Image of Edessa

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 Holy 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").^[1]

According to the legend, King Abgar of Edessa wrote to Jesus, asking him to come cure him of an illness. Abgar received an answering letter from Jesus, declining the invitation, but promising a future visit by one of his disciples. Along with the letter went a likeness of Jesus. This legend was first recorded in the early fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea^[2], 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.

The first record of the existence of a physical image was in the sixth century, in the ancient city of Edessa (now Urfa). The image was moved to Constantinople in the tenth Century. The cloth disappeared from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade (Sack of Constantinople) in 1204, reappearing as a relic in King Louis IX of France's Sainte Chapelle in Paris. It finally disappeared in the French Revolution.

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).

The Eastern Orthodox Church have a feast of this icon on August 16 (August 29 in N.S.), which commemorates its transition from Edessa to Constantinople.

History of the legend

The story of the Mandylion is the product of centuries of development. The first version is found in Eusebius' History of the Church (1.13.5-1.13.22). Eusebius claimed that he had transcribed and translated the actual letter in the Syriac chancery documents of the king of Edessa. This records a letter written by King Abgar of Edessa to Jesus, asking him to come cure him of an illness. Jesus replies by letter, saying that when he had completed his earthly mission and ascended to heaven, he would send a disciple to heal Abgar (and does so). At this stage, there is no mention of an image of Jesus.

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 however, no mention of any 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 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.

The image itself is said to have resurfaced 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.

In a further elaboration, Evagrius Scholasticus in his Ecclesiastical History (593) attributed the same event to a "God-made image," a miraculous imprint of the face of Jesus upon a cloth. 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. It was this last and latest stage of the legend that became accepted in Eastern Orthodoxy, the image of Edessa 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.

Later events

The Holy Mandylion disappeared again after the Sassanians conquered Edessa in 609. A local legend, related to historian Andrew Palmer when he visited Urfa (Edessa) in 1999, relates that the towel or burial cloth (mendil) of Jesus was thrown into a well in what is today the city's Great Mosque. The Christian tradition exemplified in Georgios Kedrenos' Historiarum compendium^[3] is at variance with this, John Scylitzes^[4] recounting how in 944, when the city was besieged by John Kourkouas, 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 Romanos I Lekapenos, who deposited it in the Theotokos of the Pharos chapel in the Great Palace of Constantinople. Not inconsequentially, the earliest known Byzantine icon of the Mandylion or Holy Face, preserved at Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai, is dated c. 945.^[5]

The Mandylion remained under Imperial protection 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. Similarly, it is thought that the Shroud of Turin disappeared from Constantinople in 1204 when Crusaders looted the city. The leaders of the Crusader army in this instance were French, and it is believed that somehow because of this the Shroud made its way to France.^[6] 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 (not to be confused with the Sainte Chapelle at Chambéry, home for a time of the Shroud of Turin) until it disappeared during the French Revolution.^[7]

Links with the Shroud of Turin

Journalist Ian Wilson has put forward a theory^[8] that the object venerated as the Mandylion from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries was in fact the Shroud of Turin, folded in four, and enclosed in an oblong frame so that only the face was visible.

For support, he refers to documents in the Vatican Library and the University of Leiden, Netherlands, which seem to suggest the presence of another image at Edessa. A tenth century codex, Codex Vossianus Latinus Q 69^[9] 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).^[10]

Surviving images

Two images survive today which are associated with the Mandylion.

Holy Face of Genoa

The Holy Face of Genoa.

This image is kept in the modest Church of St Bartholomew of The Armenians, Genoa, where it was donated to the city’s 14th century Doge Leonardo Montaldo by the Byzantine Emperor John V Palaeologus.

It has been the subject of a detailed 1969 study by Colette Dufour Bozzo, who dated the outer frame to the late 14th century^[11], while the inner frame and the image itself are believed by some to have originated earlier. Bozzo found that the image was imprinted on a cloth that had been pasted onto a wooden board.^[12][13]

The similarity of the image with the Veil of Veronica suggests a link between the two traditions.

Holy Face of San Silvestro

The Image from the Matilda chapel in the Vatican.

This image was kept in Rome’s church of S. Silvestro up to 1870 and is now kept in the Matilda chapel in the Vatican. It is housed in a Baroque frame donated by one Sister Dionora Chiarucci in 1623 ^[14]. The earliest evidence of its existence is 1517, when the nuns were forbidden to exhibit it to avoid competition with the Veronica.

Like the Genoa image, it is painted on board and therefore is likely to be a copy.

It was exhibited at Germany’s Expo 2000 in the pavilion of the Holy See.

Notes

See also

• Acheiropoieta: images 'Not made by Hands'
• Shroud of Turin
• Relics attributed to Jesus
• Images of Jesus
• Veil of Veronica, the other "true image" (vera icon)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Mandylion

• Image: Mandylion of Genoa
• 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.
• Eyewitness report: The sermon of Gregory Referendarius in 944
• Documentary proofs, make out a list of sixteen documents in the period 944 to 1247

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.