More on the Shroud and Miraculous Images

tenth century icon showing King Abgar

of Edessa with the Holy Mandylion

Sorry for the hiatus.  A colleague of mine passed away somewhat suddenly and I am his executor.  It has taken a bit of time, but now I am back on track.  Burying the dead is a corporal act of mercy and, of course, it is not one that will wait.  
     We had been talking about Veronica’s veil and then the shroud of Turin.  In the last entry, I had mentioned the “Image of Edessa” which is—or was—“Christos Acheiropoietos” an icon of “Christ, not painted by human hands”—a miraculous image.  We need to understand the theology of images in Eastern Christianity to appreciate the importance of this image. The Icon, unlike a statue in Western Christianity, does not merely depict but “represents” in the theological sense of that term, that is makes present, the one whose image it is.  In Eastern Christianity when God wishes Christ or a Saint, including the Mother of God, to represent himself or herself, they do it my means of a miraculous icon—perhaps a weeping icon, or one that miraculously emits a scented oil.  There is no tradition of visions in Eastern Christianity, the miraculous icon performs that same function.  And, of course, the icon—unlike the vision—can be seen by all.  The most important icons are the ones allegedly of miraculous orign.   One of the oldest, if not the oldest, of these icons is the Image of Edessa.    
     According to the story, King Abgar of Edessa—a Syriac city in northern Mesopotamia—was converted to Christianity by Addai, one of the 72 disciples that Luke’s Gospel tells us that Jesus sent out to prepare the towns and cities that he, Jesus, intended to visit.  Now, Edessa would have been a bit of the beaten path for Jesus, especially as he limited his mission “to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” and gentile Edessa was no where near the Galilee and Judah of Jesus.  But, a story is a story.  Anyway, supposedly King Abgar was ill with a fatal disease (and he did die relativel young) and he heard about the miracle working Jesus and wrote him asking him to come and cure him.  Eusebius, the fourth century Church historian, relates the legend that Jesus declined but promised to send a disciple.  Enter Addai, (aka Thaddeus of Edessa) one of the Fathers of the East Syriac Church who, by tradition, was one of the 72 disciples of Jesus.  Sometime after Eusebius wrote the earliest known version of the story—based on oral tradition—a new element was added to the story.  Supposedly Jesus gave Addai a portrait of himself (Jesus) to give King Abgar and the king kept this painting—painted on a piece of cloth—in a shrine in one of his palaces.  Evagrius Scholasticus, writing at the end of the sixth century, mentions this painting and claims that its miraculous powers delivered the city of Edessa from the Persian invasion of 544.  When Edessa fell to the Muslims in 638 Christianity was allowed to its citizens without persecution.  The Byzantines tried to retake the city in the tenth century and the Muslim authorities used the sacred icon to ransom Muslim Prisioners from John Kourkouas, the Byzantine general.  Thus the image, known as the Holy Mandylion,  came to Constantinople.  The Archdeacon of Constantinople,  Gregorios Referendarios, preached the sermon of welcome  in 944.  The image was stolen from Constantinople by the Crusaders during the infamous sack of the city in 1204.  Baldwin II of Jerusalem sold it to Louis IX of France to placed it in palace chapel he built to hold various relics he acquired in the Holy Land—the famous Sainte Chapelle of Paris.  It remained there until it was lost or destroyed in the French Revolution.  During its time in Constantinople various copies were made on icons, the most famous being at Saint Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai.  Another copy was held in the Roman Basilica of San Silvestro in Capite but moved in 1870 to the Vatican Palace.  It is currently on loan to the British Museum, though due to return to Rome this month (October 2011).  Some historians believe that the Image of Edessa is the same artifact as the Shroud of Turin, but there are two problems with this.  The Image of Edessa allegedly portrayed a living Christ, the Shroud Christ’s corpse.  Secondly, the Shroud’s existence and the Image of Edessa’s existence in two distinct places between the years 1390 and the disappearance of the Edessa Icon during the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, can be clearly documented, the same object not able to be present in two places.  The Image of Edessa is referred to as acheiropieta—images “not made by hands,” that is miraculously produced images.  History sometimes becomes hopelessly entwined with myth, but even as a historian I find the myth far more interesting than any old facts. 

Shroud of Turin II--A Mysterious Provenance

The Hagia Sophia, or Church of 

the Holy Wisdom, one time seat of

the Patriarch of Constantinople 

Let’s get back to the Shroud of Turin.  In a previous entry (October 1) I said that the history of the shroud can only be traced with exactness from 1390 when the Bishop of Troyes wrote the pope with his (the bishop’s) opinion that the Shroud was a forgery and even claimed that the artist had confessed to his counterfeit.  The Shroud was in the possession of the family of the Counts de Charny and was passed on in that family until it was sold ot the Dukes of Savoy in 1453.  It remained in possession of the Savoy House until 1983 when the Savoys (the Italian Royal Family from 1861 until 1946) gave it to the Holy See.  During its time with the Savoys it was kept first in a chapel at Chambéry and was later (1578) transferred to the cathedral in their new capital, Turin.  It remains in Turin to the present.  That is all history.
     Now to reasonable conjecture.  Medieval documents allege that the shroud was in Constantinople from an unspecified date, probably as early as the seventh century, until the city was sacked by the Crusaders in 1204.  It disappears at that time until possibly (and even probably) 1353 when it shows up in Lirey.  (There is mention of it in 1353, but the earliest definitive record is 1390.)  How did it get from Constantinople to Lirey, and where was it from 1204 until 1353 (much less 1390).  The theory is (and it is a reasonable conjecture) that it had come into the possession of the Knights Templar at the time that Constantinople was sacked in 1204 and remained with them until the Order was dissolved in 1307.  A key figure in the Templars was Geoffrey de Charny who served as the Grand Preceptor of Normandy (the head of the Order in North-west France).  DeCharny was among the Templars burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay, the Master General of the Order.  When the shroud surfaces, it is in the custody of  his nephew, another Geoffrey de Charny.  There is a bit of a jump here, but it is reasonable. 
     Ok, but how did it get to Constantinoplein the first place?   Here there is some controversy.  There are coins from the reign of Justinian II—coins minted in 692—that purportedly display the image of Christ from the shroud?  Do they?  Hard to say.  Art historians differ and medieval representations are never exact.  If they do, it would indicate that the shroud was in Constantinople, Justinian’s capital, by the end of the seventh century.  There are other scholars who identify the shroud with “The Image of Edessa”—a representation of Christ on cloth that is mentioned by Saint John Damascene (675-749).  We will do a separate entry on the “Image of Edessa.”  The Image of Edessa was brought to Constantinople only in 944; there exists a sermon preached on the occasion by the archdeacon, Gregorios Referendarios.  Another reason not to associate the shroud with the “Image of Edessa,” also known as the Holy Mandylion, is that this image also was looted during the sack of Constantinople but was sold to Louis IX (Saint Louis) of France and kept in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris along with other relics of the Passion of Christ.  It was lost or destroyed during the French Revolution, but this testifies to the Shroud at Lirey- Chambéry-Turin existing separately from the Image of Edessa at Paris from 1390 (the point in time when we undisputedly have both relics) until 1789 when the Paris relic disappears.  The existence of the “Image of Edessa” is recorded at the very end of the sixth century though there are stories going back to the fourth which may refer to it.  All that is for a later entry.  We are still left with the problem: even if Justinian’s coins from 692 refer to the Shroud at Constantinople—where was it for the approximately 660 years between the burial of Christ and Justinian’s coins?  Frankly we don’t know.  All we can say is that from the time that Constantine transferred his imperial capital to Constantinople, the city and its churches became a repository for a huge number of relics of Christ, Mary, and the Saints.  There authenticity—at least form a historical perspective—cannot be proved.  It should not surprise us that a burial cloth purported to be that of Jesus—authentic or not—eventually found its way to what was until the Sack of Constantinople, the greatest treasure house of Christian holy objects in the world.  Is it the historical Shroud of Jesus?  I don’t know; the Church doesn’t say, but as a dear friend of mine, Dot Pittman (God Rest her) used to say: “never let the truth spoil a good story.”