Edessa

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.

Apparent Flower Images

If you look very closely between the face and each of the upper corners you may notice two very faint shapes that look something like flowers. One is very distinct. The other is barely visible. They look like small circles with apparent petals about them—like a child’s drawing of flowers. They may be images of real flowers, as some contend, or they may simply be illusions, shapes of flowers caused by anomalies in the weave and coloration of the cloth. For our purposes it is only important to note that they look like flowers.

We will, when we examine the images in fuller detail, explore many other aspects of the images and the cloth, qualities and mysteries that will fascinate and challenge our intelligence. But for now, and to help us with history, we will focus on just these observations.

And so, with an understanding that the shroud that is in Turin is a large oblong three-over-one herringbone twill piece of linen with two life-sized images along with bloodstains, burn holes called poker holes, and persistent folding creases and patterns that look like flowers, we turn our attention to Edessa and then Constantinople.

Edessa of the Fertile Crescent

Edessa was a city in the Fertile Crescent of upper Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. It was long an important  city on the Silk Road between China and India and Europe. I was also a very early Christian community. If you traveled from Jerusalem to Antioch as St. Paul the evangelist did, you were two-thirds of the way to Edessa. At Antioch you could turn left and travel along the Roman roads to Tarsus, Paul’s home town. Or you could turn right and by travelling about the same distance along the Silk Road to arrive at Edessa.

Today, the city is called Şanlıurfa or simply Urfa. It is situated in south-eastern Turkey near the border with Iraq. As is the case with northern Iraq, most of the population is Kurdish, though there are many Arabs and Turks in the city as well. The predominant religion is Muslim but there are Christian and Jewish minorities, some who claim lineage back to the 3^rd century and 1^st centuries respectively, and perhaps earlier.

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.

The Legend of Abgar

Legend has it that a cloth with an image of Jesus was brought to King Abgar V Ouchama of Edessa who reigned over the city state off and on between A.D. 13 and 50. We know of this legend from Eusebius of Caesarea’s early 4^th century Ecclesiastical History. Therein, we learn of a now lost document (if it ever existed) that had been in Edessa’s archives. It was purportedly written by King Abgar V and delivered to Jesus by an envoy named Ananias. Abgar supposedly asked Jesus to come to Edessa to cure him of a malady. Eusebius’ history reports that the Apostle Thomas did send Thaddeus sometime after Jesus’ death and that he founded a church in Edessa.

Historians are highly critical of this account since Eusebius’s history includes, as elements of the letter, references from the Gospels, which were written later than the legendary account, as well as theological concepts, which probably developed many years after the reign of Abgar.

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 6^th 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 1^st 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.

Plausible Alternative to the Abgar Legend

Historian Jack Markwardt has developed a plausible alternative to the Abgar legend to the account of cloth’s discovery in Edessa. From early documents he has inferred that the best explanation was that the shroud was taken, not to Edessa, but to Antioch during apostolic times. There it remained until late in the 2^nd century when it was taken to Edessa for the baptism of King Abgar the Great—Abgar the VIII, not to be confused with Abgar V of the legendary account. Markwardt writes:

. . . Avircius Marcellus, the Bishop of Hieropolis, was summoned to Rome, where he was introduced to Abgar’s wife, Queen Shalmath, that he then travelled to Antioch, where he was joined by Palut and provided with the Shroud, identifiable as the historically-documented sacred Christ-icon which had been taken from Palestine to Syria, and that he then proceeded to Edessa, where he displayed the imaged relic to the king and baptized him into the Christian faith, thereby resulting in the Shroud’s commemoration, in legend, as the Portrait of Edessa.

This makes sense. It fits with a general scholarly consensus that Edessa was evangelized at about this time and probably not before. And it gives us a plausible scenario for seeing how the legend of Abgar might have developed.

Gate of the Cherubim

The shroud, according to Markwardt’s theory, was then returned to Antioch where it remained until the 6^th century. It was concealed in a niche above the city’s Gate of the Cherubim in 362 where it remained until about 540. The Gate of the Cherubim was so named because, reportedly, according to the biographer of St. Saint Symeon Stylites, the column sitter, the Roman Titus placed the Cherubim he took from the Temple in Jerusalem above this gate. In 540, the Christ icon was again moved to Edessa, this time to safeguard it from Persian armies. This may not have been a good idea given that Edessa was attacked by the Persians four years later. Then again, it may have been prescient, for Edessa survived the attack. Antioch, on the other hand was nearly destroyed by the Persians under Khosrau I.

Credence for Markwardt’s theory comes from the account of Sister Egeria’s travels to Edessa in 384. Egeria was possibly a nun, a detail that historians stay up at night debating. A nun, some argue would never have taken such a pilgrimage. It was too far from her home in Gaul or Spain, and certainly it would have been expensive. But she did address her letters to her sisters. But then again, it was common in those days to address fellow Christian lay people as sister or brother. But then again would she write only to sisters in the plural. But then again maybe they were familial sisters. And does it matter.

Sister Egeria

Sister Egeria was given a three-day tour of the city by the Bishop of Edessa. We learn from her account of many miracles that saved Edessa from the Persians. And we learn that she was introduced to the legend of Abgar, even shown a copy of Abgar’s letter to Jesus. She wrote lengthy detailed accounts of her visit and we might think that had there been an image bearing cloth, she would have mentioned it. (and put into her hands transcripts of the correspondence of Abgarus and Jesus, with embellishments.

Part of her accounts of her travels, in letters to her sisterhood, survive. "She naïvely supposed that this version was more complete than the shorter letter which she had read in a translation at home, presumably one brought back to the Far West by an earlier pilgrim" (Palmer 1998). Her escorted tour, accompanied by a translator, was thorough; the bishop is quoted: "Now let us go to the gate where the messenger Ananias came in with the letter of which I have been telling you." (Palmer). There was however, no mention of any image reported by Egeria, who spent three days inspecting every corner of Edessa and the environs.

Regardless of how the cloth arrived in Edessa, by 544 the cloth was an important part of Edessa’s history.

Ecclesiastical History

In the late 6^th 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.

Many Images of Edessa?

The fact of the matter is that there is more than one image claiming to be the Image of Edessa, even claiming to be the image of the Abgar legend. And this causes no end of confusion. One is The Holy Face of Genoa, kept in the Church of St. Bartholomew of the Armenians in Genoa. Another is the Mandylion of Edessa, once kept in the Church of Saint Silvestro in Rome and now kept in the Matilda chapel in the Vatican.

These two images look remarkably alike. And they do have some similarities to the facial image on the shroud; at least the long thin nose and the long hair. But the eyes are not owlish and the beard is apparently not forked. I say apparently because outline frames may be obscuring part of the beard. Unlike the shroud, these images are not negative images, are not monochromatic and appear to have been painted. There is a sense of photorealism to them and yet they seem primitive as well. Whether or not they are what the claim to be, authentic acheiropoieta is beyond our scope here.

The Veronicas

There are, in addition to these two icons, four more that have the similar cut-out frames that are claimed to be the true image made when Veronica wiped Jesus brow during his walk to Calgary:  1) The Veronica kept at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. 2) The Holy Face at the The Hofburg Palace in Vienna. 3) The Holy Face at the Monastery of the Holy Face in Alicante, Spain. 4) The Holy Face at the cathedral of Jaén in southern Spain. Just to add to the confusion, there is another famous image that some claim is the authentic Veronica, a facial portrait of a man at a Capuchin monastery in Manoppello, Italy. Unlike the other claimants, it does not have a cut-out frame. Unlike the other images, it seems most like an early Renaissance painting.

Most significantly all of the vera icons, the Veronicas and the cut-out framed images of Edessa are small pieces of cloth just big enough to hold a facial portrait. Our concern is with the tetradiplon image of Edessa.

Early records and the legendary accounts speak only of facial image in Edessa. And the shroud is certainly a cloth large enough to a burial cloth and full body images. But the references to a tetradiplon suggest that the facial image could be the visible part of something more. And, as we will see, the evidence that an image bearing cloth from Edessa that was moved to Constantinople 400 years after the emergence in Edessa of the tetradiplon bearing a facial image is suggestive.

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.

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 Size of a Burial Cloth?

We get a sense that the Image of Edessa—or at least that an image of Jesus in Edessa—is large, perhaps the size of a burial cloth. The words tetradiplon and himation are important clues. The face we are told is unusual. And the face, in some ways, certainly resembles the face on the shroud. It will not be until the cloth arrives in Constantinople in 944 that we get a clear indication that it indeed has a full body image. It won’t be until the advent of modern science that we learn how extraordinary that image of a face and the entire body is or until we discover new evidence that links the Turin shroud to Edessa and even the environs of Jerusalem.

But before we leave the Edessa era and look at these things we need to examine three other accounts that, if not provably linked, tend to strengthen the case that the Shroud of Turin is the Image of Edessa and possibly the burial shroud of Christ.

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.

Hymn of the Pearl

But the most intriguing piece of very early evidence may be a few lines of poetry from some apocryphal early church literature. These lines, referred to as the two images segment are from an epic Syriac poem, the "Hymn of the Pearl."

We find this hymn, today, within a 3^rd century text called the Acts of Thomas (not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas). Many scholars argue it is Gnostic text and the Catholic Church has called it heretical. But vilification does not diminish significance for historians. It is the legendary story—true, partly true or false—of the apostle Thomas’ (Judas Thomas or Thomas Judas Didymus) mission to India and his martyrdom. Authorship is often attributed to the Gnostic poet Bardesane of Edessa, perhaps as early as A.D. 216).

The hymn, itself, is thought to be older than the Acts of Thomas. It is found in different places in different Greek and Syriac versions of Acts found.

The Notion of Mirrors

Mirrors, as we know them today, did not exist but the concept was understood. Mirrors at the time of the Roman Empire and well into the medieval era were simply pieces of highly polished stone or metal such as copper or silver; or they were still pools of water. Full length mirrors were rare. But it was understood that they reversed an image—what was on the left seemed to be on the right. Was the phrase, “saw my image on my garment like in a mirror,” an attempt to say that lighter and darker tones were reversed, as is the case with a negative? There is no way to know what the author intended. At best, we are speculating.

There perhaps is another interpretation for the reference to a mirror-like image. Though Greco-Roman statues were highly detailed and superbly realistic, portraiture, of either the face or a whole body, was not. It wasn’t until the European Renaissance, particularly among the Italian and Dutch masters, that the human form was represented realistically on canvas and other flat surfaces. But mirrors, even mirrors in antiquity provided photo-realistic images. Is this what Bardesane of Edessa meant?

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.

Curcuas Captures the Image of Edessa

Curcuas, when he arrived at Edessa, offered to spare the city if it surrendered the Image of Edessa. But he was rebuffed because the significant Christian population of the city balked at giving up their priceless relic. Leaving a siege force behind, Curcuas continued raids throughout the region collecting more loot and prisoners. Finally, the Caliph of besieged Edessa agreed to surrender the cloth after Curcuas agreed to a payment of silver, the freeing of hundreds of Muslim prisoners and a promise of perpetual immunity from further attack. Various outdated histories give different accounts of what the Image of Edessa was. It was the Veronica, some said. It was the Holy Mandylion that is now in a  church in Genoa. But there can be little doubt, as we will see, that it was a full length burial cloth. (23)

The Image of Edessa in Constantinople

On August 15, 944, the prized relic arrived in Constantinople where it was received with great fanfare. A lengthy document, the Narratio de imagine Edessena, tells us that Constantine VII described the image as “extremely faint, more like a moist secre­tion without pigment or the painter’s art.” That is a poignant clue for us that the Image of Edessa was in this way like the Shroud of Turin. Another document, Symeon Magister’s Chronographia tells us that Constantine could see some image features but his two brothers-in-law, Romanus’ two sons, could barely see anything. Thus we have more evidence that the cloth with its image might be the Shroud of Turin. But there was more to come. On the very next day, Gregory Referendarius, the archdeacon of Constantinople’s great cathedral, Hagia Sophia, gave a sermon in which he described the cloth as having an image formed through sweat and blood. This was the first indication, from known records, that the cloth contained blood. He also mentioned the likeness of a man and a side wound, which implies that the image was a full body image.

McNeal’s Sudarium

And what is the sudarium, that McNeal mentions? Possibly it is many things. Was it another image, perhaps painted from the face on the tetradiplon-folded cloth in Edessa? There is another small facial image called the Image of Edessa in the Vatican Museum. Or was it Veronica’s Veil, a completely different icon with a completely different legend? It is not implausible that there were among Constantinople’s vast treasury of icons and relics many such images with independent of confused legends even as there are today.

Dictionaries define sudarium (or sudarion in Greek) as a sweat cloth. And thus it seems plausible to call the facial imprint from the Legend of Abgar and the Legend of Veronica a sudarium. But the word is also widely used to describe the other cloth in the tomb: “and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.” (John 20:7 NRSV)

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.”

St. Panteleimon Fresco

While Manuel was emperor the church in the St. Panteleimon monastery was built and a grand fresco was painted in 1164. The fresco, like many others of the era, showed Jesus after the crucifixion but before entombment. What catches our attention is the burial shroud with a crisscross pattern of diagonal lines or Xs on the burial cloth. Scavone notes:

As early as 1164 a threnos mural was painted and a liturgical epitaphios was woven in Nerezi, Serbia, both which showed the body of Jesus lying upon a symbolic burial sheet. The mural, however, is important as it shows a shroud designed with a series of Xs very much like the Xs that decorate several artists' copies of the Mandylion that begin to appear in the 10^th century . . .  It is not precisely a herring-bone weave, but does hint at it. Another interpretation of the Xs, of course, is that they represent Chi, the first Greek character in the name Xpistos. It seems that this X design was common in the Kosovo (Eastern European) region since the Edessa cloth was depicted in a mural at Studenica in 1235 with precisely the same design. (30)

Dan Scavone goes on to say:

Hans Belting is one of the few who have perceived the Shroud as at least one factor among many in the rise of the larger cloth epitaphioi and the new mural art, but sadly he did not follow it up as we might have wished. Belting noticed what he called a new empathetic realism in liturgical representation during the 11th-12th c. (30)

Hungarian Pray Manuscript

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 and important historian who made the first detailed study of it, although we can reasonably suspect, with no realization that it might someday have some bearing on the shroud. The codex is the earliest known text in the ancient Finno-Ugric tribal languages of the people that occupied that region.

This codex was written between 1192 and 1195, within about 30 years of the Nerezi mural. An illustration, one of five in the manuscript, shows Jesus being placed on a 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. This seems artistically strange. But forensic pathologists tell us that this makes sense. Why? It was once stated that nails driven through the wrist would likely cause the thumbs to fold into the palms. But Fred Zugibe disagrees.

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 earliest date assigned to the shroud by carbon 14 testing—knew something of the details about the shroud, the Holy Mandylion, the Image of Edessa.

The Real Sudarium?

We can imagine that there may have been several cloths: the shroud, the face cloth or sudarium, a chin band, a strip of cloth to tie the wrists together and perhaps a similar strip for the feet. It was, however, the sudarium, the towel that was being mentioned in Constantinople. Was it real, as well?

There is a contender for the real deal, one that has an uncanny and astonishing relationship to the shroud that is in Turin. It is the Sudarium of Oviedo. This piece of cloth was never in Edessa or Constantinople. But if the historical record is correct, it was in Jerusalem. If the shroud is genuine, it was in Jerusalem at the same time as the shroud.

In the city of Oviedo, in northern Spain, in a small chapel attached to the city’s cathedral, there is a small bloodstained dishcloth size piece of linen that some believe is one of the burial cloths mentioned in John’s Gospel. Tradition has it that this cloth was used to cover Jesus’ bloodied face following his death on the cross. Forensic analysis of the bloodstains suggests strongly that both the Sudarium and the shroud covered the same human head at closely different times. Bloodstain patterns show that the Sudarium was placed about a man’s head while he was in a vertical position. If we assume that the man was a crucifixion victim then we can presume that this was while he was still on the cross. It was then removed before the shroud was placed over the man’s face. 

The Sudarium, unquestionably, has been in Oviedo since the eighth century and in Spain since the seventh century.

Documents in the late Roman period and the early middle ages are often sketchy and prone to chronological mistakes, and those pertaining to the Sudarium are no exception. But from a multiplicity of sources, scholars have extracted core elements of historical certainty and plausibility sufficient for a fair degree of historical reconstruction. We can be confident that the Sudarium came to Oviedo from Jerusalem.

Testing History

Part of the task of the historian can be likened to a prospector panning for gold and being able to distinguish between the real stuff and fool’s gold, little bits of pyrite that glitter and shine, that look like gold but are all but worthless. 

We started our journey through the Edessa to Constantinople history by looking at the shroud that is in Turin, in an obvious sort of way, so that we might test the nuggets of history we found and see if they were gold. We have a long ways to go. We need to find a plausible way for the cloth to get from Constantinople to Turin. We need to then look at the history of astonishing discoveries that happened in the 20^th and early part of the 21^st century. The journey gets very exciting.

The divided images looking out of and into the cloth of the shroud and the burial garment of the Hymn of the Pearl, the tetradiplon fold marks, the unusual images that seemed like sweat or fine pigments, seemingly not made by human hands, the poker holes. We took a detour through Spain to look at the Oviedo cloth. At first it looked like we might in this cloth have extraordinary confirmation. Then we were not so sure. How significant is the carbon dating of the Oviedo Sudarium? Not much, as we will see.

Have We Missed Something?

Have we missed something else? Is there something on the shroud that is in Turin that we didn’t notice, or that was so small we could not readily see it, or something so bound up in the cloth’s chemistry that we could not even see it with an ordinary microscope? Might we find in these things something that might corroborate the gold nuggets of history so far? Might we at least find something that shows us that the cloth might indeed be old enough to have been in Constantinople, Edessa before that, and maybe Jerusalem before that?

Scanning Electron Microscope

But, as we now have come to realize, Frei may not have used the scanning electron microscope for identifying any of the pollen on the shroud. He never said that he did but implied it. Captions in photographs contained wording such as “pollen types found on the Shroud.” It is doubtful that there are any SEM photos of pollen actually found on the shroud. We have come to realize that some species that Frei identified, could not be identified with only an ordinary light microscope. It was a rhetorical sleight of hand.

What Frei reported was extraordinary. He identified fifty-eight different plants, many from the environs of Jerusalem and areas in Turkey that coincided nicely with Edessa and Constantinople. Those who were looking for confirmation of the shroud’s authenticity were ecstatic. Skeptics, on the other hand, were looking for holes.

One line of attack was to find fault, not with the science, but the man. Frei, it was reported, had made a mistake, a very embarrassing mistake that had absolutely nothing to do with the shroud or with pollen evidence.

Vanillin as a Validation of Carbon Dating

It is not as good a way of dating a piece of linen as carbon dating. But the carbon dating was flubbed. And so for the time being this as good as it gets, scientifically. It really doesn’t tell how old the cloth is, only that it is at least 1300 years old and quite possibly older. It certainly existed when someone illustrated a burial shroud in the Hungarian Pray Manuscript with holes that resemble the poker holes on the Turin cloth. It certainly existed when the Image of Edessa was brought from Edessa to Constantinople. It certainly existed when Leo III was attempting to banish images of Christ and John of Damascus was objecting.

And if all this is so, the shroud that is now in Turin may well have existed when the words, “Peter ran with John to the tomb and saw the recent imprints of the dead and risen man on the linens” were made part of the Mozarabic Rite in Spain. Vanillin testing can’t tell us that. Inference can. It may well have existed when Abgar the Great was baptized. It may have existed at the time that the body of Jesus was buried in a tomb.

Alexios and Alexios

At the time, Alexios Angelos III was the emperor. He was the great-grandson of Alexios Komnenos who reportedly appealed for help from Robert of Flanders before the First Crusades. Alexios III had, with the help of the military, taken the throne from his brother, Isaac II, while Isaac was out of the city. When his brother returned he had him arrested, put out his eyes and threw him in prison.  

Isaac’s son, also named Alexios Angelos, fled the city and connected up with the crusaders claiming that he was the rightful heir and offering to pay the crusaders to help him. It was ostensibly for this reason that crusaders entered the harbor in 1203. Alexios III put up a brief resistance, then fled. The blind Isaac II briefly resumed the throne and welcomed his son back.

Someone took the tetradiplon shroud, the full length burial cloth with blood and images described by Gregory Referendius, Christ’s burial shroud, once the Image of Edessa. right when he said, “[No one knows - neither Greek nor Frank - what became of that shroud when the city was taken,” wrote Robert de Clari.

Later History

From there, the cloth’s history is well documented as it passed from the de Vergy family to the House of Savoy and was moved to Chambéry and then Turin.

 In 1983 it was bequeathed to the pope and his successors when Umberto II, the last king of Italy and the last regent of the 980 year-old House of Savoy died in exile. Umberto had only reigned for only 33 days when the monarchy was abolished.

The question we are compelled to evaluate is this: Is the cloth that is today in Turin, the same cloth that was in Athens and before that in Constantinople and before that in Edessa? Did it ultimately come from Jerusalem and is it possibly the burial cloth of Jesus?