Image of Edessa

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According to the legend, King Abgarus received the Image of Edessa, a likeness of Jesus.

According to Christian legend, the Image of Edessa, (known to Orthodox Christians as the Mandylion, a Byzantine Greek word not applied in any other context), was a holy relic consisting of a square or rectangle of cloth upon which a miraculous image of the face of Jesus was imprinted — the first icon ("image").

According to the legend, King Abgar of Edessa wrote to Jesus, asking him to come cure him of an illness. Abgar received a letter and a likeness of Jesus. The legend was first recorded in the early fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea^[1], who said that he had transcribed and translated the actual letter in the Syriac chancery documents of the king of Edessa. Instead, the apostle "Thaddaeus" is said to have come to Edessa, bearing the words of Jesus, by the virtues of which the king was miraculously healed. Since Jesus was living at the time ^[2], this image would seem to have no connection with his alleged burial cloth, the Shroud of Turin.

The vicissitudes of the Edessa image between the first century and its location in his own time are not reported by Eusebius. The materials, according to the scholar Robert Eisenman, "are very widespread in the Syriac sources with so many multiple developments and divergences that it is hard to believe they could all be based on Eusebius' poor efforts" (Eisenman 1997:862).

[edit] History

The legend of the mandylion as it is known today is the product of centuries of development. The first and earliest version involves a letter written by King Abgar of Edessa to Jesus, asking him to come cure him of an illness. It is found in the History of the Church (1.13.5-1.13.22) written by Eusebius of Caesarea who claimed that he had transcribed and translated the actual letter in the Syriac chancery documents of the king of Edessa. In this earliest account, Christ replies by letter, saying that when he had completed his earthly mission and ascended, he would send a disciple to heal Abgar (and does so). It is noteworthy that in this first account there is no mention of an image of Jesus. That was a later addition to the story.

In AD 384, Egeria, a pilgrim from either Gaul or Spain, was given a personal tour by the Bishop of Edessa, who gave her many marvellous accounts of miracles that had saved Edessa from the Persians and put into her hands transcripts of the correspondence of Abgarus and Jesus, with embellishments. Part of her accounts of her travels, in letters to her sisterhood, survive. "She naïvely supposed that this version was more complete than the shorter letter which she had read in a translation at home, presumably one brought back to the Far West by an earlier pilgrim" (Palmer 1998). Her escorted tour, accompanied by a translator, was thorough; the bishop is quoted: "Now let us go to the gate where the messenger Ananias came in with the letter of which I have been telling you." (Palmer). There was no mention of an image reported by Egeria, who spent three days inspecting every corner of Edessa and the environs.

The next stage of development appears in the Doctrine of Addai [Thaddeus], c. 400, which introduces a court painter among a delegation sent by Abgar to Jesus, who paints a portrait of Jesus to take back to his master:

"When Hannan, the keeper of the archives, saw that Jesus spoke thus to him, by virtue of being the king's painter, he took and painted a likeness of Jesus with choice paints, and brought with him to Abgar the king, his master. And when Abgar the king saw the likeness, he received it with great joy, and placed it with great honor in one of his palatial houses." (Doctrine of Addai 13)

The image is said to have surfaced in 525, during a flood of the Daisan, a tributary stream of the Euphrates that passed by Edessa. This flood is mentioned in the writings of the court historian Procopius of Caesarea. In the course of the reconstruction work, a cloth bearing the facial features of a man was discovered hidden in the wall above one of the gates of Edessa.

By 544, when Procopius recorded the recovery of Edessa from the Persians, he attributed the event to the letter sent from Jesus to Abgar. Yet in 593 Evagrius attributed the same event to a miraculous "God-made image," a miraculous imprint of the face of Jesus upon a cloth. It was this last and latest stage of the legend that became accepted in Eastern Orthodoxy and was mistakenly regarded as historical.

Evagrius Scholasticus mentions in his Ecclesiastical History the image of Edessa discovered in 544, that was "created by God, and not produced by the hands of man". This idea of an icon that was Acheiropoietos (Αχειροποίητος, literally "not-made-by-hand") is a separate enrichment of the original legend: similar legends of supernatural origins have accrued to other Orthodox icons.

The Mandylion of Edessa from the private chapel of the pope in the Vatican. Photography taken in the pavilion of the Holy See during the EXPO 2000 in Hannover, Germany.

The Mandylion disappeared again after the Sassanians conquered Edessa in 609. An Arab legend, related to historian Andrew Palmer when he visited Urfa (Edessa) in 1999, relates that the towel (mendil) of Jesus was thrown into a well in what is today the city's Great Mosque. The Christian tradition is at variance with this, recounting how in 944 it was exchanged for a group of Muslim prisoners— at that time the Image of Edessa was taken to Constantinople where it was received amidst great celebration by emperor Romanus I, who deposited it in the chapel of the Great Palace of Constantinople. It remained there until the Crusaders sacked the city in 1204 and carried off many of its treasures to western Europe - though the "Image of Edessa" is not mentioned in this context in any contemporary document. A small part of this relic, or one believed to be the same, was one of the large group sold by Baldwin II of Constantinople to Louis IX of France in 1241 and housed in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris (two documentary inventories: year 1534 (Gerard of St. Quentin de l´Isle/Paris) and year 1740) until it disappeared during the French Revolution (not to be confused with the Sainte Chapelle at Chambery, home for a period of the Shroud of Turin).^[3]

Thus we can trace the development of the legend from a letter, but no image in Eusebius, to an image painted by a court painter in Addai; then to a miracle caused by the letter in Procopius, which becomes a miracle caused by a miraculously-created image supernaturally made when Jesus pressed a cloth to his wet face in Evagrius.

The later legend of the image recounts that because the successors of Abgar reverted to paganism, the bishop placed the miraculous image inside a wall, and setting a burning lamp before the image, he sealed them up behind a tile; that the image was later found again, after a vision, on the very night of the Persian invasion, and that not only had it miraculously reproduced itself on the tile, but the same lamp was still burning before it; further, that the bishop of Edessa used a fire into which oil flowing from the image was poured to destroy the Persians.

This long-developing legend of a miraculous first image of Jesus that appeared on a cloth he pressed to his wet face, was adopted by the Eastern Orthodox church not as legend, but as historical fact. Countless reproductions of what was considered to be the image were painted as icons; in the nineteenth century many reproductions were carried by the Russian armies of Tsar Nicholas II. According to Robin Cormack, almost every Byzantine church contained a representation of the image by the beginning of the Iconoclastic period.^[4] Because the miraculous image of the later legend was believed to be not made by humans but by God, it is called acheiropoietos in Greek -- "Not Made by Hands."

John of Damascus (died 749) mentions the image in his anti-iconoclastic work On Holy Images,^[5] quoting a tradition that Abgarus had requested an image of Jesus and Jesus himself put a cloth to his face to produce the image. The cloth is described as being a "strip", or oblong cloth, rather than a square, as other accounts hold.

Other documents from the sixth century— it is said— in the Vatican Library and the University of Leiden, Netherlands, seem to suggest another image at Edessa. A tenth century codex, Codex Vossianus Latinus Q 69 found by Gino Zaninotto in the Vatican Library contains an eighth-century account saying that an imprint of Christ's whole body was left on a canvas kept in a church in Edessa: it quotes a man called Smera in Constantinople: "King Abgar received a cloth on which one can see not only a face but the whole body" (in Latin: [non tantum] faciei figuram sed totius corporis figuram cernere poteris)^[6]. This image is apparently not the same as the mandylion whose widely-disseminated and familiar iconic image is of a face alone.

However, some modern researchers have suggested that by folding the Shroud of Turin it is possible to display a rectangle of fabric showing only the face, suggesting that the Shroud and the Mandylion are in fact one and the same relic. This interpretation also reinforces the connections between the Image and the Shroud of Turin, of which no reliable record exists before the fourteenth century.

[edit] Notes

[edit] See also

• Shroud of Turin
• Relics attributed to Jesus
• Images of Jesus
• Veil of Veronica, the other "true image" (vera icon)

[edit] External links

• Old and new Images from Edessa
• Andrew Palmer's essay on Edessa in Golden Horn: a Journal of Byzantium summer, 1998
• Icons of the Mandylion (mostly Russian)
• Is the Shroud of Turin the Image of Edessa
• "The Image of Edessa":"Not-Made-by-Human-Hand" Ancient and modern references.

[edit] References

• Eusebius of Caesarea. Epistle of Jesus Christ to Abgarus King of Edessa Historia Ecclesiae
• Eisenman, Robert., 1997. James the Brother of Jesus. (Viking Penguin). In part a deconstruction of the legends surrounding Agbar/Abgar.