See also W. Cureton (ed.), Ancient Syriac Documents Relative to the Earliest Establishment of Christianity in Edessa (London: Williams & Norgate, 1864), Elibron Classics Replica Ed., pp. 6-23, from two manuscripts in the Nitrian collection, one 5th century, the other 6th century. A new translation called The Teaching of Addai by George Howard and Lububna Bar Sennak came out in 1981.
4. Below Abgar in the original tryptych are St. Basil and St. Ephraim the Syrian. Facing Abgar is Thaddaeus. Below Thaddaeus are St. Paul of Thebes and St. Antonios. See the full image at http://www29.homepage.villanova.edu/christopher.haas/Abgar%20&%20Thaddaeus.htm.
5. G. E. Gingras, trans., Egeria: Diary of a Pilgrimage, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 38 (NY: Newman, 1970): Ch. 19. See also John Wilkinson, Egeria's Travels (London: SPCK, 1972).
6. J. B. Segal, Edessa: The Blessed City (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970):87-93, 170-173. A new edition came out in December 2001.
7. Jack Markwardt, "Antioch and the Shroud," The Shroud of Turin Website (1999): 1, 16. Paper presented at the 1999 Richmond Conference.
8. Codex vaticanus syriacus 95, folios 49-50. French translation by André Grabar, "Une hymme Syriaque sur l'architecture de la Cathédrale d'Edesse," L'art de la fin de l'antiquité et du moyen âge, Collège de France Fondation Schlumberger pour des études Byzantines (1968); cited in Wilson (1998:158, 266).
9. Evagrius, Historiae Ecclesiasticae. Original text in Migne, Patrologia graeca, vol. 86, 2, 2748-2749; translated in Bohn's Ecclesiastical Library (1854) and cited in Wilson (1979:137); Drews (1984:61).
10. Procopius, De Bello Persico 2, 26-27; cited in Drews (1984:65).
11. Acta Thaddaei 3, from R. A. Lipsius, ed., Acta apostolorum apocrypha I (Leipzig, 1891):274. English translation by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, The Ante-Nicene Fathers 8 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1951):558-559. Online versions of this text at: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0826.htm and http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-08/anf08-103.htm#P8319_2661690. Tetradiplon is translated as "towel" which unfortunately is not real helpful for a true understanding of its nature. STURP in 1978 performed raking light photography on the Shroud and found fold marks consistent with a "doubled in four" folding arrangement. See John Jackson, "Fold Marks as a Historical Record of the Turin Shroud," Shroud Spectrum 11 (1984):6-29 and John Jackson, "New Evidence that the Turin Shroud was the Mandylion," Actes du Symposium de Rome, 301ff.
12. John of Damascus, "De imaginibus oratorio," ch. 27 in Migne, Patrologia graeca, vol. 94, 1261. See also Bulst (1957:124), and citations in Drews (1984:39), and Wilson (1998:152).
13. Aka, Leon Diaconos, cited in Drews (1984:39) and Wilson (1998:152).
14. Mark Guscin, "The Sermon of Gregory Referendarius," The Shroud of Turin Website (January 2004): 12. See also Bulst, 134, and Dan Scavone, "Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail and the Edessa Icon," Collegamento pro Sindone (October 2002): 3, English translation based on A. M. Dubarle's French translation published in Revue des Études Byzantines 55 (1997): 5-51.
15. See Appendix C of Ian Wilson, The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ? Revised ed., (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1979): 276. Translated from the Greek by Bernard Slate and boys of Bradford Grammar School, West Yorkshire, assisted by the Reverend John Jackson. See also Migne, Patrologia cursus completus, series graeca (Paris, 1857-66), vol. CXIII, cols. 423-54.
16. Ibid., 278.
17. Guscin, op. cit., 2.
18. Ordericus Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica, part III, book IX, 8, 'De gestis Balduini Edessae principatum obtinet.' Cited in Wilson (1998:144).
19. A. Heisenberg, Nicholas Mesarites--Die Palasrevolution des Johannes Comnenos (Wurzburg, 1907): 30. Cited in Wilson (1978:144).
20. Ibid., cited in Wilson (1986:145).
21. Ian Wilson, The Blood and The Shroud (NY: Free Press, 1998): 157.
22. Robert of Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople. ed. Edgar H. McNeal, (1936). Reprint ed. U. Toronto Press, 1997.
23. Peter Dembowski, "Sindon in the Old French Chronicle of Robert de Clari," Shroud Spectrum International 2 (March 1982): 15-16.
24. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperiali III, from Scriptores rerum brunsvicensium, ed. G. Liebniz (Hanover, 1707), I:966-7, cited in Wilson (1988:255), (1998:139) and Wilson & Schwortz (2000:114).
25. Dorothy Crispino, "1204: Deadlock or Springboard?" Shroud Spectrum International 4 (September 1982): 27.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Icons
Did the Shroud of Turin serve as an original model for many Byzantine icons? Throughout the first five centuries after the death of Christ, he was usually represented as youthful, beardless, and with short hair. The detail below of Christ Enthroned from the apse mosaic of San Vitale, Ravenna (c. 545) demonstrates this clearly.1
Christ Enthroned (c. 545). San Vitale, Ravenna.
Image courtesy of Early Christian and Byzantine Art.
During the late sixth century artists began representing Christ's image in various media so that it had many uncanny similarities to the image on the Shroud of Turin. See the photographs of the face of the man in the Shroud and its negative image below.
Positive and Negative facial images of the Shroud of Turin.
Images © 1978, Barrie M. Schwortz. Courtesy of The Shroud of Turin Website.
French scholar Paul Vignon, was one of the first to notice these similarities and catalogued at least 15 distinct markings that many of the icons have in common with the Shroud image. Three of the most common markings are a topless square between the eyebrows, a "v" shape at the bridge of the nose, and two wisps of hair.2 Dating from c. 590 is one of the earliest and most beautiful icons, the Christ Pantocrator, pictured below. It is painted in encaustic, an early technique involving beeswax.
Christ Pantocrator (c. 590). Monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Sinai.
Image courtesy of Byzantine Icons.
Using a Polarized Image Overlay Technique that they developed Whanger and Whanger (1998:20) discovered 170 points of congruence between the St. Catherine's Pantocrator icon and the Shroud face. In a court of law the forensic standard for fingerprints is 14 points of congruence, for faces 45-60.
During the first reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian II (685-695), the first known coinage to feature Christ's portrait appeared. The gold solidus below dates from c. 690.
Gold solidus (c. 690).
Image courtesy of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, (May 2000).
The Whangers (1998:20) found 145 points of congruence between the Justinian solidus and the Shroud face. This evidence strongly suggests the Shroud as the model for both the Pantocrator icon and the Justinian solidus.3
Three of the most famous icons exhibiting several of the Vignon markings can be seen in the following examples. The first is the Christ Pantocrator mosaic (c. 1050-1100) from the dome of the Church at Daphni, near Athens. Notable are the "v" shaped triangle at the bridge of the nose, and a stylized version of the topless square.4
(Left) Christ Pancrator (c. 1050-1100), Daphni. Image courtesy of Dr. Allen Farber, Art Dept., State University of New York College at Oneonta.
The Christ Pantocrator, (c. 1148) from the mosaic in the apse of Cefalù Cathedral, Cefalù, Sicily can be seen in the second example below. It has exaggerated strands of hair and also the stylized "v" and topless square.
Christ Pantocrator (c. 1148), Cefalù. Image courtesy of Dr. Oleg Bychov, Theology Dept., St. Bonaventure University.
The final image is a detail from the mosaic of the Deesis from the south gallery of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Most of the markings are present, though the strands of hair are missing. This mosaic dates from ca. 1260-1280, around the earliest date given for the Shroud from the Carbon 14 dating.
Detail of the Deesis (c. 1260-1280), Hagia Sophia. Image courtesy of Orthodox Ministry ACCESS Icon Gallery.
Armenian artist P. Ariel Agemian created this modern "icon" (shown below) in 1935 using the Shroud image as his model. This image is one of my favorites. For animations of the positive and negative images of the Shroud morphing into the Agemian portrait, see Holy Shroud Guild and Jesus Shroud Face websites.
Face of Christ (1935). P. Ariel Agemian. Scan of plate 36 from Kenneth E. Stevenson and Gary R. Habermas, Verdict on the Shroud (Wayne, PA: Dell/Banbury, 1981). Out of Print.
The image below is obviously a composite of the Agemian and the Shroud negative image. It was allegedly made in 1978 by NASA engineers. However, it has been claimed by some to be a miraculous manifestation by the Indian spiritual master Sai Baba. No further comment is really necessary.
Composite image of the Agemian and the Shroud face negative (1978).
Image courtesy of Visages du Christ.
_______________
NOTES
1. An even earlier example, Christ the Good Shepherd, ca. 430 from the Mausoleum of Gallia Placidia can be seen at Images from World History.
2. Other Vignon markings include: (1) a transverse streak across the forehead, (2) a raised right eyebrow, (3) large, accentuated eyes, (4) accentuated cheeks, (5) an enlarged left nostril, (6) a line between the nose and upper lip, (7) a heavy line under the lower lip, (8) a hairless area between the lower lip and beard, (9) a forked beard, and (10) the left sidelock of hair is longer than the right. See Wilson (1998:Plate 39b).
3. For more on the Whanger's research, see the Council for Study of the Shroud of Turin. It contains Quicktime and AVI movies for fascinating image comparisons. To view an interactive java applet with an image overlay and image density averaging of the Pantocrator icon and the Shroud face, see The Shroud of Turin Story - Java applets showing image comparisons.
4. For another image of this icon see also The Shroud of Turin Story: The Daphni Pantocrator.
Christ Enthroned (c. 545). San Vitale, Ravenna.
Image courtesy of Early Christian and Byzantine Art.
During the late sixth century artists began representing Christ's image in various media so that it had many uncanny similarities to the image on the Shroud of Turin. See the photographs of the face of the man in the Shroud and its negative image below.
Positive and Negative facial images of the Shroud of Turin.
Images © 1978, Barrie M. Schwortz. Courtesy of The Shroud of Turin Website.
French scholar Paul Vignon, was one of the first to notice these similarities and catalogued at least 15 distinct markings that many of the icons have in common with the Shroud image. Three of the most common markings are a topless square between the eyebrows, a "v" shape at the bridge of the nose, and two wisps of hair.2 Dating from c. 590 is one of the earliest and most beautiful icons, the Christ Pantocrator, pictured below. It is painted in encaustic, an early technique involving beeswax.
Christ Pantocrator (c. 590). Monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Sinai.
Image courtesy of Byzantine Icons.
Using a Polarized Image Overlay Technique that they developed Whanger and Whanger (1998:20) discovered 170 points of congruence between the St. Catherine's Pantocrator icon and the Shroud face. In a court of law the forensic standard for fingerprints is 14 points of congruence, for faces 45-60.
During the first reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian II (685-695), the first known coinage to feature Christ's portrait appeared. The gold solidus below dates from c. 690.
Gold solidus (c. 690).
Image courtesy of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the XXth Century, (May 2000).
The Whangers (1998:20) found 145 points of congruence between the Justinian solidus and the Shroud face. This evidence strongly suggests the Shroud as the model for both the Pantocrator icon and the Justinian solidus.3
Three of the most famous icons exhibiting several of the Vignon markings can be seen in the following examples. The first is the Christ Pantocrator mosaic (c. 1050-1100) from the dome of the Church at Daphni, near Athens. Notable are the "v" shaped triangle at the bridge of the nose, and a stylized version of the topless square.4
(Left) Christ Pancrator (c. 1050-1100), Daphni. Image courtesy of Dr. Allen Farber, Art Dept., State University of New York College at Oneonta.
The Christ Pantocrator, (c. 1148) from the mosaic in the apse of Cefalù Cathedral, Cefalù, Sicily can be seen in the second example below. It has exaggerated strands of hair and also the stylized "v" and topless square.
Christ Pantocrator (c. 1148), Cefalù. Image courtesy of Dr. Oleg Bychov, Theology Dept., St. Bonaventure University.
The final image is a detail from the mosaic of the Deesis from the south gallery of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Most of the markings are present, though the strands of hair are missing. This mosaic dates from ca. 1260-1280, around the earliest date given for the Shroud from the Carbon 14 dating.
Detail of the Deesis (c. 1260-1280), Hagia Sophia. Image courtesy of Orthodox Ministry ACCESS Icon Gallery.
Armenian artist P. Ariel Agemian created this modern "icon" (shown below) in 1935 using the Shroud image as his model. This image is one of my favorites. For animations of the positive and negative images of the Shroud morphing into the Agemian portrait, see Holy Shroud Guild and Jesus Shroud Face websites.
Face of Christ (1935). P. Ariel Agemian. Scan of plate 36 from Kenneth E. Stevenson and Gary R. Habermas, Verdict on the Shroud (Wayne, PA: Dell/Banbury, 1981). Out of Print.
The image below is obviously a composite of the Agemian and the Shroud negative image. It was allegedly made in 1978 by NASA engineers. However, it has been claimed by some to be a miraculous manifestation by the Indian spiritual master Sai Baba. No further comment is really necessary.
Composite image of the Agemian and the Shroud face negative (1978).
Image courtesy of Visages du Christ.
_______________
NOTES
1. An even earlier example, Christ the Good Shepherd, ca. 430 from the Mausoleum of Gallia Placidia can be seen at Images from World History.
2. Other Vignon markings include: (1) a transverse streak across the forehead, (2) a raised right eyebrow, (3) large, accentuated eyes, (4) accentuated cheeks, (5) an enlarged left nostril, (6) a line between the nose and upper lip, (7) a heavy line under the lower lip, (8) a hairless area between the lower lip and beard, (9) a forked beard, and (10) the left sidelock of hair is longer than the right. See Wilson (1998:Plate 39b).
3. For more on the Whanger's research, see the Council for Study of the Shroud of Turin. It contains Quicktime and AVI movies for fascinating image comparisons. To view an interactive java applet with an image overlay and image density averaging of the Pantocrator icon and the Shroud face, see The Shroud of Turin Story - Java applets showing image comparisons.
4. For another image of this icon see also The Shroud of Turin Story: The Daphni Pantocrator.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
What is the Shroud of Turin?
© 2002, Archdiocese of Turin. Courtesy of The Holy Shroud - Official Site.
The Shroud of Turin takes its name from the city in which it has been kept since September 14, 1578. It is a linen cloth about 14 feet 3 inches long and 3 feet 7 inches wide (437 cm x 111 cm). This measurement corresponds with the measurement of common burial shrouds in Palestine in the 1st century which was 8 x 2 Philaeterian cubits.1
The shroud is a herringbone twill with a 3:1 weave, of probable 1st century Syrian manufacture closely resembling 1st century textile fragments found at Masada. The flax fibrils also contain entwisted cotton fibrils from a previous work of the loom identified as Gossypium herbaceum, a Middle Eastern species not found in Europe.2
Burial shrouds have been used since ancient times and were wrapped lengthwise around the body as shown in the painting below, an aquatint attributed to Giovanni Battista della Rovere (1561-1630).3
La Santa Sindone, Galleria Sabauda, Turin.
Image courtesy of TIME 151: 15 (April 20, 1998): 52.
What is unique about the Turin Shroud is that it is the only burial shroud that bears the front and back images of a man who was beaten, scourged, and crucified.4
In 1978 a group of scientists, The Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), studied the Shroud intensively for 120 hours. They concluded that the image is not formed by paint, and that the image is caused by oxidation, dehydration, and conjugation of the cellulose in the linen.5 The image is quite faint and found only on the very outer surface of the linen fibers.
In 1898 an attorney named Secondo Pia was allowed to photograph the Shroud for the first time. He was amazed to discover while developing the film that on the negative he was actually seeing a positive image (see below B/W negative of the Shroud ventral image rotated to a vertical position)6 and that the details on the Shroud could be seen much more clearly.
Image ©1978, Barrie M. Schwortz.
Courtesy of The Shroud of Turin Website.
Some of the notable features are the side wound, the blood flow down the arm, the nail wounds in the wrist and feet, various creases, and fold marks, scorch marks, and water stains. The patches sewn on by the Poor Clare nuns to repair the damage from the 1532 fire can be seen in older photographs. They were removed during the restoration in July 2002.
Tests on samples from the blood areas indicate that it is actual blood7 of human type AB.8 Forensic specialists have determined that the angle of the blood flows and the appearance of the wounds are accurate.9 Further on the areas where there is blood, the blood has saturated all the way through the fibers and there is no body image under the blood.10
The Shroud of Turin takes its name from the city in which it has been kept since September 14, 1578. It is a linen cloth about 14 feet 3 inches long and 3 feet 7 inches wide (437 cm x 111 cm). This measurement corresponds with the measurement of common burial shrouds in Palestine in the 1st century which was 8 x 2 Philaeterian cubits.1
The shroud is a herringbone twill with a 3:1 weave, of probable 1st century Syrian manufacture closely resembling 1st century textile fragments found at Masada. The flax fibrils also contain entwisted cotton fibrils from a previous work of the loom identified as Gossypium herbaceum, a Middle Eastern species not found in Europe.2
Burial shrouds have been used since ancient times and were wrapped lengthwise around the body as shown in the painting below, an aquatint attributed to Giovanni Battista della Rovere (1561-1630).3
La Santa Sindone, Galleria Sabauda, Turin.
Image courtesy of TIME 151: 15 (April 20, 1998): 52.
What is unique about the Turin Shroud is that it is the only burial shroud that bears the front and back images of a man who was beaten, scourged, and crucified.4
In 1978 a group of scientists, The Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), studied the Shroud intensively for 120 hours. They concluded that the image is not formed by paint, and that the image is caused by oxidation, dehydration, and conjugation of the cellulose in the linen.5 The image is quite faint and found only on the very outer surface of the linen fibers.
In 1898 an attorney named Secondo Pia was allowed to photograph the Shroud for the first time. He was amazed to discover while developing the film that on the negative he was actually seeing a positive image (see below B/W negative of the Shroud ventral image rotated to a vertical position)6 and that the details on the Shroud could be seen much more clearly.
Image ©1978, Barrie M. Schwortz.
Courtesy of The Shroud of Turin Website.
Some of the notable features are the side wound, the blood flow down the arm, the nail wounds in the wrist and feet, various creases, and fold marks, scorch marks, and water stains. The patches sewn on by the Poor Clare nuns to repair the damage from the 1532 fire can be seen in older photographs. They were removed during the restoration in July 2002.
Tests on samples from the blood areas indicate that it is actual blood7 of human type AB.8 Forensic specialists have determined that the angle of the blood flows and the appearance of the wounds are accurate.9 Further on the areas where there is blood, the blood has saturated all the way through the fibers and there is no body image under the blood.10
Pollen from the Jerusalem area, Turkey, and Europe has been found on the Shroud.11 In addition, there appears to be an image of a coin over the right eye that has been identified as a lepton from the time of Pontius Pilate. Further scientific studies are needed, however, to confirm this finding.
Debate on whether the Shroud could be the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth has been heated, especially since the 1988 Carbon-14 dating indicated the Shroud was from the medieval period (1260-1390).12 The painting above which is from the late 16th century shows how an even later artist was not able to convincingly duplicate the features of the Shroud.
On January 20, 2005, Los Alamos chemist Raymond Rogers published a scientific paper proving that "the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin,"13 and thus reopened the question of its age.
____________
NOTES
1. Ian Wilson and Barrie Schwortz, The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence, (London: Michael O'Mara, 2000), p. 42.
2. D. Barag, et al. (eds.), Masada IV: Lamps, Textiles, Basket, Wood, and Ballista Balls, v. 4 of the Reports of the Masada Excavations, Jerusalem (1994). See also Gilbert Raes, La Sindone, 1976; and J. Tyrer, Textile Horizons (Dec. 1981).
3. There are also two similar paintings: (1) Gerolamo della Rovere's (1605-1637) Descent from the Cross, from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin can be seen at The Holy Shroud - Official Site; and (2) Jean Gaspard Baldoino's (1590-1669) Entombment of the Body of Christ in the Shroud, is in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Nice. Image courtesy of CRET: Le Saint Suaire.
4. Pierre Barbet, A Doctor at Calvary (NY: 1953); Robert Bucklin, "The Medical Aspects of the Crucifixion of Christ," Sindon (December 1961), pp. 5-11; Frederick T. Zugibe, The Cross and the Shroud: A Medical Examiner Interprets the Turin Shroud (NY: Angelus, 1982).
5. E.J. Jumper, A.D. Adler, J.P. Jackson, S.F. Pellicori, J.H. Heller, & J.R. Druzik, "A Comprehensive Examination of the Various Stains and Images on the Shroud of Turin," ACS Advances in Chemistry 205: Archaeological Chemistry III (American Chemical Soc., 1984), pp. 447-476.
6. ©1978, Barrie M. Schwortz. Courtesy of The Shroud of Turin Website.
7. John Heller & Alan Adler, "A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin," Canadian Society for Forensic Science Journal 14:3 (1981), p. 92.
8. P. Baima-Bollone, M. Jorio, & A.L. Massaro, "Identification of the Group of the Traces of Human Blood on the Shroud, Shroud Spectrum International 6 (March 1983), pp. 3-6.
9. Barbet, Bucklin, and Zugibe, op.cit.
10. Jumper et al., op cit.
11. Max Frei, "Nine Years of Palinological Studies on the Shroud," Shroud Spectrum International 3 (June 1982), pp. 3-7; A. Danin, A. Whanger, U. Baruch, & M. Whanger, Flora of the Shroud of Turin (St. Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden Press, 1999), pp. 14-15, 22.
12. P. E. Damon, et al., "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature 337:6208 (February 16, 1989): 611-615.
13. Raymond N. Rogers, "Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin," Thermochimica Acta 425/1-2 (January 20, 2005): 189-194.
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