If you pay attention, you know that the Bible is filled with little details that sometimes make you scratch your head. Consider John 20:5-7 — “And when he [St. John, the Beloved Disciple] stooped down, he saw the linen cloths lying; but yet he went not in. Then cometh Simon Peter, following him, and went into the sepulchre, and saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkin that had been about his [i.e. Our Lord's] head, not lying with the linen cloths, but apart, wrapped up into one place” (Douay-Rheims Version).

Well, the part about St. John waiting for St. Peter’s arrival has to do with Petrine Supremacy, so that’s easy enough. But why an entire verse to explain that the “napkin” that wrapped Our Lord’s head was somewhere other than with the rest of the shroud cloths? Well, the “linen cloths” are very famous. At various times they have been called the Cloth of Edessa, the Mandylion, and the Shroud of Turin. I am among those who believe that the genuine Shroud was brought to Edessa by the Apostle St. Jude Thaddeus, known locally as Addai, thence to Constantinople, Southern France (via the Fourth Crusade), and Turin. The “napkin” (Latin: sudarium, Grk.: soudarion, literally “towel for wiping off sweat”) however, as John 20:7 hints, has been preserved separate from the Shroud — perhaps to make sure that both would not be lost or destroyed simultaneously? It is currently kept as a revered relic in Oviedo, Spain.

Here is detailed history of the Sudarium by Mark Guscin, a Sindonologist (scholar who studies the Shroud, It. Sindone, of Turin). The tale, as told by Pelayo, Bishop of Oviedo in the early 12th century, is one of high adventure. The Sudarium stayed in Jerusalem until the Sassanid Emperor Chosroes II of Persia sacked the city in 614. (He did so with the assistance of the local Jews, who unleashed what we would call an “ethnic cleansing” of Christians in the area, even assaulting Tyre in Lebanon — topical, huh?) This is the same Chosroes who stole the True Cross, and the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on Sept. 14 became popular because of the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius’ recovery of the Cross from the Persians in 629. (Btw, from at least the 1st century B.C., the Persians/Parthians have made a national pastime of stealing legionary standards and other symbolic prizes from the Romans.) Well, Christian refugees first secreted the Sudarium away to Alexandria, until Chosroes sacked that city in 616. Then they transported it to the other end of the Mediterranean, to Spain, where it would be well out of the way of Persian hordes.

At the time, Sisebutus was the king of the Visigoths in Spain. Ironically, he had just expelled the last of the Byzantine forces from the Iberian Peninsula at about the same time that Chosroes was rolling back the Byzantine armies in the Levant. Unlike his heretical Arian ancestors, however, Sisebutus was a pious Catholic. Bishop Pelayo writes, “As he was also a perfect Catholic, he made the Jews who were in his kingdom convert to faith in Christ,” as Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella would do in 1492 (my note). The Sudarium was entrusted to Sisebutus’ close collaborator, St. Isidore of Seville, one of the thirty-three Doctors of the Church. In turn, his pupil, St. Ildefonso, took it from Seville to Toledo when he became Archbishop of that city.

The Sudarium would not be safe from anti-Catholic barbarians for long, though. In 711, jihad reached Spain when Mohammedan Arabs, Moors, and Berbers invaded from Africa. (Many Spanish Jews also assisted these “liberators” — is there a pattern here?) Sometime thereafter the Sudarium was transferred from Toledo, now in infidel hands, to Oviedo. King Alfonso II the Chaste halted the Moslem onslaught and made Oviedo the capital of his Catholic kingdom, Asturias. He built San Salvador Cathedral, where the Sudarium remains today in its own Camara Santa, or Sacred Chamber. The cloth’s reliquary is called the “Ark,” so Pelayo compares Alfonso to King Solomon and his cathedral to the Temple of Jerusalem, which housed the Ark of the Covenant. According to Mary Jo Anderson’s article, Bishop Pelayo also claimed that the “holy ark” was “made out of oak by followers of the twelve apostles” and also contained “several relics of the Virgin Mary and the apostles and a piece of the cross on which Jesus was crucified.”

Anderson’s article contains even more of what Johnboy rightly would call “crazy-in-a-good-way” stories about the Ark. Some priests opened the reliquary without fasting and were blinded by a bright light emanating from within (think Raiders of the Lost Ark). Later, one Rodrigo D’az de Vivar joined King Alfonso VI and his sister in recording the contents of the Ark. They did so at Eastertime, only after carefully prepared themselves throughout Lent so as not to share the fate of the blinded priests. Who was Rodrigo D’az de Vivar? He is known to subsequent history and literature as El Cid, the fabled national hero of Spain.

Anderson also records a song sung by pilgrims on their way to the Shrine of the Apostle St. James the Greater at Compostela. For those who don’t know, St. James visited Spain and there received the first recorded apparition of the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of the Pillar, during Mary’s lifetime. He later returned to Jerusalem and, at the hands of the Jewish King Herod Agrippa I, he became the first of the Twelve Apostles to win the palm of martyrdom (Acts 12:1-2). In Spain, though, he became patron saint of the Reconquista, under the title Santiago Matamoros — that is, St. James the Moor-Killer! I propose him as a patron saint for ecumenism ;). Where was I? Oh, right, his shrine at Santiago de Compostela became one of the three major pilgrimage sites of medieval Christendom, along with Rome and Jerusalem. The pilgrims used to sing,

“Who has been to St. James
And not to San Salvador
Visits the servant and
Neglects the master.”

They were referring, of course, to Our Lord’s Precious Blood as preserved on the Sudarium at Oviedo’s San Salvador Cathedral. And who built the first shrine at Santiago de Compostella? Why, King Alfonso the Chaste, who also built the shrine for the Sudarium. According to one tradition, he was also the first pilgrim to the martyred Apostle’s tomb.

What of the cloth itself and its relationship to the Shroud of Turin? Well you can consult Guscin’s and Anderson’s articles, but I shall relate some of the facts. Scientiests have concluded that the Sudarium of Oviedo was wrapped around the head of a man who had multiple bleeding head wounds, as from a crown of thorns. Fluid from a pulmonary edema flowed out of the mouth and nostrils. This indicates that he died of asphyxiation, just as a victim of crucifixion would, not long before the cloth was applied. The Blood on the cloth is type AB, just like the Blood on the Shroud. The pattern of the head wounds match the Shroud. Pollens on the Sudarium show that it has been in Palestine, North Africa, and Spain, just as one would expect the real headcloth of Jesus to show. The Shroud’s pollen samples show that it has been in Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Southern France, and Northern Italy, as one would expect of the real Shroud of Jesus, as recorded in extant accounts.

The Sudarium verifies the Shroud. They have a separate history. The Sudarium arrived in Spain prior to 1000. While the Shroud of Turin can only be verifiably traced back in historical records to the beginning of the 14th century, it is highly likely that it is identical with the earlier Cloth of Edessa and the Byzantine Mandylion. There is no way that the two cloths, the Sudarium and Shroud, could have been forged in such a way as to confirm each other’s veracity. There is no way that they could have been forged independently and still mirrored each other so perfectly by mere coincidence. Despite the highly suspect Carbon-14 dating of the Shroud to the 14th century, the Sudarium indicates that it is in fact genuine. Not only that, the Sudarium has a rich and colorful history of its own. So perhaps that is why, some sixty years after the fact, the Holy Ghost inspired St. John in verses 20:5-7 of his Gospel to specify that the “napkin” had been rolled up in its own place apart from the burial cloths.

(For pictures of the Sudarium, please go here. I would copy some for this post, but I am not sure about copyright rules vis-a-vis photos.)

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