Edessa not Hellenized
The Hellenized areas around the eastern Mediterranean included Palestine. They were lands where men had short hair. The apostle Paul appealed to this fact when he wrote to the Greeks (Hellenes) of Corinth: "Does not nature itself teach you that for a man to wear long hair is degrading to him"? (I Cor. 11:14) But Edessa was beyond the Euphrates River — in the realm of the ancient Assyrians where long hair on men was considered noble. Long after the Persians had taken over the Assyrian kingdom, and into Christian times, it was still true that "the population of Edessa was predominantly Semitic and had closer affinities with its Iranian than with its more Hellenized western neighbors" (Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed., "Edessa").
Other pictorial evidence found near Palestine corresponds to the evidence from Rome. "Reference may be made to another portrayal of Christ, dating from early in the third century. It was found on the wall of a house — chapel at Dura-Europos in the Syrian Desert in 1931-2 during excavations of Yale University and the French Academy of Inscriptions and Letters. . . . Here, too, He is young and without a beard and wearing the ordinary costume of the time. . . . It is not until the fourth century that the familiar bearded face appears" (Dunkerley, p. 58).
"During the first four hundred years there is probably no representation of Christ as bearded, or as a worn and weary sufferer" (Farrar, p. 52).
It took almost 400 years to evolve the "Christ" we have been brought up to envision! It is a false Christ portrayed on the shroud, not the Christ of the Bible. (See the box: Could Jesus Have Worn Long Hair?)
Let's consider the Edessa image further.
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Could Jesus have worn long hair?
The image on the shroud shows a figure with long flowing hair and a beard. While acknowledging that the Romans were clean-shaven — in the normal fashion of the first century — and that beard and long hair were not characteristically Jewish during New Testament times — some, such as Ian Wilson in The Turin Shroud, have attempted to make a point for authenticity of the relic by claiming that "most Jews had worn beards and long hair since the time of Moses." And further, referring to a feature of the shroud's posterior image, "the victim's most Jewish feature was a long streak of hair visible at the back of the head, falling almost to the shoulder blades. . . . the unmistakable impression of an unbound pigtail. One study has shown that this was one of the commonest fashions for the Jewish men in antiquity" (New York Daily News, March 24, 1978).
What are the facts about long hair and first-century Jews?
The facts are that no Jewish religious leader who honored the Word which had come from God would have worn long hair. This Word included "the law and the prophets" which the Jew Jesus said He had "not come to abolish . . . but to fulfill" (Matt. 5:17). Specifically, note' Ezekiel 44:20: "They [priests] shall not shave their heads or let their locks grow long." In Roman times the Talmud (Ta'anith l7a) specified a priest's hair was to be cut every 30 days, and (Sanh. 22h) that its style was to be the "Julian." that is, the short hairstyle worn by Julius Caesar (see photo).
Any Jew might have worn a beard. The Word nowhere condemns beards, and in certain eras, at least, a beard was considered an important sign of manhood (11 Sam. 10:5).
The rebel, David's son Absalom, is presented as an example of long-haired men (11 Sam. 14:26: 18:9). Long hair was pagan: the pagan gods were so imagined. The ancient Assyrian kings were long-haired. Israel was to be separate from this way of the world.
But Nazarites — those who had a special vow of consecration to God — had long hair. Could Jesus, like Samson, have been a lifelong Nazarite? If Jesus had been a Nazarite, He would have appeared quite different from the average Jew. He would have stood out in a crowd (hut see Luke 4:30: John 8:59: 10:39).' There would have been no need for Him to have to be identified (Matt. 26:48: Mark 14:44).
Jesus characterized Himself as one who drank wine (in great moderation, of course). But in the chapter of Nazarite regulations, any use of wine or any other product of the grape is prohibited (Num. 6:3). So Jesus was not a — Nazarite. (Do not be confused by His title of "Nazarene," which designated a man who grew up in the city of Nazareth)
"For a man to wear long hair," wrote Paul, "is degrading to him" (I Cor. 11:14). And Paul had "seen Jesus" (I Cor. 9:1: 15:8). Can we imagine Paul regarded his Lord as shameful or degraded? Of course not!
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The Abgar Legends
The original Edessa image was a portrait on cloth, allegedly discovered at the city now called Urfa in or slightly before A.D. 544, and recognized to be the same as an earlier image of Christ of the Abgar legends.
The original Abgar legend centered around, not a shroud, but a totally different yet equally fantastic and unique artifact relating to Christ. It was a letter allegedly written by the Savior Himself. Eusebius, the fourth-century church historian, tells the story in his Ecclesiastical History, book I, chapter XIII: "Agbartis [a common alternate spelling of Abgar], therefore, who reigned over the nations beyond the Euphrates with great glory, and who had been wasted away with a disease, both dreadful and incurable by human means, when he heard the name of Jesus frequently mentioned, and his miracles unanimously attested by all, sent a suppliant message to him, by a letter-carrier, entreating a deliverance from his disease. But, though he [Jesus] did not yield to his call at that time, he nevertheless condescended to write him a private letter . . .
"Of this, also, we have the evidence, in a written answer, taken from the public records of the city of Edessa, then under the government of the king . . ."
Could such a story possibly be true? Eusebius apparently believed the alleged archival documents he copied were genuine. But few scholars believe it today. Nor does the New Testament give any such hint.
Furthermore, "F.C. Burkitt in his Early Eastern Christianity (1904) showed an anachronism in The Doctrine of Addai which makes it likely that Christianity reached Edessa only after 150 . . . " (The [BBC] Listener, May 11, 1978, p. 617).
One must thus conclude that not only the story of a letter from Jesus, but also the story of the origin of an image of Christ, are mere manufactured tales coined long after the beginning of Christianity.
And whatever the date of Edessa's first Christianity, the quality of its religion is dubious. At Abgar IX's court in A.D. 180 was a teacher called Bardesanes, a convert later regarded as a heretic because he taught an astrological fatalism rather than the gospel.
And there were other heretics. Says Eusebius: "Under the same reign, Bardesanes lived, who dwelt in the land between the rivers, where heresies abounded . . . " (book IV, chapter XXX).
How Was Christ's Body Really Wrapped?
The shroud theory demands that Christ's body was covered differently than was the custom in Jewish burial. The usual fashion was for the body to be wrapped cocoon-wise in strips of linen cloth which were bound at hands and feet. All representations of Christ's burial in the first four centuries assumed this Egyptian-like style. "The [Jewish] corpse was wrapped in a shroud, and bandages soaked with resin were wound around the hands and feet: a cloth, the sudarium, was placed over the face (John 11:44). Finally the tomb was shut" (Bo Reicke, The New Testament Era, p. 187).
The account of the raising of Lazarus illustrates the method. "The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with bandages, and his face wrapped with a cloth." It would appear that he was so enclosed and tied as to be scarcely able to walk until "Jesus said to them, `Unbind him, and let him go"' (John 11:44). Shroud of Turin theorists postulate that Joseph of Arimathea, not having time to bury Christ's body properly, simply covered it, leaving the body lying amidst the rolls of cloth he had brought for the usual wrapping, perhaps intending to return and use them after the Sabbath. They suppose this may have been what Peter saw when he came into the tomb after the resurrection and saw "linen cloths lying, and the napkin, which had been on his head . . . rolled up in a place by itself (John 20:6-7).
But Matthew tells us that "Joseph took the body, and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud" (Matt. 27:59). This shroud was obviously not merely a long flat cloth like the Turin shroud, laid out under the body, then folded over it from the head.
The Gospel of John plainly tells us that Joseph and his company actually "bound it [the body — not merely covered it] in linen cloths [plural] with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews" (John 19:40). This was done even before they carried the body to the tomb (verse 42).
Is It of God or of Men?
It is said that Luther's protector, Frederick the Wise, possessed 19,013 relics which earned the beholder 1,902,202 years' remission of purgatory! Physical-man's desire for material objects for use in worship leads to such absurdity.
Can we believe that God Himself, knowing the inevitable misuse and the decline of true religion it would produce, would have given mankind for an icon, a relic, the very shroud in which Jesus was buried? The same God who hid the body of Moses and hid the exact location of his grave, lest the Israelites should worship the body of Moses, and lose sight of the worship of God?
U.S. Catholic thus concluded its discussion of the shroud: ". . . Forgers do forge, and people have a great ability to rationalize and theorize their way toward what they would like to believe.
"Ultimately, it's about as difficult to prove scientifically the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as it is to document or explain the Resurrection itself. But the latter is an essential question, and the former is not."