Open Letter to John Dominic Crossan

For More Information See: Shroud of Turin Story
 

The Image of Edessa

Historians have long known about an ancient cloth bearing an image of Jesus. This cloth was known as the Image of Edessa, the Edessa Cloth, and later in the Byzantine era as the Holy Mandylion. Edessa was a cosmopolitan city in Jesus’ day and one of the cities were Christian communities developed early as they did in Antioch. Edessa, now the city of Urfa in modern day Turkey, is situated about 400 miles north of Jerusalem. We can be quite certain that this ancient cloth, which disappeared during the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 by soldiers of the Fourth Crusade, is the Shroud of Turin.

Legend has it that the cloth was brought to King Abgar V Ouchama of Edessa (13 –50 CE) by one of Jesus’ disciples known to us as Thaddeus Jude (Addai). We know of this legend from Eusebius of Caesarea’s early fourth century Ecclesiastical History. Therein, we learn of a now lost document once in Edessa’s archives purportedly written by King Abgar V and delivered to Jesus by an envoy named Ananias. Abgar, supposedly, asked Jesus to come to Edessa and to cure him of leprosy. Eusebius’ history reports that the Apostle Thomas did send Thaddeus Jude sometime after Jesus’ death and that he founded a church in Edessa. Historians are highly critical of this legend since Eusebius’s history includes, as elements of the letter, references from the Gospels, which were written later, as well as theological concepts, which were developed later. It also must be pointed out that Eusebius makes no mention of the cloth.

Another Syrian manuscript, the Doctrine of Addai, fills in some gaps. According to this document, which also mentions the letter, Ananias painted a portrait of Jesus “with choice pigments.” A later document, the Acts of the Holy Apostle Thaddeus, written in the early part of the sixth century, adds more detail. It suggests that the image was formed when Jesus wiped his face on the linen cloth and it refers to the Edessa Cloth as a tetradiplon. We can only assume that this is all legend. But from this material we can gather three very important clues:

1)      The cloth arrived in Edessa.

2)      The image on the cloth is recognized to be unique in that the images were described as painted with choice pigments or formed when Jesus wiped his face on the linen cloth.

3)      The cloth is described as a tetradiplon, which means doubled in fours. When folded thus, only the face from the Shroud will be visible. 

Regardless of how the image-bearing cloth arrived in Edessa, it was discovered in the early sixth century concealed behind some stones above one of the city gates. It was a practice in ancient cities of this area to mount a stone tile with a picture of some favored deity above the city’s main gate. It may be that the Image of Edessa was simply stored behind such a tile as suggested by some Byzantine iconography. It could well have been that because of severe floods, to which Edessa was very prone; the cloth was placed high in the city’s walls for protection. There is also the very real possibility that it was hidden to protect it from invaders or to protect it during times of Christian persecutions. We know that during the many persecutions of the first three centuries, valuable relics, writings, and ceremonial items of the church were routinely destroyed. There is evidence of local persecutions in Edessa as early as the latter part of the first century and of Roman persecutions that persisted until the time of Emperor Constantine. If, in fact, the cloth was taken to Edessa in the earlier part of the first century, it might have been hidden for protection as early as the reign of Ma’nu VI, Abgar’s son, who is thought to have reverted to paganism. 

What is not legend, nor speculation, is that the cloth, with an image of what was then believed to be a true and miraculous facial image of Jesus – described as a divinely wrought image and an image not made by hand – was found in the walls of the city in the sixth century. During repairs of the city walls in 525 CE, or more likely, during a Persian invasion of the city in 544 CE, the cloth was rediscovered and placed in a church built especially for it. It was, to the people of Edessa, the lost cloth of the “legend.” In the late sixth century, Evagrius Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical History mentions that Edessa was protected by a “divinely wrought portrait” (acheiropoietis) sent by Jesus to Abgar.  In 730 CE, St. John Damascene in On Holy Images describes the cloth as a himation, which is translated as an oblong cloth or grave cloth. This may be the first mention, among extant documents, of it being a grave cloth.

In 944, Emperor Romanus I sent an army to remove the Edessa Cloth and transfer it to Constantinople. There are many references to it after 944. In 1080, Alexis Comnenus of Constantinople sought assistance from Emperor Henry IV and Robert of Flanders to protect some of the city’s relics including “the cloth found in the sepulcher after the resurrection.” A Roman codex in 1130 speaks of the cloth “on which the image, not only of My face, but of My whole body has been divinely transformed.”

We know that the crusaders looted the treasures of Constantinople and carried away many riches and relics. The Edessa Cloth disappeared along with other priceless treasures. There is some evidence that suggests that the Edessa Cloth, then known as the Holy Mandylion, was taken to Athens. About a year after Constantinople was plundered, Theodore Ducas Anglelos wrote in a letter to Pope Innocent III:

The Venetians partitioned the treasure of gold, silver and ivory, while the French did the same with the relics of saints and the most sacred of all, the linen in which our Lord Jesus Christ was wrapped after His death and before the resurrection. We know that the sacred objects are preserved by their predators in Venice and France and in other places.

In 1207, Nicholas d’Orrante, Abbott of Casole and the Papal Legate in Athens, wrote about relics taken from Constantinople by French knights. Referring specifically to burial cloths, he mentions seeing them “with our own eyes” in Athens. 

There is significant evidence that, in Edessa and also in Constantinople, the cloth was kept folded in such a way that only the face was visible. By folding the cloth, doubled in fours (tetradiplon) that is exactly what results – a centered face of Jesus on a horizontal folded cloth – as seen in a 10^th century painting of Abgar V holding a picture that is odd for its horizontal shape as a portrait. In Constantinople, the cloth was sometimes ceremoniously unfurled, raised up like a vertical banner, in a way that showed a full frontal picture of Jesus as though rising from a grave.  In 1201, Nicholas Mesarites, the sacristan of the Pharos Chapel where the Image of Edessa was kept, wrote: “Here He rises again and the sindon [=Shroud] … is the clear proof … still smelling fragrant of perfumes, defying corruption because they wrapped the mysterious naked dead body from head to feet.”

John Jackson, who was one of several physicists who physically examined the Shroud in 1978, used special raking light photography to reveal ancient fold marks on the Shroud. He found persistent creases exactly where expected and in the correct folding direction for just such a tetradiplon folding.

The textile evidence, the pollen and floral images, the travertine aragonite limestone, and the Sudarium; all of these suggest the cloth’s origin in Jerusalem from where its historical journey may have begun. But there is more to the pollen story that corroborates its journey. As would be expected, there are pollen grains that place the Shroud in Western Europe. It has been in Europe since the mid-fourteenth century. At times it was exhibited at open-air festivals and even carried into battle by medieval knights. But there are also some pollen spores that place the Shroud in the environs of both Constantinople and Edessa. This is important information that suggests that the Shroud of Turin was likely at these locales. It is more evidence that the Shroud of Turin is indeed the Image of Edessa. 

 

Jesus in Art

There are no descriptions of Jesus’ appearance in the New Testament. Nor are there any reputable descriptions in any known early Church sources.  St. Augustine of Hippo made a point of this when he wrote his monumental works in the fifth century. Yet, starting in the sixth century a new common appearance for Jesus emerged in eastern art. We see it today in hundreds of icons, paintings, mosaics, and Byzantine coins. This common quality seems to have started in the Middle East about the same time that the Image of Edessa was discovered. Prior to this time, images of Jesus were mostly of a young, beardless man, often with short hair, often in story-like settings in which he was depicted as a shepherd.

Abruptly, throughout the Middle East, and eventually throughout eastern Mediterranean Europe, depictions of Jesus became full frontal portraits with distinctive facial characteristics. Jesus now had shoulder length hair, an elongated thin nose, and a forked beard. Numerous other characteristics appeared in these portraits and some of them were seemingly strange and of no particular artistic merit. Many portraits had two wisps of hair that dropped at an angle from a central parting of the hair. Many works showed Jesus with large “owlish” eyes. Paul Vignon, a French scholar, who first categorized these facial attributes in 1930, also described a square cornered U shape between the eyebrows, a downward pointing triangle on the bridge of the nose, a raised right eyebrow, accents on both cheeks with the accent on the right cheek being somewhat lower, an enlarged left nostril, an accent line below the nose, a gap in the beard below the lower lip, and hair on one side of the head that was shorter than on the other side.

Jennifer Speake who wrote a chapter, “Jesus in Art,” in J. R. Porter’s Jesus Christ: the Jesus of History, the Christ of Faith, observed:

Speake:  Famous relics that claim to bear the true imprint of Christ’s features include the controversial Shroud of Turin and the Holy Mandylion of Edessa; the iconography of both of these promoted the now conventional image of Jesus as a bearded man.

Keep in mind that the Shroud of Turin and the Holy Mandylion of Edessa are very likely one in the same. And keep in mind, too, that this iconography started some six centuries before the carbon-14-determined date for the Shroud.

Now with modern image analysis technology we can clearly see that the portraits in numerous works of art are most probably sourced from a single image and those pictorial characteristics are those found on the Shroud of Turin. Some most notable and telling portraits include:

§         Christ Pantocrator, an icon at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai (550 CE)

§         Byzantine Justinian II solidus, a coin (695)

§         Icon of Christ at St. Ambrose, (now in Milan) (700s)

§         Christ Enthroned, a mosaic in the narthex of Hagia Sophia Cathedral (850 – 900)

§         Christ Pantocrator, a dome mosaic in a church in Daphni (1050 – 1100)

§         Christ the Merciful, a mosaic icon now in a Berlin museum (1000s)

§         Christ Pantocrator, an apse mosaic in Cefalu Cathedral, Sicily (1148)

The Chrysanthemum image found on the Shroud is particularly significant. What makes this so is not just the prominence and clarity of the image on the Shroud, but the fact that this flower is depicted accurately, as to its likeness and relationship to the face, on some early icons and coins. This includes the Pantocrator icon at St. Catherine’s Monastery and the seventh century Justinian solidus coin.

Poker Holes

They are often called the poker holes because some have speculated that L-shaped patterns of burn holes on the Shroud were created by someone thrusting a hot poker through the Shroud. The speculation is that this was some sort of “test by fire” to ascertain the Shroud’s authenticity. That seems fanciful and there is no good basis for imagining that this is how the holes were formed. But they are burn holes. The cloth was folded in half lengthwise and again in half to half its width when the burns were made. This is evident as there are four matched mirrored repetitions of the holes showing progressive levels of burn penetration. Each pattern has four burn marks or holes.

It is more probable that the burns were caused by a careless thurifer who may have accidentally sprinkled some granules of burning incense onto the Shroud. However the burn holes came about, it did not happen in a devastating fire in Chambéry in 1532 when the Shroud was severely damaged by molten silver dripping onto it from its storage reliquary. We know that because a copy of the Shroud, the Lier Shroud painted in 1516, possibly by Albrecht Durer or Bernard van Orley, clearly shows the burn holes.

But there is a far more interesting and older picture of the burn holes. In the Budapest National Library there is an ancient codex, known commonly as the Hungarian Pray Manuscript or Pray Codex, named for György Pray (1723-1801), a Jesuit scholar who made the first detailed study of it.

This codex was written between 1192 and 1195. An illustration, one of five in the manuscript, shows Jesus being placed on his burial shroud, a shroud with the identical pattern of burn holes found on the Shroud. The artist has drawn the very unusual herringbone weave on the shroud and a number of other graphic characteristics consistent with the Shroud. Jesus is shown naked with his arms modestly folded at the wrists, the fingers are unusually long in appearance as they are on the Shroud, and there are no visible thumbs. There are no thumbs visible in the images of the man of the Shroud either. Forensic pathologists tell us that this makes sense since nails driven through the wrist would likely cause the thumbs to fold into the palms. In the drawing, there is also a clear mark on Jesus’ forehead where the most prominent 3-shaped bloodstain is found on the forehead of the man of the Shroud.   There can be little question that this illustrator of the Pray Codex, far removed from France – working at a time before the sacking of Constantinople by French knights, before the time given for the Shroud by carbon 14 testing, and before or the d’Arcis Memorandum – knew about the Shroud, the Holy Mandylion, the Image of Edessa.

Given all of this scientific and historical evidence, many think that there can be little doubt that the Shroud is the real thing, the burial cloth of Jesus. But it isn’t that easy for some of us.