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The Flemish painter Juan de Flandes painted around
1498 "The Resurrection of Christ and Three Women at the Tomb",
Palacio Real de Madrid |
Forensic evidence
from the resurrection
of the
Son of God
by Paul Badde
originally published in the German magazine Vatikan (April, 2021 edition)
and online https://de.catholicnewsagency.com/article/ikone-der-dna-des-gottessohnes-1312
for a helpful commentary on this article see the post by Patricia Enk at https://illuminadomine.com/2021/04/08/the-icon-of-easter/
The icon of the resurrection -- the napkin (or sudarium) from the tomb of Christ -- is essentially transparent. as we were able to marvel at again three years ago on the booklet that Pope Francis prepared in 2018 for the participants in the liturgy of his Easter Mass at St. Peter's Basilica which displayed a panel from 1498 by Juan de Flandes, depicting the moment when “ Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome “came to the tomb”, as Mark says. “They saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a white robe; they were very amazed. But he said to them: Don't be amazed! You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen; he is not here. Behold, the place where they laid him. ”
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| Cover page of Booklet from Easter Vigil Mass with Pope Francis at St. Peter's Basilica 2018 |
The Flemish painter in Spain incorrectly depicted the empty tomb as an
open sarcophagus, which demonstrates that he had never been to Jerusalem. On
the other hand, he obviously knew Rome and was familiar with its treasures, as
shown here. Because over the edge of this sarcophagus hangs very realistically
a transparent veil to which the angel points --the sudarium -- the key relic of
the Lord that was known to thousands of pilgrims to Rome during the artist’s lifetime
and ever since Pope Innocent VIII had first carried this veil barefoot on a
Sunday in January 1208 from Peter's Basilica to the nearby hospital church of
Santo Spirito. This veil, too, was transparent and enigmatic like the
resurrection itself, at the heart of our faith.
Because
the essence of Christianity is neither the cathedral of Cologne nor St. Peter's
Basilica, but only the resurrection of Christ from the kingdom of the dead to
Life in the land of the living, however impossible it may seem. But without the
belief in precisely this impossibility, our whole faith would be filth, says
Paul. Then we could leave the church immediately with the multitudes of all the
others who have left without even having to ask as Peter did: “Lord, where
should we go?” Because first of all Christ would no longer be our Lord and
secondly we would already know where we wanted to escape to with the money from
the church assessment we no longer pay, no matter that it is impossible to find
a place or a society of people without abuse and without lies, fraud, crime,
and violence.
If,
on the other hand, Christ has truly risen from the dead, then anything is
possible. Then the church will wake up again from the death zone of abuse and
flourish again, in Cologne, throughout Germany and everywhere. Nevertheless, many
theologians over the past centuries have tried to minimize the offensive nature
of the challenge to believe in the resurrection of Christ by using scriptural
tricks and to make it more compatible with the spirit of the age (“zeitgeist”).
These kind of “glass bead games” however
were never possible for icon writers or visual artists as long as they were
serious about the core of their beliefs.
Theologians
and artists share a common problem, however: there were no witnesses to the act
of Christ's resurrection from the dead. None of the evangelists were there. All
four only report what it looked like in Jesus' tomb after the
resurrection. Matthew tells of an "angel" in a snow-white robe who
says to three women in the burial chamber: "He is not here". It is
similar with Mark. Luke speaks of "two men in shining robes". And
with John we learn how Peter and the “disciple whom Jesus loved” looked into
the tomb of Christ early in the morning. - There is only one thing that none of
the four evangelists say: that the tomb was empty. Obviously, it wasn't. Jesus
was no longer there. But there were cloths at the scene of which the poet Wipo
(+ 1048) spoke in his Easter sequence "Victimae paschali laudes", Mary
had seen two "angelic witnesses", namely the "napkin and linen cloths"
(Latin: sudarium et vestes). These witnesses and forensic traces of evidence have,
thank God, been preserved uncorrupted and materially, with the DNA of the Son of
God.
First
there is the sacred Sudarium from Rome, which is now in Manoppello, and then
there is the Holy Shroud, the world-famous linen in Turin. We encounter both fabrics
for the first time in the testimony of
John, who described Easter morning in this way: “Then Simon Peter, who had
followed him, arrived and went into the tomb (which was a cave hewn in the
rock). He saw the linen cloths lying there and the napkin (Greek: soudarion)
that had been lying on Jesus' head; but it was not with the linen cloths but rolled
up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who had come to the tomb
first, also went in; he saw and believed.” - That is the key passage in this
gospel, which, however, only becomes plausible when read in conjunction with
the specific cloths that John mentions here.
The
"Holy Shroud" or the Shroud of Turin is only rarely shown and yet has
been researched as has no other textile in the world, by a genuine and separate
science, Sindonology, which in the last century has focused on this linen cloth
with the dimensions of 14 feet 3 inches by 3 feet 7 inches (436cm by 110 cm)
and which captures the panorama and the torture of the flagellation, the
crowning of thorns and the crucifixion of Christ in an inexplicable way, as in
a detailed script, as well as the subsequent piercing of his heart and the
extinction of his last spark of life by means of a lance. This cloth contains
blood and water.
The sudarium, on the other hand, is a very delicate veil that was kept in Rome for centuries and then for a long time in Manoppello, where it was locked away until 1923, in similar fashion to the shroud in Turin. Nevertheless, for almost a century, unlike the situation of the Shroud in Turin, every pilgrim to Manoppello has been able to observe and study the sudarium at close quarters every day from morning to evening above the main altar as never before. At certain times and in certain light it shows the face of Christ with open eyes and healed wounds. Yet when unshadowed, the veil reveals, above all, complete transparency as its inner characteristic - as if Easter were the festival of transparency towards heaven and God's eternity in another world.
A good hundred years before Juan de Flandes, the Catalan painter Joan Mates (1370 - 1431) masterfully expressed this characteristic of the napkin of Christ in his panel of the "Lamentation of Christ", where we see Nicodemus, who after Jesus’ deposition from the cross is putting a transparent fabric over His face.
Joseph of Arimathea and John put the napkin on the dead Jesus
Panel painting by Joan Mates from Barcelona from 1429. Photo: Wikimedia (CC0) |
The model for this depiction here can only have been the Roman “Sudarium” of the Popes from St. Peter's Basilica, the “true icon”, which has also been called “Veronica” there since the Middle Ages. Countless images in the history of art attest to this Easter transparency. One of the key witnesses to this mystery, moreover, is Dr. Martin Luther, who saw the veil on his trip to Rome in 1511 and who still sneered in 1545 that the “Lord's face in his little sweat cloth”, which was regularly shown and displayed at Saint Peter’s, was nothing but „ein klaret lin“ in other words: Doctor Luther had only seen a “transparent linen” here.
The large shroud, which is by no means transparent, appeared for the first time in Lirey in Champagne in 1355 and was only brought through the efforts of St. Charles Borromeo from Chambéry in Savoy to Turin in 1578, 233 years later, which began the process of western Christendom gradually getting to know it. Previously, the Shroud had been the most precious part of the treasures of the emperor of Byzantium remaining more or less a rumor for the pilgrims of Europe until 1578.
Photo: Wikimedia (CC0)
An
image- document in the Széchényi library of the National Museum of Budapest
dates back to 1192 (at the latest), and for decades has become something of a
new founding document for all shroud researchers and their highly complex
science. It is a small colored drawing on parchment in a codex measuring 9.5
inches by 5.9 inches, which also highlights the resurrection of Christ from the
dead - and the burial of the crucified Lord. Above we therefore see Jesus dead,
lying with a peaceful face, on a sheet that has been rolled out on a stone. His
eyes and mouth are closed, with a sparse beard and long hair parted in the
middle which hide his ears and frame his face. At the head of Jesus stands
Joseph of Arimathea, the councilor of the Sanhedrin, at the feet of the Lord
stands John. Both grasp the cloth with which the body was removed from the
cross, while Nicodemus empties a bottle with precious spices over the body, as
we read in the Gospel of John (19:39). The stone slab underneath is reminiscent
of the so-called "anointing stone" from the Jerusalem Church of the
Holy Sepulcher, which has long been venerated as the most important relic of
the Pantocrator Church of Constantinople. Three striking details are unique in
this representation. First, the body of Jesus is naked. Second, he keeps his
hands crossed over the pubic area, his right hand over the left. Third, both
hands only show four fingers and no thumb. So Jesus is depicted here as a real
victim of an ancient, real, and concrete crucifixion, in which the nails were
driven through the roots of his wrists (and not the palms of the hands). During
this torture, the thumbs cramped inward into the palms of the hands due to the
injury to the median nerve. And for this representation there is only a single
“picture” in the vast array of pictures throughout History, which must have
served as an exemplar and model. This is the Shroud of Christ in Turin which
shows these significant details, but long before this linen even had appeared
in Europe!
And this drawing from the library of Budapest was also made at least 133 years before the date assigned to the Shroud, resulting from a sensational radiocarbon investigation in 1988, according to which the shroud was supposed to have been woven between 1260 and 1390. This drawing from Budapest, which documents its evidence as if with a photo proof, dates from 1192 at the latest. For in 1150, on the occasion of an arranged wedding in Constantinople, the ambassador of Hungary was received by Manuel II Komnenos, and the Emperor of Byzantium showed him and his delegation the hidden treasures of his Blachern Chapel. In the process, the Shroud of Christ must have impressed itself in detail on one of the participants of the Hungarian delegation. Below the entombment we see - as centuries later with Juan de Flandes - three women come to the grave at the right, where an angel on the left with an outstretched right forefinger indicates the resurrection of Christ on this first Easter morning. Between the angel and the women we see a large, folded sheet of fabric, which is covered on the inside with Greek crosses and on the outside with zigzag lines, which are interpreted in research as an attempt to draw the herringbone pattern of the shroud. Four small holes depict four very old fire damage holes that can still be found in the "Holy Shroud" today. But above this shroud, under the angel's finger, we see another folded little cloth, as if blowing, or as “rolled up, next to it, in a special place”, which had been lying on the face of the dead Jesus, as we came to know by the gospel of John.
This
veil over the large linen has a liveliness, as if wind were blowing into it.
And under its right edge we can still see parts of the pattern of the shroud
through the fabric. Making the veil completely transparent has obviously
overwhelmed the capacity of the author of this almost childlike drawing.
Nevertheless, in contrast to the large shroud, the sudarium appears as animated
as the stole of the angel next to it. And in any case, we encounter the two cloths
together in an almost realistic way for the first time in the picture, from the
zero hour of Christianity. And both without “pictures”, without a body image
and without a face, at least to our eyes.
The
most significant detail of this depiction is, however, often overlooked in many
debates about the burial cloths of Christ. In this representation in the Codex
Pray from Budapest, the extremely important link for the history of the
authenticity of the shroud of Turin the angel
doesn’t point to the big, long linen but to the transparent sudarium which like
no other “image” allows us to gaze into the paschal mystery of the paschal hour.
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