Abgar picture
A representation of Jesus Christ associated with King Abgar V of Edessa is called the Abgar image , mandylion or Christ image by Edessa ; According to the Abgar legend, the original was not an icon , but a cloth from which the facial features were mechanically transferred.
Jesus Christ is depicted on the cloth with shoulder-length hair and divine glory. The fine long nose accentuates the narrow face. The pointy beard usually falls into three parts.
The " acheiropoieton " (ie, non-human-made image) was often copied onto icons and crosses. We also find the cloth in another representation: two angels standing on clouds hold up the cloth on which the bearded face of Jesus Christ is printed.
The correspondence between Abgar and Jesus after Eusebius
In Edessa (today's city of Urfa - Neo-Aramaic: Urhoy - in Turkey east of the Upper Euphrates) in the Mesopotamian Kingdom of Osrhoene , the story has been passed that the Aramaic king Abgar of Urhoy (Edessa) of the famous name Jesus and of his in general heard certified miracles. He then sent a messenger to Jesus who brought a letter requesting that he be cured of a serious illness. Jesus replies that only after his resurrection would he send one of his seventy disciples .
Eusebius of Caesarea wrote that St. Thomas sent his disciple Thaddaeus to King Abgar to heal him. He, Eusebius, discovered these two letters in the Edessa archives and translated them from Neo-Aramaic:
“There is a written record of this fact that was taken from the archives of the then royal city of Edessa. In the official documents there, which report on the earlier events and also on the history of Abgar, the above-mentioned event is also kept to this day. It is best to hear for yourself the letters that we have taken from the archive and translated verbatim from the Aramaic. They are as follows:
Copy of the letter which Prince Abgar had written to Jesus and sent to him in Jerusalem through the fast-moving Ananias: Abgar Ukkama, the Prince, greets Jesus, the good Savior who appeared in Jerusalem. I have received news of you and your healings and have learned that you work them without medicine or herbs. Because, as it is said, you see the blind, walk the lame, clean lepers, cast out unclean spirits and demons, heal those who have long been tormented by diseases, and raise the dead. In response to all this news I said to myself: either you are God and work these miracles because you have descended from heaven, or you are the Son of God because you work this. Therefore I turn to you in this letter with the request that you strive to help me and heal me of my suffering. I have also heard that the Jews grumble against you and want to harm you. I have a very small, dignified city that is enough for both of us.
Jesus' reply, conveyed through Ananias, the courier of Prince Abgar: "Blessed are you because you believe in me without having seen me. For it is written about me that those who have seen me do not believe in me , and that those who have not seen me should believe and live. With regard to your written invitation to come to you, you must know: it is necessary that I first fulfill all that I have been sent on earth to do and then, when it is fulfilled, return to him who sent me. After the ascension I will send you one of my disciples to heal you from your suffering and to give life to you and yours. "
Legend has it that Squidward came to the king. The king was cured of his illness and, according to Eusebius, he gave the order "that the citizens should gather next morning and listen to Thaddeus' sermon."
In this oldest tradition of the Abgar legend, written down by Eusebius in 325, there is no mention of an image.
Extension of the legend
Towards the end of the 4th century it appears for the first time in the " Doctrine of Addai ", the story of the courier Ananias ( Neo-Aramaic : Hannan ), who is said to have brought the letter to Jesus . This Ananias is said to have been a painter and at the same time made a portrait of Jesus, which he brought with him to King Abgar. A later version reports direct face contact in which the image of Jesus was imprinted on a cloth.
According to the historian Niaphoris , the cloth disappeared in 359. It is said that the cloth was hidden in the city wall to protect it from flooding. After that, it fell into oblivion and was only rediscovered in the 6th century. According to Prokopios of Caesarea (around 550), the image was found in one of the city gates during clean-up work in 525 after the Daisan, a tributary of the Euphrates , inundated the city of Edessa. The historian Euagrios Scholastikos (before 594 ) writes that the inhabitants of the city of Edessa discovered a cavity in the wall during the siege by the Persians under Chosrau I in 544, probably through fortification work on the highest gate. It contained a cloth with the image of Jesus. When Chosrau withdrew with his army after a fire in his field camp, the inhabitants of Edessa fell into great enthusiasm. Euagrios describes the picture in his church history as made by God, but not by human hands . A silver vase from Emesa from these years (now in the Louvre , Paris ) shows the likely head image on the cloth.
It is noticeable that the image representations of Christ have undergone a radical change since the 6th century, i.e. the beginning of the worship of the Abgar image in Edessa. If the representations had shown a great variety up to then - for example, Jesus was portrayed as a beardless and youthful, in the type of the Greek god Apollo - since then the images have resembled those on the Turin shroud .
Whereabouts of the cloth
The miraculous image remained in Christian Edessa even during the Islamic conquests . It was not until the expansion policy in the resurgent Byzantium that Edessa had to cede the so-called Abgar image to Byzantium in 944. In Constantinople it was exhibited in the Pharos Palace Chapel in the Imperial Palace.
During the siege of the 4th Crusade , the picture was taken to the Blachernen Church in Constantinople, from which it disappeared after the city was conquered and sacked in 1204 . Then the track of the picture is lost. It is possible that there are several copies, namely in the Vatican and - documented since the 14th century - in Genoa.
According to some historians and art historians such as Ian Wilson , Werner Bulst and Heinrich Pfeiffer , the image is identical to the Turin shroud . The earliest written mention of the shroud comes from the year 1357, when it appeared in Lirey near Troyes in France in the hands of Geoffroy de Charny . The Turin Shroud not only shows the face, but also the complete front and back view of a man. It is possible, however, that the cloth was kept folded in Edessa, so that only the face was visible at the time. If the Abgar picture is actually identical to the Turin shroud, the question arises as to what remains in the 150 "missing years". It may have been owned by the Temple Order . This assumption is based primarily on the assumption that the first verifiable owner Geoffroy de Charny was the nephew of the Knight Templar Geoffroy de Charnay , who in turn was burned at the stake on March 18, 1314 together with the last Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay .
The Mandylion very rarely leaves the Vatican. The Expo 2000 in Hanover was an exception . Text next to the picture explained why the Vatican considers it the oldest known representation of Jesus. In 2011 it was featured in an exhibition on relics at the British Museum in London.
See also
literature
- Gerhard Wolf / Colette Dufour Bozzo / Anna Rosa Calderoni Masetti (eds.): Mandylion: intorno al "Sacro Volto", da Bisanzio a Genova . Genoa, Museo Diocesano, April 18 - July 18, 2004. Skira, Milan 2004, ISBN 88-8491-824-3 .
- Andrea Nicolotti: From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin. The Metamorphosis and Manipulation of a Legend. Leiden, Brill, ISBN 978-90-04-26919-4 .
- Daniel Spanke: The Mandylion. Iconography, legends and image theory of the "non-human-made images of Christ". Monographs of the Icon Museum Recklinghausen. Vol. 5. Recklinghausen 2000. ISBN 3-929040-48-4
- Hans Belting : Image and Cult, a History of the Image before the Age of Art . Beck, Munich 1990, 2000. ISBN 3-406-37768-8
- Heinrich W. Pfeiffer : The Roman Veronica . In: Frontier Areas of Science. (Resch, Innsbruck) 49/3 (2000), pp. 225-240. ISSN 1021-8130
- Joseph Sauer: The oldest images of Christ . Wasmuth, Berlin 1920.
- Die Abgarlegende / Das Christbild von Edessa, Fontes Christiani, Brepols Publishers, 2003 ISBN 2-502-52114-9
Web links
- Sermon of Gregor Referendarius about the true portrait of Christ from the year 944 (English; PDF file; 187 kB)
- Icons of the Mandylion (Christ Acheiropoietos)
- The Christ image of King Abgar of Edessa
- The Edessa image of the Savior
- The "image of Edessa" as the forerunner of the Turin shroud
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mandylion is a Greek word derived from Persian for woolly outer garment ( Mandylion , in: Hartmann: Das große Kunstlexikon )
- ^ A b Eusebius of Caesarea : Church history (Historia Ecclesiastica) 1st book, chapter 13th online
- ^ History ( memento of February 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) of the Turin Shroud in the Middle Ages
- ↑ Dineke Rizzoli: Christafbeeldingen along the Frankenweg. Bulletin: Het archief. Stichting Eikonikon, 2002, archived from the original on October 27, 2004 ; Retrieved October 5, 2013 (Dutch, Annals of the City of Genoa, 14th century).