FAITH & REASON 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 be- yond 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 evi- dence 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.