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DOCUMENT III.
GREGORY REFERENDARIUS 944
As recently
as 1986 a Rome classicist, G. Zaninotto, turned up in the
Vatican Archives a 17-page Greek text (Codex Vaticanus
Graecus 511) of a sermon delivered by one Gregory,
Archdeacon and referendarius of Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople, on August 16, 944, the day after the
Mandylion’s arrival. As an eyewitness of the events,
Gregory again recites the original Abgar legend, and he
describes the image as formed by “the perspiration of death
on [Jesus’] face.” Then comes the most arresting part: he
speaks of the wound in Jesus’ side (πλευρα) and the blood
and water found there (haιμα κaι hydor eκεi):
[This image of
Christ] was imprinted only by the perspiration of the agony
running down the face of the Prince of life as clots of
blood drawn by the finger of God. . . . And the portrait . .
.has been embellished by the drops from his own side. The
two things are full of instruction: blood and water there,
and here the perspiration and figure. The realities are
equal for they derive from one and the same being. . . .
teaching that the perspiration which formed the image and
which made the side to bleed were of the same nature that
formed the portrait.18
Describing the
Edessa cloth, then, Gregory has divulged that it might have
contained more than a facial image. Yet, for all this, it
is curious that he did not express an iota of surprise at
his unanticipated observation of the side wound on a cloth
that for centuries hitherto was supposed by all to bear the
face only of the Lord. He did not draw the reasonable and
obvious conclusion, that the blood-stained Edessa Mandylion
might actually be Jesus’ grave cloth.19 In his
defense, it had just then arrived from Edessa, and with it
had come an old and venerated legend that could not easily
be cast aside. It is not a question of actual blood and
miraculous images, but of the perception of the people of
those centuries.
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