CNS is reporting that Pope Benedict will next year visit the Shroud of Turin, which is believed by many to be the burial cloth of Christ. The Shroud has a connection with today’s saint, the Apostle Jude Thaddeus. This is from the book The Shroud of Turin: A Case for Authenticity:

The history of the Shroud can be traced with assurance to the mid-fourteenth century. Prior to that period, little is known with absolute certainty concerning its whereabouts. A third century Syrian text mentions a cloth that is associated with the miraculous cure of King Abgar V, ruler of Edessa (13-59 A.D.), now called Urfa, in southeastern Turkey. This story was translated almost verbatim by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, in his Ecclesiastical History in 325 A.D.1 According to the story, Abgar suffered from an ailment, perhaps leprosy. Having heard about the healing powers of Jesus, he sent a certain Ananias around the year 31-32 A.D. with a letter to Jesus requesting that He come and heal him. Jesus replied that He was unable to go, but promised to send one of His disciples. It was not until after His death and Resurrection that one of the seventy-two disciples, Thaddeus, brought a cloth to Abgar bearing an image of the face of Jesus. Upon seeing this cloth, Abgar was cured, and the Christian Faith was established in the city. (Actually, the first Christian king of Edessa was Abgar VIII, who ruled from 177-212.) Although the Syrian text mentions a cloth, for reasons unknown, Eusebius makes no reference to it; rather, he states that Abgar saw a vision when he looked at Thaddeus. “Immediately on his entrance there appeared to Abgar a great vision on the face of the Apostle Thaddeus. When Abgar saw this, he did reverence to Thaddeus, and wonder seized all who stood about, for they themselves did not see the vision, which appeared to Abgar alone.”

While the Syrian account refers to Thaddeus as one of the seventy-two disciples of the Lord (cf. Luke 10:1), he soon came to be associated with Jude Thaddeus, the apostle who was a cousin of Jesus (cf. Matt. 13:55; Mark 6:3). One of the earliest Byzantine icons to depict Thaddeus holding the Image of Edessa, as the cloth was referred to there, was painted in 550 A.D. and is located at St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai. In the Western tradition, St. Jude is often represented holding an image of the face of Jesus over his heart. It has been suggested by the British historian Ian Wilson that the Image of Edessa was actually the Shroud folded in such a way that only the face was visible. Early replicas of the Image were portrayed as an elongated trellis frame with a circle in the middle that depicted the face. A sixth-century text called The Acts of Thaddeus refers to such an image as a tetradiplon, a Greek word which literally means “doubled in four” or, put another way, folded in eight layers. Interestingly, this Greek word is not used for any other object.

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