Page 272 - ירושלים: גיליון רפואי

The Story of Abgar

Emma Maayan Fanar

Abgar, the first-century king of Edessa, was gravely ill. Hearing about Jesus Christ’s miracles in
Jerusalem, he sent a messenger asking him to come to Edessa to heal him. Unable to comply
with the king’s request, Christ washed his face and wiped it with a cloth, leaving on it an imprint
of his likeness, which he then gave to the messenger. The king looked at the image and was
immediately healed.

The earliest source of the Abgar legend and the miracle of healing appears in the fourth century
in Eusebius (Historia ecclesiastica I.13) and refers to the letters between King Abgar and Christ.
In his letter Christ promises to send one of his disciples to cure the king. Reference to Christ’s
image appears for the first time in the fifth-century Syriac Doctrina Addai, which states that it was
painted by Abgar’s messenger, Ananias. Although the image immediately became a source for
veneration, it did not cure Abgar. In the early sources the king was cured by the Apostle Thaddeus
after Christ’s Ascension. Later sources determined that this image of Christ was miraculous,
not made by hands (acheiropoietos). Describing the siege of Edessa in 544, Evagrius mentions
that the city was miraculously saved by the God-made image sent to Abgar many years before
(Historia ecclesiastica IV. 27). The authenticity of this passage is debated. Some scholars think
that the notion of an image not made by hands can be dated to the sixth century, as there are
contemporaneous stories of similar images; others suggest that it could have been introduced
into the original text at a later date. By the eighth century, the miracle of Abgar’s healing was
linked to the image imprinted on the cloth by Christ himself.

The image of Edessa is both a relic and an icon; direct contact with Christ’s face preserved his
most truthful likeness, which Christ himself delivered, thus permitting and even commanding
reproduction of his likeness in matter. This argument clearly supported the iconophile conception
of the legitimacy of icons. At the Second Council of Nicaea in AD 787 BCE, the image of Edessa
was cited as unequivocal testimony to the miraculous power of images, while in the ninth-tenth-
century Letter of the Three Patriarchs the Holy Face was the most esteemed of the twelve most
important relics justifying the veneration of icons. In the tenth century the cloth with the Holy

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