769

Pope Stephen III speaks of an image on linen

A papal letter describes Christ’s face and body imprinted on cloth.

This is an early Western statement about an image-bearing burial cloth, not a custody record for the Turin Shroud.

At a Roman synod in 769, Pope Stephen III invoked the story of Christ sending an image on cloth to King Abgar while defending the use of sacred images. The source is a sermon or synodal address transmitted in the acts of the Roman assembly. It belongs to the icon-veneration debate and uses the Abgar legend as an argument about images and the Incarnation.¹

What the surviving source says

The early text speaks of the image of Christ’s face; some later copies or quotations have been used to claim a full-body imprint. That variant must be tracked to its manuscript witness before it is attributed to Stephen himself. It is not accurate to describe this as a letter to Charlemagne or as a secure eyewitness description of a burial shroud.¹²

Historical significance and limits

Stephen’s testimony shows that the face-image Abgar legend had entered papal argument by the eighth century. It does not establish that the Turin Shroud was known in Rome, and wording in later expanded recensions should not be projected backward without textual proof.²³

Sources and further reading

1. Mark Guscin, The Tradition of the Image of Edessa, discussion and transcription of the Lateran Synod text (769), pp. 184–190. Consult the cited passage in the full source and its transmission context; the article distinguishes the source’s wording from later interpretation.
2. Otangelo Grasso, The Image That Should Not Exist: A Scientific Investigation of the Shroud of Turin (2026), ch. 2, “Origins and Historical Record,” pp. 23–31, and ch. 17, “The Mandylion, Art, and the Historical Record,” pp. 232–243. Author synthesis; not an independent witness.
3. Otangelo Grasso, From Forensics to Faith (2026), ch. 2, “Pre-1355 History,” pp. 32–125, and ch. 3, “6th to 14th Century History,” pp. 126–194. The book advances a proposed reconstruction; claims are assessed here against the primary texts.
4. Otangelo Grasso, Chronological List of Pre-1356 Literature Mentioning the Shroud and Christ’s Burial Cloth (20 July 2025), pp. 1–9. Prepared with AI assistance and used as a research checklist; its identifications and confidence labels are not treated as verified facts.
5. MGH, Epistolae, papal synod text of Stephen III (769). Further reading or contextual source retained from this event’s earlier bibliography.
6. Andrea Nicolotti, From the Mandylion of Edessa to the Shroud of Turin (critical study). Further reading or contextual source retained from this event’s earlier bibliography.