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As promised in my previous post, this is "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 lighter coloured circular `halo' around the man's head, within a lighter rectangle. 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 Shroudies accept, as far as I know, 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].However, as objected by the Professor of Italian at Birmingham University, Philip McNair (1974–94), "If the Shroud spent more than half its life as the Mandylion, there should be a circular area around the face of Christ which is more yellowed than the rest of the cloth: but this is not the case":16. "The actual word used in the Acta Thaddaei is tetradiplon... "[WI79, 307]
"Mr Wilson argues that the Mandylion was the Shroud of Christ so folded up and protected by ornamental trellis that only the image of the face was displayed. His hypothesis, presented with a wealth of circumstantial evidence, is as attractive as it is unconvincing; for, although it would have explained so much, it is fraught with difficulties which many critical readers will find insuperable. One is purely practical, and might occur to any housewife. If a linen sheet is folded and protected so that only a small part of it is exposed to the air, after several centuries that part is likely to have suffered discoloration. If the Shroud spent more than half its life as the Mandylion, there should be a circular area around the face of Christ which is more yellowed than the rest of the cloth: but this is not the case"[MP78, 37].There are two fallacies in McNair's objection. The first is that the Shroud's years as the Image of Edessa are not the same as it having been "exposed to the air." As Stevenson and Habermas point out, "... perhaps the Mandylion was never exposed to the open air and sunlight often enough to become visibly discolored":
"But perhaps the Mandylion was never exposed to the open air and sunlight often enough to become visibly discolored. If the Shroud and the Mandylion are indeed the same, then the Shroud was hermetically sealed in the Edessa city wall for 500 years, and later kept in a reliquary where it was removed only twice a year in Edessa and only once a year in Constantinople. Private showings of the Mandylion for dignitaries and artists would have been conducted indoors. So in the course of twelve centuries the cloth's actual exposure to heat, air, and sunlight may have amounted to only a few hundred days"[SH81, 25].The second fallacy is contained in McNair's objection. If it would "occur to any housewife" that if the Image of Edessa was "exposed to the air" it would "suffer... discoloration," then it would have occurred to the Edessans, so they wouldn't have allowed that.
Moreover, since the Edessans regarded the Image of Edessa as "too holy for common gaze"[WI10, 201], an obvious way for them to both protect the face of the Image of Edessa/Shroud from becoming discoloured by exposure to air and light, as well as preserve its "too holy for common gaze" mystique, would be to place a depiction of the Image/Shroud's face over the actual face. Over centuries this would have the effect of slowing the face area's darkening relative to the rest of the cloth, causing it to appear lighter than the other areas!
The `acid test' which would falsify my theory if it was false, but doesn't, 
is STURP's 1978 raking light photograph of the Shroud which revealed a pattern of ancient foldmarks at one-eighth intervals [see 08Dec22], which is consistent with the Shroud having been "doubled in four" for much of its history.
[Left (enlarge): Diagram of STURP's raking light photograph of the Shroud. Note ancient foldlines D and E which enclose the man's face in landscape aspect, as it is in copies of the Image of Edessa (e.g. 23Aug12). And as can be seen above, those foldlines also enclose the lighter coloured halo around the Shroudman's face within a lighter rectangle!]
Below is a close-up of that lighter coloured `halo' around the Shroud face, within the lighter coloured rectangle, and a red rectangle approximating the boundaries of 
[Above: Extract of the face area of the 2002 Restoration full-length Shroud photograph above, within the approximate boundaries of foldlines D and E in STURP's raking light photograph above, drawn over it in a red rectangle.]
foldlines D and E drawn over it. That this is not an effect of the lighting of the 2002 Restoration photograph is proved by the same light coloured circular `halo' around the man's head, within a light colured rectangle, is evident, albeit less clear, in Shroud Scope's 2002 Durante pre-restoration photograph of the same area (see below).
[Above: Extract of the face area of Shroud Scope's Durante 2002 Vertical pre-restoration photograph, showing the same circular `halo' within a light-coloured rectangle, proving it really is there! Could this `halo' around the Shroudman's head be the origin of medieval depictions of Jesus with a halo around his head?].
Questions. 1. Why is the `halo' and the rectangle it is within, clearer on the 2002 Resoration photograph? During the 2002 restoration the white Holland cloth backing, sewn on in 1534, was removed. So in all Shroud photographs before the restoration the white backing would have been reflected through the weave of the cloth. This likely partially masked the contrast between the `halo' and its rectangle and the rest of the Shroud. 2. Why isn't the rest of the Shroud light-coloured, since it was also covered from light and air? As can be seen in this drawing below of the 
likely side view of the Image of Edessa, proposed by Classics Professor Prof. Robert Drews (1936-) (with a red line inserted by me), in which the Edessan clergy could see that the cloth was doubled in four, without seeing its full length (see 15Sep24).
[Right: Likely side view of the Image of Edessa, with red line added by me, to illustrate that if a depiction of the Image of Edesa (represented by the read line) was placed over the actual face of the Image of Edessa/Shroud, air could circulate through the rest of the doubled-in-four cloth, and so discolour it over time, but there would be very little air circulation between the depiction of the face and the face itself, protecting it from discolouration.]
So again (see 03Aug24), the claimed `bug' turned out to be a feature!
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
JP78. Jennings, P., ed., 1978, "Face to Face with the Turin Shroud ," Mayhew-McCrimmon: Great Wakering UK.
MP78. McNair, P., 1978, "The Shroud and History: Fantasy, Fake or Fact?," in JP78, 21-40.
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.
WI10. Wilson, I., 2010, "The Shroud: The 2000-Year-Old Mystery Solved," Bantam Press: London.
Posted 26 November 2024. Updated 12 December 2024.
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