Byzantine
Dawkins Should Know Better
Historians know better and an evolutionary biologist of Dawkins stature should know better; for the absence of evidence argument is a favorite ploy by the don’t-believe-in-evolution crowd who unceasingly point to the absence of fossil records as evidence of God’s hand in creation. Historians are more careful, acknowledging that there may be missing data, gaps in the written records to be bridged, and Eurocentric biases to be overcome. Western-centric exceptionalism is clearly a means of seeing only what we want to see. For example, many of us learned from our school histories that David Livingstone, the British explorer and missionary, discovered Victoria Falls in 1855. None of us would go so far as to suggest that the falls did not exist before then, when they turn up in the historical record of the West. But when we widen our viewing lens we learn that they were well known to Muslim scholars in the days of the Byzantine Empire and before that to the indigenous people of the region as the Mosi-oa-Tunya falls (“Smoke that Thunders”). From stone artifacts found in the region, we can be reasonably confident that they were known 50,000 years ago.
An Unbroken Chain of Evidence
There are no existing records that constitute an unbroken chain of evidence among all the records of the Shroud of Turin that go back beyond the 1350s. This does not rule out earlier evidence if such records might later be found. Might there also be evidence of a cloth that might be the shroud, if a way can be found to identify it as one and the same.
There is now substantial and convincing evidence that a cloth with an image believed to be that of Jesus, moreover believed at times in its history to be the actual burial shroud of Jesus, might have been a treasure of the early church, as Cahill had suggested. It might have been in the ancient city of Antioch for awhile. It was certainly in Edessa for many years. The same cloth that was in Edessa was later in Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine Empire and the center of Greek Christianity.
The historian cannot avoid this and he must therefore concede that there is a possible gap in the records. To simply state that there is no history before the 1350s reveals a lack of knowledge, a contempt for historical integrity and a failure of imagination. It is akin to saying, as some creationists do, that evolution is not real because there are gaps in fossil records.
Dealing with Gaps
The problem for the historian is to see if there is a way to fill in the gap with records, and if this is not possible then to bridge the gap or alternatively show that the gap is false and the cloths are not one in the same. So far, bridging the gap seems most fruitful. In fact, it is conclusive enough to mitigate for the lack of records and to falsify any theory that might emerge to show that the two historical cloths are not one physical cloth.
To fully appreciate the possibility that the cloth of these cities of Eastern Christianity is one and the same shroud now in the hands of Western Christianity we need to ask if there is anything about the Turin shroud that would make us think that it is the Byzantine shroud? The best we can do is look at physical attributes of the existing cloth in Turin to see if they are consistent with what we know of the Edessa-Constantinople relic from historical records. However, we must be mindful in doing so, for historical records from antiquity are prone to inaccuracies, omissions and credulity. The historians and letter writers and artists of more than a millennium of history, the early to later Middle Ages, saw history through a worldview lens which we can at best only imagine. We must avoid the problems of credulity ourselves by guarding ourselves from too much literalism. But it would be totally unfair, as some have done, to dismiss the history of antiquity because it seems too legendary or because it doesn’t meet our modern day documentation standards.
Urfa
No one is sure when Urfa was originally settled. According to local tradition and the belief of some Muslims, it was the Biblical city of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham. However, most biblical scholars and many archeologists and historians of the ancient Tigris and Euphrates region think that the Chaldean city of Ur Kasdim, now Tell el-Mukayyar in southern Iraq near the Persian Gulf, is Biblical Ur.
Seleucus I, a Macedonian officer under Alexander the Great, established an outpost in this already settled town for his newly formed kingdom in 303 B.C., twenty years after the death of Alexander. He named it Edessa after the city of the same name in Macedonia. By about 132 B.C. the dynasty he established, the Seleucid dynasty, collapsed and the city came under the control of the Abgar dynasty, a series of client kings for Parthia, very much the way Herod I and Herod Antipas were client kings of Israel under Roman control. In the years that followed the Abgar dynasty, which lasted for 350 years, Edessa fell under Armenian, Persian and Roman control. It would become part of Byzantine Empire. It repulsed the Persians in A.D. 544, but fell to Muslim Arabs in 639 not to be retaken until the First Crusades in 1098 by French forces under command of Baldwin of Boulogne, who would later become King Baldwin I of Jerusalem.
Edessa, a City of Conflict
Edessa, a high walled town along a major trade route seemed to be on the contested frontier of every empire that ruled it and thus it saw centuries of conflict in which it was sometimes conquered, sometimes successfully defended and sometimes ceded to victorious armies as part of a negotiated deal. As such it developed a varied culture of different peoples from many lands. When it became a Christian city is not clear, but it was so by the time it became part of the Byzantine. By 944, a date that will be very important in our analysis, it was under the jurisdiction of a Muslim Caliph but it retained significant communities of Greek Orthodox and Assyrians Christians as well as a number of Roman Catholics and possibly some Nestorians.
There was, throughout the city’s history, a strong tradition that the apostle Thomas and a disciple named Thaddeus Jude (Thaddeus of the 72, also called Addai) went to Edessa shortly after the death of Jesus.
Historians and Legends
The historian can use legend, by ascertaining its need, to construct clues. From the story told of Abgar we can gather three very important clues: 1) A cloth with an image thought to be of Jesus somehow turned up in Edessa. 2) The image is understood to be unique in that it was described as painted with choice pigments or formed when Jesus wiped his face on the linen cloth. 3) The cloth is large and described as folded in eight layers.
In the middle of the 6th century, a cloth with an image believed to be that of Jesus turned up in Edessa. Historians have believed that this happened during repairs of the city walls in A.D. 525, or more likely, during the Persian invasion of the city in 544. Reportedly, it was concealed behind some stones above one of the city gates. It was a practice—or so it seems—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 an ancient Byzantine painting. It could well have been that because of severe floods, to which Edessa was prone, that the cloth was placed high in the city’s walls for protection. There is also the possibility that it was hidden to conceal 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. If the cloth was taken to Edessa in the earlier part of the 1st century or even later, it might have been hidden for protection.
The cloth, when it was found, was placed in a church built especially for it. It was, to the people of Edessa, the lost cloth of the legend. The image, we find from the historical narrative, was thought to be a true and miraculous facial image of Jesus—described as a divinely wrought image and an image not made by hand.
Ecclesiastical History
In the late 6th century, Evagrius Scholasticus’ Ecclesiastical History mentions that Edessa was protected by a “divinely wrought portrait” (acheiropoieton) sent by Jesus to Abgar. Not yet enough for a decent inference, but at least a beginning: There was in Edessa a piece of cloth with an image thought to be of Jesus. It was not an ordinary image. The clue is that it is variously described as painted with choice pigment, of formed by sweat and not made by human hands.
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 5th century. Yet, starting in the 6th century a new common appearance for Jesus emerged in art. We see it today in hundreds of icons, paintings, mosaics, and Byzantine coins. This common quality seems to have started in Christian Byzantium 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.
Jennifer Speake
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:
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.
While this does support the opinion that a “promoted” conventional image emerged from these relics, it introduces two issues. First is a claim of a true imprint, whatever that means. Beyond legendary accounts, we are not ready to explore this possibility yet. We will, from those who think the image is miraculous (whatever that means) to those who think it is a natural phenomenon to those who think it is a manmade fake image. But we must first finish a survey of the history. The other issue is the idea of another image-bearing relic, one specifically tied to Edessa. Many scholars have suggested that there are two or more images: the shroud and the Image of Edessa or “Holy Mandylion of Edessa” and possibly others. Other scholars think that it is one and the same. Mandylion is a Byzantine Greek word meaning a piece of cloth with a miraculous image of Jesus, though in more modern usage the word has come to mean an icon of Jesus.
Christ Pantocrator
One icon that clearly might have been sourced from the image found on the Shroud of Turin is the Christ Pantocrator, an icon at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai.
The Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai, more commonly called The Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine, sits at the base of Mount Sinai, a mountain in the southern-most region of the Sinai dessert. Many believe that it was at this spot where Moses saw the Burning Bush and on this mountain that he received the Ten Commandments. The Monastery, now Greek Orthodox, dates back to the 4th century and is claimed to be the oldest, continuously active Christian monastery in the world. Today, the monastery includes a 6th century church and fortifications built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great, a Muslim Mosque, buildings and gardens beyond the old fortifications and a scattering of nearby hermitages.
The Flower Images and the Icon
There is another aspect to this icon that is fascinating and perhaps more convincing, the appearance petal-shaped flowers on the shroud. The St. Catherine Christ Pantocrator icon also has distinctive flower images in precisely the same relative positions. If the Shroud was the facial source for this icon as it seems to have been, then it is highly probable that the flower motif was also picked up from the shroud.
As we have noted, it is important to remember that the flower images on the Shroud of Turin may not be actual flower images. But for this argument that question is immaterial. If there are images that look like flowers, even if they are coincidental anomalies caused by background noise or weave irregularities, and they are in the same relative place as there are on the Pantocrator icon, then it does strengthen the argument that the icon was sourced from shroud.
We find this flower motif repeated elsewhere and frequently in pictures of Jesus from this time forward. We find it, commonly, in Byzantine epitaphioi a cloth with a full-length image of Jesus, frequently in burial repose used in Greek Orthodox liturgies for Good Friday.
Justinian II and the Golden Pavilion
In 685, Justinian II, at the age of sixteen took the throne. He was the first Byzantine emperor to introduce a likeness of Christ on coinage of the realm. His image was on one side and Christ’s was on the reverse. Some have argued, and it seems quite possible, that the image on the coin was sourced from the Edessa image. It does seem to have many similarities. But the Philip Grierson writing in the Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and Whittemore Collection argued that was derived from an image of Christ in the Chrysotriclinos, The Golden Pavilion in Constantinople. The Golden Pavilion served as a church and a throne room for the emperor. The problem is that don’t know exactly when this was built or when a Christ image was installed. The original image was replaced later and we don’t know anything about the original image. It is possible that original pavilion image was created about the time that the St. Catherine icon was painted and we might speculate that it might have been inspired by the Image of Edessa. The basic historical problem is that we don’t have enough information.
Justinian II and His Troubles
The image on the coin caused a great deal of trouble for Justinian. It may have contributed to his downfall. Noted art historian John Beckwith tells us:
At the same time, even after the first two centuries of the Christian era there had always been the seeds of opposition to images. When the Empress Constantia, stepsister of Constantine I and wife of the Emperor Licinius, asked Eusebius of Caesarea for an image of Christ, she was sharply snubbed. From the 4th century onwards there had always been a minority among the intellectuals and the upper classes who disapproved of the cult of icons and the superstitious practices so often attached to them. Moreover in the Byzantine Empire near the eastern frontiers strong iconoclastic tendencies had been fairly constant. There is no period between the fourth and the eighth centuries in which there is not some evidence of opposition to images within the Church. (21)
John of Damascus and the Himation
John of Damascus, a priest and monk who served as an advisor to the Muslim Caliph of Damascus, was able from the relative safety of the Caliph’s court, to criticize the Leo III and iconoclasm. He wrote Apologetic Treatises against those Decrying the Holy Images, in 730, the same year that the pope excommunicated Leo.
Though it wasn’t the main thrust of his work, the Edessa Image was mentioned. He retells the legend of Abgar. The king, he tells us, sent envoys to obtain a likeness of Christ, a painting if necessary. Christ, who is “all knowing and all powerful took” a himation and pressed it to his face that his likeness might be on the cloth. The Greek word himation was a long rectangular cloth worn as sleeveless garment in ancient Greece and well into the middle Byzantine era. Similar to a toga, but shorter, it was often used as a garment in iconography of Christ or other biblical persons. This may be the first mention, among extant documents, of the Image of Edessa being such a large cloth.
The Visigoths in Spain
In the late 6th century, Visigoths driven south of the Pyreneans began converting from Arianism to Latin-Catholicism developed a form of Eucharistic liturgy. In form and content it is very close to ancient Celtic and Gallican rites. It also seems to have been heavily influenced by Syriac rites of the early Byzantine Empire. It would later come to be known as the Mozarabic Rite, so named for the Christians who did not flee from the Muslims to the northern part of the Spain with the remnants of Christian Visogothic kingdom. These Christians who adopted Arab dress, customs and language became known as the Mozarabs. Historians have also called this rite the Visogothic Rite, the Toledan Rite, the Old Hispanic Rite and Isidorian Rite because some scholars think its form was influenced by St. Isidore of Seville.
St. Leander
One possible explanation may have to do with St. Leander, a Benedictine monk and a bishop of Seville. Sometime between 579 and A.D. 582, shortly after the image bearing cloth had been “rediscovered” in Edessa, he visited Constantinople. Was the newly discovered cloth with an image the talk of the town? Edessa, at the time, was part of the Byzantine Empire, less than 200 miles away on a major trade route. Perhaps, on his return to the Iberian Peninsula, Leander influenced the composition of this one illation in the Mozarabic Rite. That is, of course, only speculation. But that there was communications between the East and the West is certain.
Constantinople
To understand the Constantinople era of the shroud’s history, it helps to know something about the Byzantine Empire. This political and religious entity that lasted for over one thousand years and its effects on western civilization is all too often viewed through the western lens clouded with misunderstanding, even bias. In modern usage the word byzantine has come to mean intricate, convoluted and sometime devious. Those definitions are justified. But there is so much more to the Byzantine era and we must be cautious not to let those meanings cloud our perception.
In its millennium it was not called the Byzantine Empire. That is a name that later historians gave it to distinguish it from the Roman Empire of antiquity. But, in fact, it was the old Roman Empire transplanted to a new capital where it would be shaped by culture and religion that in turn would shape the culture and religion of Western Europe.
The Macedonian Dynasty
We should not try to explore Byzantine history too much here. That is not what this book is about. But it does help to look at some individuals who are important to a study of the shroud. The year we are most interested at this point is A.D. 944, in the middle of the Macedonian Dynasty, so named because its first emperor Basil I (c. 811 – 886) was a Macedonian by birth. Basil, as the story is told by some historians, was the adopted son of Michael III (840 – 867) even though Basil was almost thirty years older than Michael who is more commonly known as Michael the Drunkard, the last emperor of Phrygian Dynasty.
According to one telling of history, Michael divorced his wife, Maria, to marry his mistress Eudokia, who would eventually marry Basil. Another version of the story is that Michael did not marry Eudokia but that he asked Basil to marry her so that he could keep Eudokia in court and maintain his affair with her. To compensate Basil, he gave him his sister Thekla as a mistress and named Basil co-emperor. A short while later Basil had Michael murdered and claimed the throne for himself. A new dynasty was born.
Leo the Wise (VI) followed Basil. He was most probably the son of Michael the Drunkard. Leo was followed by Basil’s son, Alexander and Alexander was followed by Constantine VII who was almost certainly the illegitimate son of Leo the Wise and thus possibly the grandson of Michael the Drunkard. To confuse matters more, Constantine would become the step-son of a dynastic interloper named Romanus.
The Fall and Rise of Zoe
One of his first acts was to ban Zoe from court. She was sent away to a convent to spend the rest of her life. However, the archbishop arranged an unpopular peace treaty with Bulgaria. It was so unpopular at court that it allowed Zoe to muster enough support to return from the convent and take the reins of government. She revoked the treaty, which proved disastrous when the Bulgarians defeated her forces. It was then that Romanus, an admiral in the Byzantine navy, led a coup d'état to overthrow Constantine’s mother but not Constantine.
Romanus declared himself regent and named himself co-emperor along with Constantine. Because he controlled the military, he was, for all practical purposes, the sole emperor, purple room or not. Eventually, Romanus’ own sons, fearing that their father favored Constantine over them to become the eventual sole emperor, managed to have him arrested and exiled to a monastery to spend the rest of his life as a monk. However, during a popular revolt, fomented it seems by Zoe, Romanus’ sons were also arrested and sent to join their father. Constantine the Purple Born was sole emperor once again, and regent.
Constantine VII, the Untypical Emperor
Constantine VII was somewhat untypical as an emperor. Having been sidelined for so much of his earlier life, he developed an interest in matters that had little to do with running an empire. He enjoyed painting and writing. He wrote several books about the history of the empire and the ceremonial life of court. He was a patron of the arts and educational institutions. He was instigated some land reforms to return lands to peasants who had been reduced to serfdom by debt. Historians tend to look on him kindly.
In 1994, just four months before Romanus was deposed by his sons, the Image of Edessa arrived in Constantinople. Romanus, because he was the regent emperor, is given the credit for bringing it to the Byzantine capital. The real credit should probably go to a general of the army named John Curcuas. Following successful campaigns against Arab forces operating in northern Syria, Curcuas, moved his army into northern Mesopotamia in 943 and began to plunder the cities and towns throughout the region. He successfully captured Amida, Dari and Nisibis, taking whole populations away and collecting vast amounts of booty. By the summer of 944 he reached Edessa and laid siege to the heavily fortified city. Edessa, once part of the empire, had fallen to the Persian Sassanians in 609. It had been briefly retaken by Byzantine forces, but fell to the Muslims in 638.
That the Image of Edessa was in a city that was in Muslim hands during the iconoclasm that was started by Leo III around 726 and ran its course until 787 when the Second Council at Nicaea put an end to the movement with the support of the pope and the emperor Constantine VI and his mother, the empress Irene.
Questions About Authenticity of the Letter
Carol Sweetenham, in her 2005 translation and commentary of Robert the Monk's History of the First Crusade: Historia Iherosolimitana, questions the authenticity of Alexios’ letter to the Count of Flanders, believing that Alexios would not itemize the treasures of Constantinople. It was, she believed, a drummed up propaganda piece written in the West to mobilize support for the crusades. Nothing appealed so much as the lure of wealth attached to the prospects of adventure. But, as Dan Scavone notes:
To dismiss this letter as a spurious piece of Latin propaganda virtually making the Byzantine emperor beg for the Latins’ expropriation of the imperial relics during the Fourth Crusade is to miss its significance as a Byzantine document referring to the presence of Jesus’ burial wrappings in Constantinople. . . . Most historians have agreed that Alexios would not have written such words, but they also concur that this epistula probably “depends on an authentic letter of the basileus” written with another end in mind and that it dates, variously, from 1091 to 1105.
In other words, though the letter may well have been a propaganda piece, it strongly suggests that the burial cloth of Jesus—real or not—was in Constantinople. And while I agree with Scavone in almost all of historical assessments, I am reminded too that he has counseled me to remember that all history is interpretation. I see it differently.
In this place He rises again
What, possibly, could Nicholas have meant when he wrote, “In this place He rises again”? Is this mere metaphor? Perhaps. But recall that Robert of Clari said that at St. Mary’s, “And on every Friday that shroud did raise itself upright so that the form of Our Lord could clearly be seen.”
John Jackson, who in 1978 found the fold marks showing that the shroud had been folded as a tetradiplon, proposed that the shroud might have been pulled up out of a box from the centermost fold like an upside down Roman shade. Jesus would appears to be rising from his tomb. It is by no means a farfetched idea. Byzantine emperors had thrones that were raised by secret mechanical devices intended to awe visitors. We can imagine similar devices for relics.
Man of Sorrows
At about this time, or certainly within a century, a new genre of icons developed: the Man of Sorrows. Jesus is shown often with a bloody side wound, often with his hands folded, often with his head tilted to one side. He was shown rising from a coffin, an ossuary, a reliquary, a box. His face was sad, not victorious.
The imagery is a stark departure from the Pantocrator—Christ the King—icons and mosaics so prevalent in the Byzantine world and beyond. The imagery is a stark departure from the sublime, victorious portrayals of the risen Christ in the gospels. Art historians tell us, haltingly, that the Man of Sorrows may have it origins in another Byzantine art form, the Epitaphios, a large cloth with a full length image of Jesus, most usually in burial repose that is used today in Eastern Orthodox churches with roots in the Byzantine rites for Good Friday. Perhaps. But the Epitaphios, which in Greek mean lamentations on the grave, might have been inspired by the Image of Edessa. And was the iconographic genre of the Man of Sorrows perhaps not a remembrance of a mechanical, ritual raising of Jesus’ shroud, when “on every Friday that shroud did raise itself upright, so that the form of Our Lord could clearly be seen.” A remembrance after, as Robert de Clari stated, “none knows - neither Greek nor Frank - what became of that shroud when the city was taken.”
San Nicola of Casole
But, and as Scavone and other historians note, Nicholas d’Orrante may have also suggested that the burial cloth was in Constantinople. He was the abbot of San Nicola of Casole monastery at the bottom of the heel of the boot of southern Italy. Tradition has it that the monastery was founded by the Norman Robert Guiscard, who had defeated the Byzantine forces of Alexios I in the years leading up to the First Crusade. (San Nicola of Casole may be older).
The monastery was a center of learning where manuscripts were copied, translated between Greek and Latin and archived in a vast library. Though not a university, like the first university created in Constantinople in 425 or the Jami'ah universities founded throughout the Muslim world starting in the 9th century or the universities of Salerno, Paris, Bologna and Oxford, which all were founded before the sacking of Constantinople, it was nonetheless a center of scholarship and learning.
Conspiracy Theory Erupted
There emerged as can be expected conspiracy theorists to explain that the sample had been switched.
1. Blame it on the atheists. The scientists doing the tests switched the samples cut from the shroud with bits of medieval cloth. No sense in risking the damage to secular humanism that would happen if the shroud proved to be from the 1st century.
2. Or blame it on church officials. They switched the sample because they were afraid of the consequences if the shroud proved to be from the 1st century since they believed that the shroud might somehow, by forensic examination, prove that Jesus survived crucifixion.
3. There were those who thought that if the shroud proved to be from the 1st century then the Catholic Church would need to return the stolen merchandise. To whom? Turkey? Israel? The Greek Orthodox Church? Saint Mary of Blachernae Church in Istanbul? It is a new church building on the site of the 5th century building which was destroyed when Constantinople fell to the Turks. A descendent of the last dynasty of the Byzantine Empire who might be able to make a claim to the throne should the empire ever rise again? The modern nation of Turkey?
The Manchester Museum
The Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester, England is “home to one of the largest and most important collections of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the United Kingdom. “The collection includes objects from prehistoric Egypt (c. 10,000 BC) to the Byzantine era, up to around AD 600,” says the museum website. It is also known to many as the museum of mummy controversy.
The museum’s most famous mummy controversy has to do with how mummies are displayed. Shall they be naked or not? Shall they be displayed in a way useful to student, scholars and the public or according to some perceived notion of being respectful to the dead? The mummies, as they were displayed were naked. They were naked because they had been unwrapped. Most unwrapping took place before the museum obtained them. In Victorian England, the unwrapping of mummies was all the rage when wealthy people brought home mummies from vacations in Egypt. The unwrapping took place at parties usually followed by tea or dinner. It was fun. They were creepy, goulash, fascinating. Where else in Victorian England could you respectfully see someone naked?
Come to Lord Longsberry's at 2 p.m., Piccadilly, for the unwrapping of a mummy from Thebes. Champagne and canapés to follow. (47)
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