Hungarian Pray Manuscript

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.

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.

Making Sense of History in Context

Much of the information about the shroud’s history or possible history, depending on how you interpret it, was known for a long time. It is just that no one realized that a strange statement about a burial cloth rising up on Friday’s seemed to make much sense at all. Or that the two-image segment of the Hymn of the Pearl was anything more than peculiarly strange gibberish within an epic poem. Or that the small little circles in a strange pattern drawn on Jesus’ burial cloth in that picture in the Hungarian Pray Codex meant anything. Or that a word like tetradiplon, a perfectly good word, that otherwise seems not to exist in anything ever written in Greek, was meaningful. I was a Scavone puts it, “in so many cases . . . obscurities such as this often become brightly lit when one inserts the Shroud into the context.”

Mixed Reaction to the Carbon Dating

That is what happened when the carbon dating results were announced for the Shroud of Turin. Many who already were convinced (or hoped) it was a fake, were gleeful. But those who had become convinced from the avalanche of historical and other scientific evidence—good or bad evidence, interpreted one way or another—were sure that there must be something wrong with the carbon dating. They argued so. And they expressed their frustration. Physicist Peter Carr would later write words that expressed that frustration.

When the testing was complete, the scientist reported their findings . . . giving the age as 1260 to 1390, therefore the cloth was mediaeval. This was the limit to their remit, to date the cloth. But they exceeded their remit by making comments about the nature of the cloth, ie that the shroud was a mediaeval forgery. In making such a sweeping statement, they showed complete arrogance of other disciplines and a blind faith in a piece of technology. No self respecting scientist would be so bold. They ignored, or were ignorant of the wealth of historical information that shows that a cloth of some form has been in existence for many centuries, and it predates the carbon dates. The carbon dating information should have been presented along side all other information, and an objective discussion taken place. (44)

If arrogance was a strong word to use, it seemed justified. The official press conference to announce the results really didn’t go beyond the boundaries of science. Newspapers did that. The photograph that appeared along with the story said a lot. There were three people in the picture. There was Teddy (Edward Thomas) Hall, the director of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at Oxford who had previously played a significant role in exposing the Piltdown Man hoax.  Robert Hedges also from Oxford and Michael Tite of the British Museum and were the dates 1260 to 1390 with a big explanation mark. The faces and the body language seemed arrogant. Perhaps there was nothing of the sort in those faces or in the way Hall crossed his arms in front of his chest. Perhaps it was an unfortunate Kodak moment.

But it wasn’t the frustration steeped with emotion that caused people to question the carbon dating. The picture in the Hungarian Pray Codex, the very convincing history from Constantinople, the apparent pollen data, the mysterious and so far inexplicable image characteristics, the forensic pathology all combined to trigger a cascade of research.