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.
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