The implication of this is that the Mandylion and the burial wrap icons may prove to be one and the same object.  This third and closely related question involves the size and, ultimately, the true nature of the imaged towel of Edessa.  It was first mentioned in a 4th c. Syriac text known as the Doctrine of Addai and containing the legend of King Abgar V Ukama.  The ailing King Abgar of Edessa (reigned ce 13-50) sent his agent-court painter Hanan to fetch the healer Jesus or at least to make a picture of him.  By this version, the Mandylion was an icon, but painted “with choice colors” (the material, whether wood or parchment or cloth, not divulged).  This phrase provides only the merest hint of any special quality of the Mandylion.  The text makes no claims to any miracle; but both its words and its omissions ingenuously unlatch that door.   Abgar was cured by means of the portrait, was converted by Addai, Jesus’ disciple, and Edessa became largely a Christian city.  This account, which describes the icon’s coming to Edessa during Christ’s lifetime, must be taken with great care for it was possibly only a legend, albeit one embellished by certain and plausible historical data.⁵  By all the hard evidence, Christianity did not come to Edessa until the reign of Abgar VIII (CE 177-212) towards the end of the 2nd c.  The account in the Edessan Archives of the great flood of 201 includes among the buildings destroyed “the sanctuary of the Christian church.⁶ 

In the 6th c. the Greek apocryphal book called the Acts of Thaddeus (=Greek for Addai) retold the Abgar legend with two important alterations.  First, the image was heralded as miraculously imprinted on a cloth by Jesus himself (acheiropoietos) but still during his ministry.  Second, the cloth is described as much larger than needed for a cheiromaktron or a face-towel.  In this version, Abgar’s agent, in Greek named Ananias, could not capture the likeness of the Lord because of its dazzling brilliance, so Jesus compliantly washed his face and wiped off on a cloth which was oddly called a tetradiplon, (“four-doubled” = eight layered).  Then, “having imprinted his image on the sindon he gave it to Ananias.”⁷  The operative word sindon is the N.T. synoptics’ word for large burial shroud.  A sindon folded in eight layers, a single exposed panel of which could present a life-sized face, is large indeed.  By the 8th c. and later, more and more references present clues pointing to a larger cloth while continuing to ascribe to it a miraculous or acheiropoietos nature.  But for all its increasing size, it continued to be regarded as a cloth on which Jesus had wiped only his face, leaving its holy imprint.  Its presence in Edessa is further attested in 544 when, according to the historian Evagrius, its miraculous powers saved that city from the siege imposed by King Chosroes of Persia.⁸ 

A development of the 10th c., one clearly associated with the Mandylion’s arrival in the capital and its accessibility to new and more sophisticated eyes, was the revelation in the two eyewitness sources produced immediately upon its arrival that the icon also had blood on its face and, surprisingly, that it had a bloodstain where Jesus had been stabbed in the side while on the cross.  In light of these data and recalling the term sindon of the Acts of Thaddaeus, we may rephrase this third question: Could the Edessa Mandylion always have been a folded burial shroud icon now assumed in these Constantinopolitan sources to be the real blood-stained burial wrapping of Jesus, whose separate arrival in the capital is nowhere mentioned?  This initial awareness of larger size and of blood on the Mandylion is the thrust of my first two documents.⁹  Although some Byzantine scholars have alleged that the history of the Edessa icon may contribute to the history of the Turin Shroud, my study does not address that issue, but only urges that the Mandylion and that shroud icon referenced in Constantinople until 1247 were one and the same.