Note that it is certain from his writings that Gervase never saw the actual cloth.

Deriving, as they claim, from a pre-944 Edessan text, all three Latin texts include information about the rituals associated with the image when it was in Edessa.  And this lends credence to their claim of a Syriac model.  Most notably, they state that the cloth with full-body image was kept in a gold chest (scrinium) and that:

[when displayed] on Easter it used to change its appearance according to different ages, that is, it showed itself in infancy at the first hour of the day, childhood at the third hour, adolescence at the sixth hour, and the fullness of age at the ninth hour, when the Son of God came to His Passion for the weight of our sins and endured the awful sacrifice of the cross.^{2 8}

Oddly this did not appear in the “Liturgical Tractate” where Edessan rituals were earlier described.  What can these words mean?  The most acceptable answer is one that harmonizes with two other eyewitness descriptions of the cloth in Documents XI and XII.  Accepting from the texts already discussed that Edessa’s cloth bore a faint painting of an entire body, we may infer from Documents XI and XII that the image of the full and bloodstained body was revealed gradually by the unfolding of the cloth in sections, beginning with the feet and lastly showing the whole bloodstained body.  The comparison of the gradually unfolded increments of the body with successive periods of Christ’s life would thus have been symbolic, part of the belief-system of the Edessenes.  It may be instructive to notice that the Byzantine cross has a diagonal suppedaneum (foot-rest), for which the Greek Orthodox Church has no standard explanation. But it suggests a belief that one of Christ’s legs was shorter than the other.  Supporting this are many medieval iconic depictions of the Virgin and Child in which one of Jesus’s feet seems deformed.  In addition, the coins of Basil I (867-886) show Christ enthroned on the obverse, but with one foot deformed.  Thus by this interpretation, something in the appearance of the feet of the Jesus image on the Edessa cloth would have suggested “infancy.”  The final stage (entire body) clearly relates to the Passion.  How the two intermediate relationships (legs with lower torso and then upper torso below the neck) fit this interpretation is not immediately apparent to a modern non-Byzantine.^{2 9}

What determinations can be made from all this?  Eusebius and others had long since made reference to Syriac archives in Edessa.  From these archives Eusebius (d. 340) related the account of the exchange of letters between Abgar and Jesus.  He omitted any mention of an image, whether painted or acheiropoietos.  Others, beginning with the Doctrine of Addai (ca. 390) made more of the painted image in the cure of Abgar than of the letter of Jesus.  The Syriac archives remain a constant.  The Acts of Thaddeus (6th c.) made the image miraculous on a tetradiplon on which Jesus wiped his face.  About 594 Evagrius told a story about the icon saving Edessa during the siege of Chosroes of Persia in 544.  The Latin discourse (769) of Pope Stephen seems to retain the face-only icon, his terms being faciem and vultus, the latter capable of expressing the entire person.  The Narratio of Constantine VII (944) still presented us a miraculous Christ-face icon.  At some time after 769 but before 944, it would seem that some Syric document (as the western Latin Abgar texts claim) attested to a full-body image on this cloth and also related an Edessan ritual connected with the city’s special and very secretly kept icon.  Even if the western documents misunderstood their source, and the ritual was one practiced not in Edessa but after 944 in Constantinople, where the threnos or burial shroud art was emerging and would by 1100 have been known to westerners, it would not materially alter the conclusions of this paper.^{3 0}