To sum up the points made in this paper: a linen cloth or cloths described as the burial wrappings of Jesus are attested in many Constantinople documents from 944 to 1203, twice with his image if one counts Mesarites (Doc. XI), and several times described as bloodied.  No record exists of the arrival of Jesus’ burial cloth in the capital, and no celebration such as accompanied the Edessa cloth in 944.  Yet it was there.  Judging from copious documents and artistic representations made in Constantinople and elsewhere from 944 to 1150, the Edessa towel always with the image of Jesus’ face may be identical with Jesus’ Shroud in folded form, enclosed in a case with face exposed.  Before that, from at latest 544 to 944, this cloth was certainly in Edessa.  If the Edessa cloth and Jesus’ purported shroud are indeed one and the same object, that assumed burial cloth may have a pedigree back at least to 544, and if the Abgar legend has any historical worth, to the 4th c. and even, accepting the descriptive evidence, to the very time of Christ.  If the pieces of this elaborate puzzle truly fit as they seem to, the blood-stained burial cloth with faint unpainted image would have a documented history back to palaeochristianity and may in fact be the actual tomb wrapping of Jesus.

     The three documents which have been customarily adduced to prove the burial cloth to have been in Constantinople after the crusaders’ sack in 1204 are seen on examination of their contents and context not to do so.  And in fact, one of them, the treatise of Nicholas of Otranto, supports its presence in Athens with Othon de La Roche, where the letter of Theodore of Epirus also places it in 1205. 

AFTERWORD.

Various plausible historical reconstructions have been proposed by which the bloodstained burial sheet of Constantinople with image of Jesus’s entire body turned up in Lirey, France about 1355.  The most cogent of these itineraries consign the cloth either to the care of the Knights Templar until their demise in 1307, or to Othon’s city of Besanηon in Franche Comtθ from about 1208 until 1349, or to King Louis IX’s Sainte Chapelle from about 1247.  Unless one wishes to pursue these, one is left with Robert de Clari’s rather final judgment that no one knew what became of it after the city was sacked in 1204.^{5 6}

***This paper owes its origins to the numerous leads provided by British author Ian Wilson.  And the debt is immense.  Gratitude goes also to Fr. Adam Otterbein (+) the University of Southern Indiana, and the scholars, those who generously read early drafts of this paper, and those on whose shoulders I now stand.