In a podcast on 22 June 2024, Jack Markwardt set out the evidence for his “Antioch” hypothesis, as regards primary sources dated from 30 – 500 AD.1 I had the honour of being a participant, and occasional commenter, but I have to confess that some of the primary sources were unfamiliar to me, and on more than one occasion Markwardt completely befuddled me with what seemed at the time inexorable logic. Nevertheless, I’m sorry to say that after further research I can’t find any evidence among the sources he mentioned to convince me, or even to suggest, that the Shroud of Turin was taken to Antioch by St Peter. At one point in the podcast I quoted my own epithet, “however many clouds you pile on top of one another, you still can’t sit on them,” to which Markwardt responded that his “clouds” were each more substantial than I gave them credit for, and that cumulatively they amounted to compelling evidence. He also challenged me to account for the picture he draws from them, if they do not as a whole, refer to the Shroud.
The first half of the four-hour podcast, however, is dedicated to discrediting the “Edessa” hypothesis, and here I think Markwardt’s methodology and mine are similar. Although we both have completely different hypotheses, among the things they have in common is that that they differ not only from each other, but also from mainstream thinking among our scholarly peers. So it is not enough simply to provide evidence why our own hypotheses are valid, we also have to demonstrate why long-held alternative hypotheses are weaker. In my own first Academia paper, I was at odds to demonstrate why the Shroud was not just ‘faked up and flogged,’ in order to clear the ground for an alternative hypothesis, and in this podcast, Markwardt explains why the “Edessa” hypothesis is unsatisfactory before embarking on his alternative. I have myself observed that visitors to Constantinople in the 10th to 12th centuries frequently mentioned both the burial cloths of Jesus and the Image of Edessa as different objects in different places, and also the fact that no version of the Image, either the traditional Mandylion found in Eastern churches or the various Veronicas in their three-tailed frames, looks anything like the Shroud. This will not, however, concern us further here.
Along the way, Markwardt reiterates several of the frustrations that dog any serious scholar of the Shroud, including the historical ignorance of many – maybe most – so-called experts, and the uncaring acceptance of two directly conflicting hypotheses. If the Shroud went to Edessa shortly after the Resurrection, it cannot also have been lugged around Asia Minor by St Peter or St Paul, for example.
When we get to Markwardt’s ‘Antioch’ evidence, however, we find ourselves under immediate stricture. He is a keen believer in the Disciplina Arcana, or Discipline of the Secret, which would explain why if there were any reference to the Shroud in early literature, we must expect it to be in a disguised form, so that only the initiati would recognise it. Although it is widely assumed that paradoxically, the Discipline of the Secret did not take hold until the middle of the 3rd century, achieved its zenith after the Roman persecution of Christianity had finished, and disappeared by the 6th century, I’m happy to go along with the idea that in order for precious things not to fall into enemy hands, they may have been referred to obliquely from the beginning.
However, this cuts both ways. Just because a reference to a fish could possibly refer to Jesus’s shroud, that doesn’t mean it did. The fish was a commonly recognised symbol of Christianity from very early on, and in most contexts couldn’t possibly be code for a shroud, and to claim that this or that reference might be, without substantial supporting evidence, is little more than a guess.
Markwardt’s hypothesis that the Shroud spent some time in Antioch is explained in detail in his book, The Hidden History of the Shroud of Turin, of which only Part 1, ‘The Turin Shroud’s Era of Iconoclasm and Persecution,’ was covered in the podcast, and is covered here. The question is, are there any pre-500 AD documents that suggest the Shroud of Turin spent some time in Antioch, sojourned briefly in Edessa, and ended up in Constantinople (although, since the last part took place after 500 AD the answer to that will not be discussed here)?
The shroud’s move to Antioch depends on it having ended up in St Peter’s hands, and then St Peter taking it to Antioch when he left Jerusalem to become bishop there.
While St Peter’s remove to Antioch is well understood, there is no evidence that he ever had the shroud until a mention by St Nino (a 4th century woman missionary to Georgia), that “they found the linen early in Christ’s tomb, whither Pilate and his wife came. When they found it, Pilate’s wife asked for the linen, and went away quickly to her house in Pontus, and she became a believer in Christ. Some time afterwards, the linen came into the hands of Luke the Evangelist, who put it in a place known only to himself. Now they did not find the shroud (sudarium), but it is said to have been found by Peter, who took it and kept it, but we know not if it has ever been discovered.”2
It actually seems to me that the tradition described here distinguishes the cloth kept by St Peter here (the sudarium) from that kept by St Luke (the linen). This is supported by the words of Ishodad of Merv, five hundred years later still, who wrote, “But they gave the garments and linen clothes to Joseph the Senator, for it was right that they should be returned to him, and be kept for him as the lord of the grave, and as he who brought them for His honour. But the shroud Simeon took, and it remained with him, that it might be a crown upon his head. And whenever he made an ordination, he arranged it on his head; and many, and frequent helps flowed from it.”3 Again, the “linen cloths” are different from the “shroud,” but I don’t know enough Syriac to be sure how!
Upon such flimsy evidence hangs the whole hypothesis, but Markwardt now gives us a list of ten more, that might more firmly establish the Shroud’s Antioch adventure.
1). 52 AD. Galatians 3:1
2). 68 AD. The Sermon of Athanasius
3). 185 AD. The Liber Pontificalis
4). 188 AD. The Doctrine of Addai.
5). 188 AD. The Inscription of Abercius.
6). 188 AD. The Hymn of the Pearl.
7). 360 AD. The Catecheses.
8). 360 AD. Bearded Jesus Art.
9). 362 AD. Histories of Sozomen and Theodoret.
10). 538 AD. The Pratum Spirituale.
1). 52 AD. Galatians 3:1
I have already explained4 that nowhere in literature does the term ‘proegraphe,’ here translated ‘portrayed,’ suggest anything pictorial, but suppose it did, and suppose the shroud existed, could this be a reference to it? On the surface, Galatians seems to refer to somebody visiting Galatia, “portraying” Christ crucified, and converting them to a ‘non-Jewish’ form of Christianity, then somebody else visiting then and changing them to a ‘Jewish’ form, and then Paul writing his letter in an attempt to reconvert them, calling them foolish for having rescinded, and even that “if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all.” The question is, who was the first visitor? If it was Paul, as is generally supposed, during his first missionary journey in about 46 AD, where he got as far as Antioch in Pisida, then it is most unlikely that he would have been entrusted with the shroud, which was far too precious to Jerusalem. If it was Peter, then it was a couple of years earlier, on his way to Rome, but there is no evidence that he took the shroud with him, or, much, that he evangelised on the way. He seems to have spent much time circling between Jerusalem, Antioch and Rome, but both his movements and his chronology are open questions. To be sure, the ‘Doctrine of the Apostles,’ which Markwardt quotes, says that “Antioch, and Syria, and Cilicia, and Galatia, even to Pontus, received the Apostles’ Hand of Priesthood from Simon Cephas, who himself laid the foundation of the church there, and was Priest, and ministered there up to the time when he went up from thence to Rome,” but the very next paragraph says: “The city of Rome, and all Italy, and Spain, and Britain, together with the other remaining countries which bordered on them received the Apostles’ Hand of Friendship from Simon Cephas, who went up from Antioch and became ruler and died there in the church which he built there and in its environs.” Thus Cilicia and Galatia are given exactly the same mention as Spain and Britain, and it is not thought that Peter visited any of the latter. On the other hand the next document in the volume, the ‘Doctrine of Simon Cephas, in the City of Rome,’ begins: “In the third year of Claudius Caesar [44 AD], Simon Cephas departed from Antioch to go to Rome. And as he passed on he preached in the countries the word of our Lord.”5 This does suggest an evangelic tour of the intermediate stages.
To my mind, however, none of this constitutes sufficient evidence that any kind of pictorial representation of Christ is suggested by Galatians 3:1.
2). 68 AD. The Sermon of Athanasius.
The Sermon of Athanasius, as Markwardt acknowledges, is even less strong. Although Markwardt gives it a date of 68 AD, he is referring here to an event it describes, not to the sermon. Athanasius flourished at the beginning of the fourth century, and many of his sermons have been preserved, but none of them refer to the miracle of Beirut, which is the subject of this particular sermon. We only know of it because it was quoted by Bishop Peter of Nicomedia at the Second Council of Nicea in 737 AD. By this time there were sufficient numbers of images of Christ to make it a topic of intense debate as to whether they should be encouraged or not. The Council of Trullo in 692 AD had determined that Jesus should always be depicted as a human rather than symbolically, but over-enthusiasm for the venerating of such images and the danger of breaking the second commandment, perhaps coupled to an apparent act of retribution by God by a devastating earthquake in 726 AD, led Pope Leo II to institute a period of iconoclasm, inaugurated by the removal of the image of Christ on the roof or above the door of the Chalke Gate in Constantinople.
A few years later, when the church fathers met to debate the question, there were many attempts to justify images of Christ by describing various miracles associated with them, and Peter of Nicomedia, using this “sermon of Athanasius” describes the miracle of Beirut. An image of Jesus was desecrated by Jews, including stabbing it with a lance, upon which blood and water flowed out, which caused them all to be converted. The Sermon is a bit confused about the origin of this icon. The story begins by saying that a one of a number of Christians had it fixed up on his bedroom wall, and forgot to take it with him when he moved house, hence its later discovery by the Jews. But having described the miracle we learn that it had originally been painted by Nicodemus, passed down from one Christian to another, and eventually brought to Syria two years before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD.
But there it stayed, until about 974, when, according to Leo the Deacon, but not mentioned by Markwardt, it was found and taken to Constantinople by the Emperor John Tzimiskes.6 This icon, then, if it existed at all, is not the same as any that might have turned up in Antioch with St Peter in 38 AD or so.
3). 185 AD. The Liber Pontificalis
I don’t doubt that King Abgar the Great of Edessa became a Christian around 185 AD. A single sentence in the Liber Pontificalis (532 AD), regarding the Papacy of Eleutherius (174-189 AD), says: “Hic accepit epistula a Lucio Brittanio rege, ut Christianus efficerentur per ejus mandatum,” and the superficial translation, Lucius, King of Britain, has been very sensibly reconsidered to Lucius Aelius Aurelius Septimus (Abgar), king of the Britio citadel in Edessa. This source contains no reference to any cloth or image, and is only here to support the next one.
4). 188 AD. The Doctrine of Addai.
Markwardt’s hypothesis is that having been converted to Christianity, King Abgar the Great caused an account of his conversion to be placed in the Royal archives. However, as the mildly disposed Emperor Commodus was followed by the persecutory Emperor Septimius Severus, it was written as a kind of allegory, in which Abgar the Great is represented by his predecessor Abgar V, who instead of appealing to Pope Eleutherius appeals directly to Jesus, and his emissary is called Hannan, who returns from his mission with a painting of Jesus.
There is much to unpack here. Firstly, I agree with Markwardt and similar scholars who see no literal truth in the story, but think it is a back-formation from the conversion of Abgar the Great. Some scholars think it may also relate to the conversion of the Royal House of Adiabene, as described by Josephus.7 However whether it is an attempt to establish a precedent, or a coded account of something that actually happened, is less obvious, and the story of the painting of Jesus less obvious still.
It may be true that the Doctrine was written after the ascension to the throne of Septimius Severus in 193 AD, but the original is lost and we only know it from translations by Eusebius (4th century) and a Syrian version from later still, both of which may have excisions and interpolations, of which the portrait in choice pigments may be part; Eusebius omits the painting altogether, either because he didn’t believe it, or because it wasn’t there when he made his translation, and Egeria, the famous pilgrim to Edessa in about 384 AD, does not mention it even though she describes artefacts connected with the story in some detail.8
Taking the story as Markwardt suggests, does it tell us anything about the Shroud of Turin? We know that in 384 AD there did not seem to be any sign of any interesting image in Edessa (according to the pilgrim Egeria), but by 544 AD there may have been one, the first we hear of the ‘Image of Edessa,’ which gradually achieves historic actuality over the next few centuries, swallowing up the Doctrine of Addai to give it a longer provenance. Markwardt took me to task for not having any evidence at all of an image in Edessa between 188 and 544 (in which he is perfectly correct) and suggested that this supports his hypothesis that it was the Shroud of Turin, kept in Antioch, but sent briefly to Edessa to witness the conversion. This seems very ad hoc to me, especially as there is no evidence of the Shroud, or any image, in Antioch either. For all we know the painting in the Doctrine of Addai could be entirely metaphorical, and treat of the greater understanding of Christ achieved when one becomes a Christian, but if it was an actual image – and much more likely 4th century than 2nd century, it could have been one of many, or painted specifically for the purpose, and then either lost or taken away again. Having abandoned any connection of the story with the historical Christ, there is no reason to suppose the painting dated from his time, any more than any other, but by the 4th century images of Christ were beginning to appear quite frequently.
5). 188 AD. The Inscription of Abercius.
This is a classic example of the Discipline of the Secret, packed with symbolism that would only have meaning to Christians. Writing his own epitaph (so poetically that although we don’t have his tombstone, we have fragments of plaques that quote it) he says he is “the disciple of a holy shepherd who feeds flocks of sheep.” He has been to Rome, where he saw “a queen golden-robed and golden-sandalled” and ” a people bearing a shining mark.” Moreover, he has visited Syria, and “all its cities,” and may well have passed through Edessa on his way to Nisibis (now Nusaybin on the southern border of Turkey). “Faith everywhere led me forward, and everywhere provided as my food a fish of exceeding great size, and perfect, which a holy virgin drew with her hands from a fountain,” in the form of “wine of great virtue … mingled with bread.”
And this, I fear, is where interpretation must be almost entirely subjective. To Markwardt, the giant fish is obviously the Shroud of Turin, to me, it is the body of Christ, in his resurrected, eucharistic form, and cannot possibly refer to any kind of picture. After all, the fish was a well recognised Christian symbol and, furthermore, although the inscription was originally personal to Abercius, it is only known in concrete form in a completely different context, when specific reference to the Shroud would have been meaningless.9
6). 188 AD. The Hymn of the Pearl.
Something similar has to be said of the Hymn of the Pearl, an elusively symbolic poem in which a prince leaves his parents on a mission to rescue a pearl from a serpent, gets distracted, then reminded, achieves his goal and returns. The prince could be Jesus or one of his apostles, or even just a metaphor for some kind of evangelistic mission, sent from heaven to rescue the world from Satan. One of the many themes that runs throughout the poem is that of clothing. We first find the Prince in a glittering robe and purple mantle, which is taken off him as he sets off on his mission, with the promise that he shall get it back when he returns.
In the land of the serpent he dresses in local fashion so as to be inconspicuous, but when he loses focus and go astray, his parents send him a reminder (countersigned by the whole court!): “Think of your robe! Think of your splendid mantle!” The prince is jerked into action, retrieves the pearl, and sets off home, discarding “the filthy and unclean dress” of the country, and eventually, after a long journey, is reunited with his glittering robe and purple mantle. At first he doesn’t recognise them, but the robe fits him so well it seems like a mirror of himself, and all his regality comes back to him.
Obviously the heavenly robe and mantle cannot refer to the Shroud.
7). 360 AD. The Catecheses.
‘The Shape of the Liturgy’ is a seminal study of the history of Christian worship in all its many manfestations, by the Anglican theologian Dom Gregory Dix, of Nashdom Abbey, and originally published in 1945. Chapter Ten deals with the Theology of the Consecration, and very dense it is, combining in a single prayer, both the ‘simple’ conversion of bread and wine into (consumable) flesh and blood, but also the drawing down of a particular ‘presence’ of the living Christ, in a more immediate fashion than that implied by the general ubiquity of God – a kind of simultaneous combination of the ideas of incarnation and resurrection. In the East particularly, it seems to me, this manifestation of the Resurrection implies that what has happened in the liturgy immediately before the consecration has been in some senses Christ’s passion and death. This was worked out and delineated by Theodore of Mopsuestia, in a theological work called his ‘Catecheses,’ from which Gregory Dix quotes. For the Orthodox, if I read it correctly, the ‘Offertory,’ which in the West represents the people of the church bringing up some of their own efforts for sacrifice, instead (or also?) represents the presentation of the dead Christ to the tomb, and consequently the cloth on the table can be seen as his shroud. Dix says that this interpretation of the mass is “from the region of Antioch,” but this only means that Mopsuestia was within the ecclesiastical province of Antioch, and not because either city, or any alleged shroud in it, had anything to do with the development of the theology.
8). 360 AD. Bearded Jesus Art.
At about this time, “suddenly,” according to Markwardt, the Shroud became sufficiently well known for artists to start portraying Jesus with a beard, which had never been known before. But this needs unpacking. No historian of the Shroud Googling “early depictions of Jesus” is likely to be surprised by any of the results. There are no more than a dozen pre-4th century images of Jesus known, and the fact that they all show him without a beard can be explained, as usual, by context. They show Jesus in his ministry, healing the paralytic, preaching to the disciples, being touched on the hem by a woman, or waving a wand over wine jars at Cana. In the 4th century a new (pictorial) theme emerged, Jesus as God or as King. Now he acquires his beard, and simultaneously his unique halo, with the cruciform rays. In other contexts he is usually without a beard, but so dominant did the ‘pantocrator’ theme become as a motif, at least in the East, that few people notice any others. Volume Three of Gertrud Schiller’s monumental work on Christian iconography helps to redress the balance.10 The earliest depictions of this pantocrator Jesus are found in the 4th century catacombs of Rome, not in Byzantium, where it doesn’t seem to have caught on until a hundred or so years later. Meanwhile, scenes showing episodes in the life of Jesus continued to show him unbearded, and often still do, depending on the whim of the artist.
So similar are the Byzantine version pantocrator faces, that a gradual assimilation of pagan into Christian iconography seems less likely as a source than one or two distinct prototypes, which art historians have been at some pains to discover. It is most unlikely to have been the Shroud, which they don’t closely resemble, and more probably was a Christian adaptation of a classical theme, very publicly expressed, such as in the dome or above the door of a popular palace or church: the Chalke Gate or the Hagia Sofia are sometimes mentioned.11
9). 362 AD. Histories of Sozomen and Theodoret.
I must confess to being in some confusion here. [We had been going for four hours, and the announcement of Barrie Schwortz’s death in the middle of the podcast had shocked both of us profoundly] Sozomen and Theodoret were two roughly contemporary church historians born in about 400 AD and writing their histories some forty years later, Sozomen in Constantinople12 and Theodoret in Antioch.13 Both describe the destruction of the Temple of Apollo there by fire in 362 AD, and the destructive revenge demanded by the very anti-christian emperor Julian, but neither mentions Theodorus the Treasurer (usually called St Theodoret the Martyr) in that context. This Theodoret is only mentioned by Sozomen, but at a much earlier time (Chapter 8 rather than Chapter 20). He was tortured and killed by the Emperor Julian’s uncle (or possibly nephew; accounts are inconsistent), another Julian, but there is no suggestion that any of the church’s treasures remained hidden. The standard life of the Emperor Julian is by Ammianus Marcellinus,14 who died in about 400 AD. He also mentions the destruction of the Temple of Apollo, but nothing of St Theodoret. Really there is nothing in any of this to suggest that the Shroud was in Antioch at all, and nothing to suggest that it, or anything else, was shut up in a wall.
10). 538 AD. The Pratum Spirituale.
The Pratum Spirituale is an eclectic collection of unconnected anecdotes collected by John Moschus, who lived at the very end of the sixth century, in Israel and Rome, where he seems to have written his only well-known work before dying. There are about 250 little tales, of holy men and women, miracles, visions and other remarkable events, and tale 230 tells the story of an almsgiver who gets fed up with a poor man who keeps rejoining the back of the queue and ends up with four pieces of free clothing before the almsgiver sends him away with a flea in his ear. That night Jesus appears to him in a dream, wearing all four garments, and tells him it’s not up to him to judge other people’s needs.15 The significance of this story to Markwardt is that the vision occurred in Antioch, and the Jesus appeared by stepping down out of an icon at the “Place of the Cherubim.”
That concludes the evidence presented for the first 500 years, and I’m afraid that to me none of it is even suggestive of the Shroud of Turin having been in Antioch.
A further podcast has ensued, discussing the historical record of the next 500 years, after which authenticist focus is firmly on Constantinople, where the various icons of Byzantium mostly ended up, although acheiropoeitoi also appear in Lucca, Rome, Latomos, Georgia and no doubt elsewhere, sometimes with a backstory of having come from Jerusalem in the first place. Whether there is any compelling, or even mildly attractive, evidence that any of them might have been the Shroud we shall have to see.
1 ‘Shroud Wars Panel Review (Part 13)- Shroud History from 30-500 A.D.,’ Real Seekers, youtube.com/watch?v=Ums2yTUyzyo&t=117s
2 From ‘Life of St Nino,’ Margery Wardrop, Analecta Gorgiana, Volume 3, 1903
3 From The Commentaries of Isho’dad of Merv, Volume 1, edited and translated by Margaret Gibson, 1911.
4 ‘προεγράφη,’ medievalshroud.com/προεγράφη/
5 ‘The Doctrine Of The Apostles,’ and ‘Doctrine Of Simon Cephas, In The City Of Rome,’ in Ancient Syriac Documents Relative to the Earliest Establishment of Christianity, William Cureton, 1864.
6 The ‘History’ of Leo the Deacon: Byzantine Military Expansion in the Tenth Century, translated and edited by Alice-Mary Talbot and Dennis F. Sullivan, 2005
Leonis Diaconi Caloënsis Historiae, 1828, pages 160-168
7 See, for example, ‘The Conversions of Adiabene and Edessa in Syriac Christianity and Judaism: The Relations of Jews and Christians in Northern Mesopotamia in Antiquity,’ Michael Thomas, Concordia Theological Journal, 2020.
8 See, for example, The Pilgrimage of Etheria, M.L. McClure & C.L. Feltoe, 1919
9 Dictionnaire d’Archéologie Chrétienne et de Liturgie, Volume 1, Fernand Cabrol & Henri Leclerq, 1924
10 Ikonographie der Christlichen Kunst, Gertrud Schiller, 1971
11 The foundations of Byzantine Art criticism are probably best represented by:
Byzantine Painting, André Grabar, 1953
The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453; Sources and Documents, Cyril Mango, 1972
The Pantocrator: Title and Image, Jane Timken Matthews, 1980
The specific relationship between the ‘pantocrator’ image and its pagan roots is dealt with in
‘An Encaustic Icon of Christ at Sinai,’ Manolis Chatzidakis & Gerry Walters, The Art Bulletin, Volume 49, 1967
A Discussion of the Development and Symbolism of the Image of Christ as ‘Pantocrator’ in Byzantine Art, Johanna Bokedal, 2016
The Dawn of Christian Art – In Panel Paintings and Icons, Thomas Mathews, 2017
Christ Pantocrator: God, Emperor, and Philosopher the Byzantine Iconography of Christ, Anna Johnson, 2023
A discussion with particular relevance to the Shroud is at:
‘The Shroud of Turin and the Face of Christ in Paleochristian, Byzantine and Western Medieval Art,’ Heinrich Pfeiffer, Shroud Spectrum International, two parts, 1983 & 1984
12 ‘The Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen,’ trans. Douglas Hartranft, in A Select library of Nicene and post-Nicene fathers of the Christian church. Second series, Volume 2, ed. Philip Schaff & Henry Wade, 1890.
13 ‘The Ecclesiastical History, Dialogues and Letters of Theodore,’ trans. Blomfield Jackson, in A Select library of Nicene and post-Nicene fathers of the Christian church. Second series, Volume 3, ed. Philip Schaff & Henry Wade, 1892.
14 The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus, trans. C.D. Yonge, 1911.
15 The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos, trans. John Wortley, 1992