The Edessa Image is a cloth imprinted with the face of Jesus Christ, said to have been given to King Abgar and healed him. The image disappeared during the Fourth Crusade and reappeared in Paris before being lost again. It is often confused with the Shroud of Turin, and some believe the two are the same. Two relics remain attributed to the legend of the Edessa Image.
Known as the “Holy Mandylion” to Orthodox Christians, the Edessa Image is a piece of cloth said to have been miraculously imprinted with the face of Jesus Christ. According to legend, the Edessa image was given to King Abgar of the ancient city of Edessa and healed him of illness. In the early 4th century, Eusebius of Caesarea transcribed correspondence in which the king requests a visit from Christ, who instead promises to send an apostle to visit him. The Apostle Thaddeus later visited the king which reportedly resulted in his miraculous healing.
Although legend indicates that King Abgar received the Edessa image as a gift from Christ, Eusebius of Caesarea’s translated correspondence in Church History does not mention the image. In further documentation, the Doctrine of Addai (Thaddaeus) it is mentioned that the king sent a court artist to Christ to paint his image. A resulting legend, embraced as fact by the Orthodox Christian church, considers the Edessa image to be the work of God and not of man; what the Greeks described as “Akheiropoietos” or “Icon not made by hand”.
In the 10th century, the Edessa Image was sent from Edessa (now the city of Urfa) to Constantinople, where it disappeared in the sack of the city in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. The image of Edessa later reappeared in Paris, as part of the Sainte Chapelle of King Louis IX of France, only to be lost again during the French Revolution. In the 19th century, reproductions of the Edessa image were carried by Russian armies as “Khorugvs” or religious banners and proliferated in several Byzantine churches.
As one of the many religious relics bearing a miraculous image of Christ, such as the Veil of Veronica; the Image of Edessa is often confused with the Shroud of Turin, a large cloth said to be the full-body imprint of Christ. Journalist Ian Wilson has theorized that the object touted as the Image of Edessa between the 6th and 13th centuries was, in fact, the Shroud of Turin, folded and framed so that the face was visible. The Codex Vossianus Latinus of the Vatican Apostolic Library seems to support this theory through its eighth-century account that “King Abgar received a cloth on which not only a face but the whole body can be seen.”
Today, two relics remain attributed to the legend of the Image of Edessa. the Holy Face of Genoa, kept in the Church of San Bartolomeo degli Armeni; and the Holy Face of San Silvestro, kept in the Matilda Chapel of the Vatican.
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