The Holy Mandylion (Napkin) of Christ (Not-made-by-hands)
“The Transfer from Edessa to Constantinople of the Icon of our Lord Jesus Christ Not-Made-by-Hands occurred in the year 944. Eusebius, in his HISTORY OF THE CHURCH (I:13), relates that when the Savior was preaching, Abgar ruled in Edessa. He was stricken all over his body with leprosy. Reports of the great miracles worked by the Lord spread throughout Syria (Mt.4:24) and reached even Abgar. Without having seen the Savior, Abgar believed in Him as the Son of God. He wrote a letter requesting Him to come and heal him. He sent with this letter to Palestine his own portrait-painter Ananias, and commissioned him to paint a likeness of the Divine Teacher.
Eusebius does not mention the Mandylion directly, but he does include the letters exchanged between Christ and Abgar, which have come down from us through tradition (the following is the translation from the Menaia (translation by Fr. Ephraim Lash):
Agbar, Ruler of the city of Edessa, to Jesus Saviour, the good physician, who has appeared in Jerusalem, greeting!
I have heard about you and about your cures, which are done by you without drugs; for example you make the blind see again; you make the lame walk; you cleanse lepers; you drive out unclean spirits; you heal those who have been tormented by disease over long periods. Having heard all this of you I had one of two ideas: either that you are Son of God, who do these things, or that you are God. So then I write to you and ask you to and to come to me to cure the suffering I have, and then to be with me; for I have also heard that the Jews murmur against you and wish to do you ill. My city is very small but distinguished and adequate for both of us to live here in peace.
Ananias arrived in Jerusalem and saw the Lord surrounded by people. He was not able to get close to Him because of the large throng of people listening to the preaching of the Savior. Then he stood on a high rock and attempted to paint the portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ from afar, but this effort was not successful. The Savior saw him, called to him by name and gave him a short letter for Abgar in which He praised the faith of this ruler. He also promised to send His disciple to heal him of his leprosy and guide him to salvation.
Letter of Christ to Abgar
Blessed are you, Agbar, who have believed in me, though you have not seen me. For it is written of me that those who have seen me do not believe in me so that those who have not seen me may believe and live. As to what you wrote about my coming to you, it is necessary that I accomplish all that I was sent out to do and, after I have accomplished it, to be taken up to the Father who sent me. And when I have been taken up I will send you one of my Disciples, named Thaddaios, he will heal your disease and grant you and those with you eternal life and peace, and he will make your city such that no enemy can prevail against it.
Then the Lord asked that water and a cloth be brought to Him. He washed His Face, drying it with the cloth, and His Divine Countenance was imprinted upon it. Ananias took the cloth and the letter of the Savior to Edessa. Reverently, Abgar pressed the holy object to his face and he received partial healing. Only a small trace of the terrible affliction remained until the arrival of the disciple promised by the Lord. He was St Thaddeus, Apostle of the Seventy (August 21), who preached the Gospel and baptized Abgar and all the people of Edessa.
Abgar put the Holy Napkin in a gold frame adorned with pearls, and placed it in a niche over the city gates. On the gateway above the icon he inscribed the words, “O Christ God, let no one who hopes on Thee be put to shame.”
For many years the inhabitants kept a pious custom to bow down before the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands, when they went forth from the gates. But one of the great-grandsons of Abgar, who later ruled Edessa, fell into idolatry. He decided to take down the icon from the city wall. In a vision the Lord ordered the Bishop of Edessa to hide His icon. The bishop, coming by night with his clergy, lit a lampada before it and walled it up with a board and with bricks.
Many years passed, and the people forgot about it. But in the year 545, when the Persian emperor Chozroes I besieged Edessa and the position of the city seemed hopeless, the Most Holy Theotokos appeared to Bishop Eulabius and ordered him to remove the icon from the sealed niche, and it would save the city from the enemy. Having opened the niche, the bishop found the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands: in front of it was burning the lampada, and upon the board closing in the niche, a copy of the icon was reproduced.
[The Persians had built a huge fire outside the city wall; when the Bishop approached with the Holy Napkin, a violent wind fell upon the fire, turning it back upon the Persians, who fled in defeat. (http://goarch.org/chapel/saints_view?contentid=167)]
In the year 630 Arabs seized Edessa, but they did not hinder the veneration of the Holy Napkin, the fame of which had spread throughout all the East. In the year 944, the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitos (912-959) wanted to transfer the icon to the Constantinople, and he paid a ransom for it to the emir of the city. With great reverence the Icon of the Savior Not-Made-by-Hands and the letter which He had written to Abgar, were brought to Constantinople by clergy.
On August 16, the icon of the Savior was placed in the [Pharos] church of the Most Holy Theotokos. There are several traditions concerning what happened later to the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands. According to one, crusaders ran off with it duringtheir rule at Constantinople (1204-1261), but the ship on which the sacred object was taken, perished in the waters of the Sea of Marmora.
According to another tradition, the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands was transported around 1362 to Genoa, where it is preserved in a monastery in honor of the Apostle Bartholomew. It is known that the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands repeatedly gave from itself exact imprints. One of these, named “On Ceramic,” was imprinted when Ananias hid the icon in a wall on his way to Edessa; another, imprinted on a cloak, wound up in Georgia. Possibly, the variance of traditions about the original Icon Not-Made-by-Hands derives from the existence of several exact imprints. [See below for a hypothesis involving the Shroud of Turin***]
During the time of the Iconoclast heresy, those who defended the veneration of icons, having their blood spilt for holy icons, sang the Troparion to the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands. In proof of the validity of Icon-Veneration, Pope Gregory II (715-731) sent a letter to the Byzantine emperor, in which he pointed out the healing of King Abgar and the sojourn of the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands at Edessa as a commonly known fact. The Icon Not-Made-by-Hands was put on the standards of the Russian army, defending them from the enemy. In the Russian Orthodox Church it is a pious custom for a believer, before entering the temple, to read the Troparion of the Not-Made-by-Hand icon of the Savior, together with other prayers…
The Feast of the Transfer of the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands, made together with the After feast of the Dormition, they call the third-above Savior Icon, the “Savior on Linen Cloth.” The particular reverence of this Feast in the Russian Orthodox Church is also expressed in iconography, and the Icon Not-Made-by-Hands was one of the most widely distributed.”
The Holy Mandylion and the Shroud of Turin***
Orthodox tradition has long seen the Mandylion (the cloth that Christ imprinted His image on in life) as distict from the burial cloths of Christ. A few modern researchers (heterodox and some Orthodox) however have proposed that the Mandylion of Orthodox tradition is in fact the burial shroud of Christ (i.e. the Shroud of Turin) upon which His image was imprinted.
(Of course it is very important to remain cautious about such theories. Also, this isn’t the juncture to fully discuss the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. Right now [the] impression [is] that the evidence is mixed, while some Orthodox do see it as authentic.)
The following is an excerpt from an article by an Orthodox source on the Shroud of Turin:
“A 6th century text refers to the Mandylion as a “tetradiplon’–“doubled in four.” A most curious choice of word, according to Cambridge University’s Professor Lampe, editor of the ‘Lexicon of Patristic Greek’; in all literature it occurs only in association with the image of Edessa, being scarcely, therefore, an idle turn of phrase.” [50] As Wilson convincingly suggests, if the Shroud of Turin were folded in this manner, i.e., doubled four times, the viewer would see nothing but the head. And if this folded cloth were attached to a board (as the Mandylion is said to have been), those who venerated the holy image could well have been ignorant of the fact that they were looking at but a portion of what was actually a full-length image, particularly if this image had been sealed up for so many years.
This theory is strengthened by the distinct crease marks photographically discerned on the Shroud in the very locations suggested by the “doubled in four.” And although the evidence of pollen is by no means conclusive (it can be blown hundreds of miles), Dr. Frei identified on the Shroud pollen not only from the Constantinople and Jerusalem areas, but also from the Anatolian steppes where Edessa is located…
But none of this, as fascinating as it is, has been conclusively proven. We can only say that the historical evidence thus far uncovered, and the scientific evidence of the Shroud of Turin itself, does indeed suggest this explanation, But the point is that if the Shroud is also the Mandylion, not only does it have an Orthodox history, but it also explains why it seems to have no separate feast or service.” (http://www.roca.org/OA/65/65m.htm)
We can benefit spiritually from both the Shroud and the Mandylion, regardless of whether not they are one and the same. They are both tangible signs that Christ our God, the eternal Word of the Father, really took on flesh for our salvation. By approaching them (or any icons of Christ for that matter) and showing them veneration, we show Christ love and worship, and we can receive grace and healing from Him as did the woman with an issue of blood, who was healed by grasping the fringe of Christ’s garment. (Luke 8:43-48) Gazing on Christ’s sacred image, we can remember His words from the Gospel of Luke (used on the feast of the Holy Mandylion):
“Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.” (Luke 10:23-24)
~Full of Grace and Truth, The Holy Mandylion (Napkin) of Christ (Not-made-by-hands), http://full-of-grace-and-truth.blogspot.com/2010/08/holy-mandylion-napkin-of-christ-not.html
