Image of Edessa: There is a circular area around the Shroud face!: Turin Shroud Encyclopedia

Copyright © Stephen E. Jones[1]

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As promised in my previous post, this is the first installment of, "Image of Edessa: There is a circular area around the Shroud face!," part #32 of my Turin Shroud Encyclopedia. For more information about this encyclopedia, see part #1.

[Right (enlarge): The Shroud after the 2002 restoration[SU14]. Note the circular `halo' around the man's head. Only tonight (26 Nov 24) did I discover the article, Soons, P., 2014, "The Halo Around The Head In The Image Of The Man On The Shroud," 10 October. However, my claims about the `halo' are different from Soons'.].

Image of Edessa/Shroud It is Ian Wilson's theory, which I and most, if not all, Shroudies accept, as far as I am aware, that the Image of Edessa/Mandylion was the Shroud folded in eight, with the face one-eighth, uppermost (see my "Tetradiplon and the Shroud of Turin.") Here is an early quote by Wilson in support of his theory:

"If the Shroud was the Mandylion, was this the manner in which it appeared in the early centuries? This speculation takes on more credibility in the light of a piece of information gleaned from a text of the sixth century, the period when the Mandylion first came to light in Edessa. The text gives a description of how the image was thought by those of the time to have been created by Jesus on the linen of a cloth he had used to dry his face. This text, as translated in Roberts and Donaldson's voluminous Writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, at first sight seems totally uninformative: `And he ... asked to wash himself, and a towel was given to him; and when he had washed himself he wiped his face with it. And his image having been imprinted upon the linen ... ' But, as a footnote reveals, one word in the passage gave the translators some difficulty. In order to convey the sense evident from the description, they used the word `towel.' But they were careful to point out that this is not the literal meaning of the strange Greek word used in the original text. The actual meaning is `doubled in four.' 16 The discovery is intriguing. Could the sixth-century writer have been trying to convey that the cloth he saw was literally `doubled in four' - i.e., that it was a substantially larger cloth, the folds perhaps being actually countable at the edges but otherwise inaccessible? The only logical test is to try to `double in four' the Turin Shroud to see what effect is achieved. This is not a difficult task. One simply takes a full-length print of the cloth, doubles it, then doubles it twice again, producing a cloth `doubled in four' sections. The head of Christ appears on the uppermost section, curiously disembodied, exactly as on artists' copies of the Mandylion. Furthermore, it appears on the cloth in landscape aspect, again exactly as on artists' copies of the Mandylion. It takes little imagination or artistic license to visualize the cloth as it would have been without the burn marks of the 1532 fire. There lies the most convincing original of all the various artists' copies of the Mandylion, the true and only cloth `not made by hands.'"[WI79, 120-121]

16. "The actual word used in the Acta Thaddaei is tetradiplon... "[WI79, 307]

To be continued in the second installment of his post.

Notes:
1. This post is copyright. I grant permission to extract or quote from any part of it (but not the whole post), provided the extract or quote includes a reference citing my name, its title, its date, and a hyperlink back to this page. [return]

Bibliography
SU14. "Image of Full 2002 Restored Shroud," High Resolution Imagery, Shroud University, 2014.
WI79. Wilson, I., 1979, "The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus?," [1978], Image Books: New York NY, Revised edition.

Posted 26 November 2024. Updated 26 November 2024.