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The Journal of Christendom College Fall 1981 | Vol. VII, No. 3

The Dispersion of the Apostles: Jude and the Shroud Warren H. Carroll

In the study that follows, Warren Carroll completes his series of historical notes on the apostles by charting the activities of St. Jude and arguing his connection with the Holy Shroud. The author’s arguments frequently run counter to recent scholarly thought, and readers should pay particular atten- tion to the running commentary in the footnotes.

ude is a shadowy figure among the Apostles; it is often said that he came to be known as the saint of recourse in apparently hopeless cases and lost causes because of all the Apostles he was the most neglected and the least known. Most historians have regarded his trail in time as faded beyond all possibility of recovery, leaving him scarcely more than a name among the Twelve Christ personally chose to found His Church. some of the most exciting research now being done with reference to the life of Christ and the early Church provides evidence on which a reconstruction of Jude’s apostolate may nevertheless be attempted. This is the research on the Holy Shroud of Turin-the steadily accumulating proofs of its authenticity(1) and the beginning of the unravelling of the tangled skein of its history across the centuries from the death, burial and resurrection of Christ to 1356 when unbroken knowledge of its whereabouts and character commences.(2) It is the theory of Ian Wilson, who has conducted the most thorough investigation to date into the history of the Shroud before 1356, that the image of Christ’s face which may still be seen and photographed on it was in fact the miraculous portrait of Christ long claimed as the most treasured possession of the Syrian city of Edessa (now Urfa in Turkey).(3) According to a very ancient tradition in Edessa, widely known throughout the Middle East and already set down in documentary form by the third century, King Abgar the Black of Edessa, stricken by a dread disease, sent a message to Jesus begging for a cure. This Abgar was in fact Jesus’ contemporary; Edessa was only 350 miles from Jerusalem and its people spoke a language almost identical to the Aramaic of the Palestinian Jews, so it is quite plausible that Abgar would have heard of Jesus and His healing miracles. While Jesus’ reply was later said to have been in writing and it is very unlikely that He actually wrote Abgar, the contact itself and an oral message from Jesus are reasonable enough. Neither the scorn of modern critics nor the later, unhistorical accretions to the story and the documents should cause historians to dismiss it out of hand as most of them have done. The message was clear, and characteristic of Jesus: Abgar is praised for his faith; Jesus cannot come to him, because His mission is to God’s Chosen People in Palestine and after completing it He must return to “him that sent me”; but after that return, He will send one of His disciples to Abgar.(4) It is most unlikely that this promise to Abgar would have been fulfilled until Peter’s baptism of the centurion Cornelius in the year 39 had opened the way for the reception of Gentiles into the Church (see the first Note in this series, F&R VII,1). Ian Wilson suggests that the Apostles decided to send the Shroud as part of its fulfillment. It was of no help whatever to the apostolate among the Jews, the martyrdom of the Apostle Jude in Iran, but also tells for the Law of Moses prohibited any visual representa- of prior missionary work by him in Mesopotamia, which tion of the human face and figure, and held any object adjoins the northeastern part of ancient Syria where which had touched a dead body to be ritually unclean. Edessa is located;(8) and Edessan tradition preserves The Shroud and its image were therefore doubly unac- no clear memory of a burial place there of their own ceptable to any Jew. But not only would the pagan King evangelizer,(9) indicating that eventually he moved on Abgar have no objection to a picture of Jesus; he would and died elsewhere, as the tradition of Jude holds. Finally, welcome it, especially since he had expressed a strong de- later Christian iconography often presents the Apostle sire to see Jesus in person. Why not bring the Shroud to Jude carrying a picture of Christ.(10) him? But it should not be brought and shown as a shroud, for all people and cultures have a natural revulsion toward The Doctrine of Addai and Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical objects which have been in close contact with the dead. History both refer to a “vision” seen by Abgar on the face Therefore, before being brought to of Thaddaeus, with his cure follow- King Abgar, Wilson concludes-with ing shortly afterward. Although this solid supporting evidence-that the “vision” is not directly linked to the cloth was folded, “doubled in four”, picture of Jesus in the Doctrine of and decorated so that it showed only Addai, it is so linked by later accounts, the portrait-like image of the Holy and the link seems reasonable, espe- Face of Jesus.(5) cially in view of the solid body of evidence indicating that it was the Holy the oldest Edessan tradition, Shroud that was brought to Edessa which appears in the ancient Syriac at this time. That evidence primarily document called “The Doctrine relates to its rediscovery after a long [Teaching] of Addai” whose original period of concealment, and its later form probably existed in the third history.(11) century and certainly by the fourth century, reports a picture of Christ according to the Doctrine of Add- brought to Abgar and the arrival of a ai, Christianity flourished in Edessa man named Addai, sent by Jesus, who Christ’s face on the Shroud during the remainder of the reign of cured and baptized Abgar and established Christianity in Abgar the Black and the ensuing reign of his eldest son Edessa. Eusebius, the first Christian historian, calls this Manu V (50-57).(12) But in 57 a second son, Manu VI, man Thaddaeus. Both sources describe him as one of came to the throne and rejected the new faith. By this the seventy-two disciples sent out by Christ toward the time the head of the Christian community in Edessa was end of His public life; but St. Jerome, writing later in Aggai, the maker of the king’s silks and headdresses-very the fourth century, identifies Addai/Thaddaeus as the possibly the man who “doubled in four” and decorated Apostle Jude Thaddaeus.(6) the Shroud to make it into a portrait. Refusing to make a pagan headdress for the apostate Manu VI, Aggai was If the name be only a coincidence, it is certainly martyred by him. The portrait-like Shroud was hidden an extraordinary one. For a mission of this importance away for safekeeping in a hollow place in one of the it would seem more reasonable to have chosen one of city gates-so well hidden that the very knowledge of its the Twelve, particularly if it took place at about the time whereabouts was lost, accounting for the fact that there of their dispersion (42 A.D., according to the argument is no further mention of the miraculous picture of Christ presented in the first Note of this series), as the regnal at Edessa in Christian literature until the sixth century. dates of King Abgar the Black (4 B.C.-7 A.D., 13-50 (13) It appears that the Christian community in Edessa A.D.)(7) combined with the date of Peter’s baptism of was almost totally destroyed by the persecution of Manu Cornelius, indicate that it did. Furthermore, considering VI. Not until about a hundred years later did a revival how precious this most impressive of all tangible relics of the faith take place under Palut, who was consecrated of their beloved Master must have been to the Apostles, Edessa’s first bishop by Serapion, Bishop of Antioch, at it is hard to imagine them giving it into the custody of the very beginning of the third century.(14) anyone not of their own number. A later tradition places

2 Ian Wilson has assembled an impressive body munity at Antioch, as well as its status as a major trade of evidence connecting the picture of Christ said to be center, makes it naturally likely that it would have been “not made by hands”, emerging at Edessa in the sixth evangelized very early; and the considerable evidence of century, with the Shroud-evidence ranging from pollen Edessa’s close contact with the Apostle Thomas, before grains found on the cloth of the Shroud from a plant and during his mission to India (see the preceding Note which grows only on the Anatolian plateau near Edes- in this series, F&R VII,2), requires an existing commu- sa, to the fifteen separate points of similarity with the nity of Christians there with which Thomas could have physiognomy of the Shroud face shown by pictorial and communicated during his lifetime.(16) iconic representations of the face of Christ which begin to appear immediately after the sixth-century discovery, It is definitely time for a thorough scholarly re- to the subsequent emergence of the relic as we know it in examination of the ancient Christian tradition of a com- Constantinople, where the picture from Edessa had been munication of some kind between King Abgar the Black taken in the tenth century after Edessa fell under Mus- of Edessa and Jesus or at least the Apostles, a first-centu- lim control.(15) And while the very existence of a Chris- ry evangelization of Edessa in which St. Jude Thaddaeus tian community in Edessa in the first century has been played a part, and a portrait of Jesus appearing in Edessa roundly denied, the city’s proximity to Palestine and its which was “not made by hands.” even closer proximity to the first Gentile Christian com-

Notes 1 See particularly, for the physical evidence, Pierre Barbet, A Doctor at Calvary (New York, 1953), and for the historical evidence, Ian Wilson, The Shroud of Turin (New York, 1978), which also cantains an update of Barbet on the physical evidence. An important additional datum was still more recently provided by Francis L. Filas, “The Dating of the Shroud of Turin from Coins of Pontius Pilate” (privately published, Youngstown, Az., 1980) together with materials supplied by Filas to the writer in June 1980. Filas, who has been studying questions pertaining to the Holy Shroud of Turin for nearly thirty years, recently discovered, as a faint imprint on the cloth of the Shroud-over the imprint of one of the eyes of the Body outlined on it, believed to be that of Jesus, the image of an identifiable Ro- man coin minted by Pontius Pilate-and minted only during the period 28-31 A.D., according to Frederic W. Madden, History of Jewish Coinage (London, 1864), p. 149. 2 According to the reconstruction of Ian Wilson, op, cit., the Shroud was in the northeast Syrian city of Edessa from the first to the tenth century, in Constantinople from the 10th century to the great Crusader sack of 1204, brought to France at that time or soon afterward by the Templars, hidden when the Templars were suppressed in 1314, and finally brought out by the heirs of the Templars’ Master of Normandy in 1356. 3 Wilson, Shroud of Turin, pp. 91-110. 4 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, I, 13. For a thorough summary of the usual modern view of the story of Abgar and Jesus, see J. B. Segal, Edessa, the Blessed City (Oxford, 1970, pp, b2-74); for the view upheld in the text, see J. P. Paulin Martin, Les Origines de l’Eglise d’Edesse et des Eglises Syriennes (Paris, 1889), pp. 103-108, and Herbert Thurston, “The Letter of Our Saviour to Abgar,” The Month, Vol. LXXVI (Sept. -Dec. 1892), pp. 39-61. The message of Christ is specifically declared to be oral in one of the two primary sources, the Doctrine of Addai. As Thurston points out (art. cit., pp. 60-61), the written documents seen by Eusebius, including the short alleged letter of Christ, are almost certainly a later retelling of the original story rather than documents contemporary with King Abgar the Black and with Christ. The antecedent improbability of a letter from Christ, Who is not known to have made any written communica- tion whatever during His life, is very high; but the oral message would be entirely consistent with His methods. 5 Wilson, Shroud of Turin, pp. 98-113; Barbet, Doctor at Calvary, pp.145-149 The Cloth “Mandylion” bearing the image of Christ, later found at Edessa, is described in the Acts of Thaddaeus as tetradaY.an-”doubled in four”- a word that appears nowhere else in Greek literatre. See Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1957), VIII, 558, and Wilson, op. :it., p. 260. The Mandylion is described as having the 3 aspect of a horizontal -ather than an upright rectangle (landscape rather than portrait shape), ich together with the “doubling in four” suggests the preparation of tne Shroud to serve as a picture (Wilson, op. cit., pp. 98-99). 6 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, I, 13; George Phillips, ed., The Doctrine of Addai the Apostle (London, 1876), p. 5; Jerome, Commentarium in Evangelium Matthae 1, 10, 57, Patriologia Latina XXVI, 61; Aziz S. Atiya, History of Eastern Christianity (Notre Dame, Ind., 1968), pp. 315-316; Henri Leclereq, “La Legende d’Abgar,” Dictionnaire d’Archeologie chretienne et de liturgie I(1), 89; Segal, Edessa, p. 80; Martin, l’Eglise d’Edesse, pp. 29-36. Roy Deferrari, in editing Eusebius, pronounces his statement that the apostle of Edessa was one of the Seventy-Two rather than one of the Twelve to be an error comparable with his statement elsewhere that Cephas was one of the Seventy-Two and a different person from Peter (Fathers of the Church XIX, 76n). 7 Segal, Edessa, p. 15n. 8 Butler’s Lives of the Saints, edited and revised by Herbert Thurston and Donald Attwater (New York, 1956), IV, 213-214. Thurston and Attwater, like many other authorities, regard the Apostle Jude as the author of the canonical Epistle of Jude in the New Testament. However, its author does not identify himself as an Apostle, but only as the “brother of James” and therefore probably the cousin of Jesus. There is good reason to doubt that the Jude who was the cousin of Jesus was the Apostle Jude Thaddaeus; on this point see Emil G. Kraeling, The Disciples (New York, 1966), pp. 203-204, and the editorial comment by Roy J. Deferrari in the edition of Eusebius in The Fathers of the Church series of Catholic University of America, Volume 19 (New York, 1953), p. 166n. The Apostle Jude is identi- fied in Luke 6:16 and Acts 1:13 ambiguously as “Jude of James,” loudan Iakobou. This is now usually translated “son of James,” as in the Revised Standard Version. While the Greek is ambiguous, Aramaic usage and the Old Syriac version of the New Testament both support the translation “son” rather than “brother”. The author of the Epistle of Jude identifies himself explicitly as the brother of James, adelphos de Iakobou (Jude 1), but not as one of the Twelve. Since this epistle was certainly written after James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, had become especially famous among Christians, the Jude of the Epistle is probably his brother, and this has tended to influence the translations of Luke 6:16 and Acts 1:13 and to support the identification of the Apostle Jude with the Jude who was Jesus’ cousin and James’ brother or half-brother. Jerome (De Viris illustribus 4) identifies the Jude of the New Testament Epistle as the brother of James, but not as one of the Twelve. An additional argument against the identification of the author of the canonical Epistle and/or cousin of Jesus with the Apostle is found in John 7:5, “even his brothers did not believe in him.” If the second James was an Apostle, as is widely and for good reason contended, then this statement in John could still be accurate if at the time of Jesus’ Galilean ministry three of His cousins disbelieved while only one believed (keeping in mind that the Twelve had already been chosen before this remark was made). It becomes much harder to explain John’s reference if two of the four cousins-half the total number-were among His Apostles. 9 Henri Leclercq states: “St. Addai or Thaddaeus nowhere had a distinct and conspicuous tomb. Reports are divergent enough on the circumstances of his death, wholly uncertain on his sepulcher. The tomb of his successor Aggai was known; it was in plain sight, inside the principle church. As for Addai, one report buries him in the cem- etery of the kings of Edessa, another in Armenia, a third transports him to Rome.” (Dictionnaire d’Archeologie chretienne et de liturgie, “Edesse,” IV [2], 2076). However, Leclercq goes on to hypothesize that the famous tomb of the Apostle Thomas in Edessa is actuallly Addai’s, which seems most unlikely in view of the very strong, ancient, and general tradition of a translation of Thomas’ body from India to Edessa at a comparatively early date (Martin, l’Eglise d’Edesse, pp. 42-50). 10 The inclusion of the reference to Christ’s face imprinted on a cloth “doubled in four” and brought to Edessa, in the Acts of Thaddaeus (see Note 5, above), may account for this. There is little mention in standard works of reference on Christian iconography of the representation of the Apostle Jude with a picture of Christ; but the writer has seen him so represented on holy cards and in statuary, notably at St. Peter’s Church in Munich. 11 Wilson, Shroud of Turin, pp. 108-109. 12 Segal, Edessa, pp. 64-69, presents a comprehensive and learned arguments against the historicity of the conversion of Edessa in the reign of Abgar V Ukkama (the Black). Segal’s principal agruments are: (1) “the conversion to Christianity of an important monarch at this early period would not have been ignored by Christian writers for close on 300 years”; (2) “Edessa was, from, at any rate, the third century, under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Antioch, but her Christian community is unlikely to have accepted this subordinate role had her ruler and the majority of her citi- zens adopted Christianity shortly after the crucifixion”; (3) the story as we have it shows a marked parallelism with that

4 of the conversion to Judaism in 36 A.D. of King Ezad of Adiabene in Mesopotamia beyond the Tigris, and also to some of the accounts we have of Manichaean missionary activity in this area in the late third or early fourth century, which also mention an Addai and a Thomas. In reply, (1) as Segal himself admits, “at the beginning of the Christian era Edessa lay in the Parthian, not the Roman, sphere of interest, and its people spoke Syriac not Greek” (op. cit., p. 65). Almost all the records of early Christianity (before 300) that have come down to us derive from the Graeco- Roman, not the Parthian world; and their total volume is small. Therefore, we are unlikely to find among them historical reports on a city in an alien realm, its people speaking an alien tongue, who had the faith only briefly and then lost it for a long time. When the first Christian history properly speaking is written by Eusebius, the early conversion of Edessa is featured. (2) The fact that Antioch always kept a strong Christian community from its initial evangelization, while Edessa’s first Christian Community was virtually snuffed out, would alone suffice to account for Antioch’s pri- macy over Edessa in the Church. And while (if the theory here advanced be correct) Edessa was evangelized by the Apostle Jude Thaddaeus, the church in Antioch could and did claim Peter himself as its founder, from his residence there in 40 and 42 and his appointment of Bishop Evodius as his successor (see the first Note in this series). The mission to Edessa was unlikely to have been undertaken until after Peter’s baptism of Cornelius, which was immediately followed by the establishment of the Christian community in Antioch. (3) Parallels can be found between any two historical events with sufficient effort. In this case they may have been compounded by the natural practice of Syriac Christians in naming their children, generation after generation, for Thaddaeus (Addai) and Thomas, of whose missionary career they were well informed (see Note 16 below). There have been many Thomases in the Chruch for two thousand years, but this does not entitle historians to assume any two of them to be identical without solid evidence. Jean Danielou and Henri Marrou, The Christian Centuries, Vol. I: The First Six Hundred Years (New York, 1966), p. 46, present evidence that Edessa was in fact evangelized from Palestine in the first century, though Danielou accepts the view that the first Christian king of Edessa was not Abgar V Ukkama but Abgar IX “the Great” (177-21). 13 Wilson, Shroud of Turin, pp. 110-119, 235-251; Segal, Edessa, pp. 76-78, 214-216; Ernst von Dobschutz, Chris- tusbilder (Leipzig, 1899), pp. 102-117. Wilson translates in full the Byzantine “Story of the Image of Edessa” prepared for the court of Constantinople. Under other circumstances so late an account, even though presented as-and giving internal indicaitons of actually being-based on careful historical research, would be of comparatively little value. But in this case the Shroud itself provides remarkable confirmation of the accuracy of the Byzantine account, as Wilson demonstrates in detail. It seems to have occurred to no modern researcher before Wilson that the lack of any mention of the picture of Christ in Edessa by writers of the fourth, fifth, and early sixth centuries, so often advanced as conclusive evidence for rejecting altogether its connection with the first-century Abgar, is clearly and satisfactorily explained by the report of the concealment of the picture for 500 years following the first-century persecution, which the Byzantine account provides (Wilson, op. cit., pp. 243-244). There is nothing surprising about either its concealment or its preservation under such circumstances, for a span of time not so long as the Holy Shroud of Turin is known to have been preserved since its emergence in France n the fourteenth century. 14 This is the most likely explanation for the most celebrated ‘`anachronism” in the Doctrine of Addai, used by modern authorities as the principal argument for rejecting it as a source of reliable historical evidence: its reference to the ordination of Palut a bishop of Edessa by Bishop Serapion of Antioch (198-212), with the implication that Bishop Palut was the immediate successor of the martyred Aggai (Phillips, ed., Doctrine of Addai, p. 50; Segal, Edessa, p. 81; Leclercq, “Edessa,” Dictionnaire d’Archeologie chretienne et de liturgie, IV [2], 2073-2074). Martin, l’Eglise d E’desse, pp. 51-56, 82-103, vigorously attacks the reliability of the Palut reference as a later interpolation, a position which to some extent begs the question of when the document as a whole was written. The evidence that Palut was regarded as a sort of second founder of the church in Edessa (Leclercq, loc. cit., cols. 2082-2083) strongly suggests that it was he who reconstructed it after its long eclipse following the persecution of Mann VI. The one major difficulty with this hypothesis arises from the three references in the Doctrine of Addai to a Palut who was indubitably a companion of Aggai. But this could simply have been a different Palut. It is not intended here to claim full historical accuracy for the Doctrine of Addai-only the essential historical truth of its main points. Its author was not a good historical scholar, but clearly he was dealing with a living tradition. It was altogether too widely known and believed at too early a date to have been entirely an invention. Martin rightly hammers on this theme: “If one wished to draw up a complete bibli- ography of books where allusion is made is Abgar, to Addai and to the evangelization of Edessa in apostiolic times, it would make a small volume. I do not believe that there was a Syriac author of any length who does not speak, at one

5 time or another, of these events or these persons.’’ (1’Eglise d’Edesse, p. 49n). 15 Wilson, Shroud of Turin, pp. 61-64, 82-85, 133-147. Several of the numerous Christian writers, beginning in the sixth century, who mention the picture “not made by hands” (acheiropoietos-a most apt designation of the Shroud image) are explicit that the image was on cloth (Leclercq, “La Legende d’Abgar,” Dictionnaire d’Archeologie chretienne et de liturgie, I[1], 94-95). 16 Martin, l’Eglise d’Edesse, pp. 13-17; J. N. Farquhar, “The Apostle Thomas in North India,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library X (1926), 82-83, 106. Farquhar presents a good case for his hypothesis that the Apostle Thomas sent a letter to the church in Edessa describing his work in India.