The Images on Jesus' Burial Shroud in Words from the Past
We might think, in our age of
spectacular visual effects, that descriptions of Jesus' images, as if my
magic, appearing on his burial shroud, are but the product of a fertile
imagination. Such thinking is of course justified until we probe the
literature.
Shortly after the image-bearing cloth was discovered
in Edessa in 544 AD, shortly after the monk Leander's three-year visit
to Constantinople in 579 AD, these words became part of an Eastertide
rite of the church in Toledo, Spain.
Peter ran with John to the tomb and
saw the recent imprints of the dead and risen man on the linens.
About 200 years later, Pope Stephen III, in Rome,
stated that Christ had . . .
spread out his entire
body on a linen cloth that was white as snow. On this cloth, marvelous
as it is to see . . . the glorious image of the Lord's face, and the
length of his entire and most noble body, has been divinely transferred.
We can not be certain that those words referred to
the Image of Edessa. But on August 15, 944 AD, the image-bearing cloth
was moved from Edessa to Constantinople with great fanfare and ceremony.
And on that occasion, Gregory, the archdeacon and referendarius of Hagia
Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople described the cloth as a burial cloth
with a full-length body image and bloodstains. We know this from a
sermon given by Gregory which was only recently discovered in the
Vatican archives and translated in 2002.
And other documents have been found that describe
the image-bearing cloth of Edessa. Documents found in Vatican library
and the University of Leiden, Netherlands (the Codex Vossianus Latinus
Q69 and Vatican Library Codex 5696, p. 35.) add to our understanding:
You
can see [not only] the figure of a face, but [also] the figure of the
whole body.
But the Earliest Words Might Be 1st Century
In a poem, the Hymn of the
Pearl, we find Jesus allegorically saying that in a garment,
justifiably a burial garment, that he sees two entire images of himself,
one facing outward and one facing inward -- in other words ventral and
dorsal images.
