The evolution of the "Legend of Abgar" and the origins of Christian iconography

This article by Dominique Cerbelaud traces the evolution of the legend of Abgar, a narrative according to which the Syrian king Abgar V supposedly maintained a correspondence with Jesus and received from him a miraculous image. Through a historical and critical study of sources — Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian and Latin — the author reconstructs the successive layers of this tradition: the simple correspondence reported by Eusebius of Caesarea, the blessing of Edessa, then the appearance of a painted portrait, and finally, from 544 onwards, that of an image "not made by human hands." The main contribution of the article is to show that this last tradition, the acheiropoieton, is later than the other legendary layers and could be identified with the Shroud of Turin, long preserved in Edessa. This identification would confer upon the Shroud the status of historical origin of Christian iconography, thereby confirming the incarnational foundation of the Nicene dogma on icons.