Late 4th century · probably 383–392

Theodore of Mopsuestia on burial linens

How a late-fourth-century preacher taught Christians to see Christ’s burial in the Eucharist: the altar as tomb, bread as body, linens as grave cloths, and deacons as attendants.

Imagine a late-fourth-century Christian service as Theodore describes it: the congregation has gathered for the Eucharist, the central communal rite of Christian worship. Deacons bring the bread and wine toward the altar. The priest interprets what the congregation is seeing: the offering’s movement recalls Christ being led to his Passion; the bread placed on the altar represents Christ’s body laid in a tomb; linen cloths spread over the altar stand for the linens of burial. Deacons stationed at the sides wave fans above the sacred gifts, a gesture Theodore compares with attendants honoring and guarding the body of a great person and with angels beside Christ’s tomb.¹

This is the episode behind the timeline entry. It is not a report that Theodore saw Jesus’ burial, nor a description of a particular relic. It is an explanation of ritual actions: Theodore asks his hearers to understand the service as a vivid remembrance of the Passion, burial and hoped-for resurrection. The homily gives us a concrete picture of how one late-antique Christian teacher connected Eucharistic worship with the Gospel burial story.

Who was Theodore, and what is a catechetical homily?

Theodore (c. 350–428) was a Christian biblical scholar and preacher associated with the Antiochene tradition. He became bishop of Mopsuestia, a city in Cilicia, in 392 and remained bishop until his death. His works included instruction for people preparing for Christian baptism and full participation in the Church’s sacraments.⁴

“Catechetical” means teaching the faith to catechumens: people receiving instruction before baptism. The collection traditionally called Theodore’s Catechetical Homilies contains sixteen discourses: the first ten explain the creed; the remaining discourses treat the Lord’s Prayer, baptism and the Eucharist. The linen passage comes from the Eucharistic teaching, Homily 15, in the section conventionally numbered 15.26. It is therefore a preacher’s explanation of worship, not a chronicle, travel diary, relic inventory or eyewitness deposition.^{1, 2}

The scene Theodore asks his listeners to see

Theodore begins with the offering being brought out in the sacred vessels. He tells the listeners to imagine Christ being led to his Passion. The deacons who carry the gifts signify the invisible ministering hosts; the priest at the altar represents Christ in the ritual. When the bread is set on the altar, the altar becomes, in Theodore’s explanation, an image of the sepulchre. The linens spread there recall the cloths of burial. The attendants’ fans complete the scene by evoking the honor paid to a body laid out and the angelic attendants at the tomb.¹

That sequence matters. The linen passage is not an isolated remark about textile. Theodore embeds it in a larger interpretation of the Eucharistic liturgy as a sequence of signs that recalls Christ’s Passion and points toward resurrection. He even says the body lying on the altar will soon rise to an immortal nature. The language belongs to the sacramental imagination of the homily: the worshippers are taught to perceive the visible rite as a representation of sacred events and Christian hope.^{1, 5}

The New Testament burial narratives supply the story Theodore’s ritual interpretation invokes. They describe Joseph of Arimathea wrapping Jesus’ body in linen and placing it in a tomb (Matthew 27:57–60; Mark 15:46; Luke 23:53; John 19:38–42). Theodore’s homily turns that remembered burial into a way of understanding the altar, the Eucharistic gifts, the linens and the deacons’ actions. It does not add a new narrative about the tomb or the identity of its cloths.⁶

When was the homily delivered?

The date is an estimate, not a date written on a surviving copy. Theodore’s homilies are commonly placed before his appointment as bishop in 392; one modern study describes them as probably delivered after 383 and before 392. Scholars have debated the precise setting: Antioch is often proposed, while other possibilities include Tarsus or Mopsuestia. The liturgy Theodore comments on does not map neatly onto later standardized rites, so the place and exact occasion should not be asserted as settled facts. The timeline’s “c. 400” label is a broad period marker; this essay gives the narrower proposed dating with its uncertainty visible.^{3, 4}

Nor does the passage describe one dated service that can be reconstructed as a historical incident. It is a didactic text explaining ritual gestures. A responsible narrative can reconstruct the actions the homily names—procession of gifts, placement on the altar, spreading linens, and fanning—while being clear that these details are the preacher’s account of liturgical practice, not a witness statement about a specific day or a particular church’s observed service.

How the text survived—and what “c. 400” dates

The original Greek text of these catechetical discourses is not extant in a complete form. The homilies survive in Syriac translation. Alphonse Mingana published a Syriac text and English translation in 1932–1933 from the manuscript then known as Mingana Syriac 561. Raymond Tonneau and Robert Devreesse’s 1949 critical edition reproduced that manuscript and compared it with a fragmentary sixth- or seventh-century witness. A contemporary review of their edition reports that the complete surviving manuscript is fourteenth-century and that the earlier witness consists of eleven leaves. The fragment is evidence for the transmission of the collection; one should not imply, without checking its contents, that it independently preserves this exact passage.^{1, 2}

Thus three dates must not be collapsed into one: the likely late-fourth-century composition or delivery of the homilies; the dates of the surviving Syriac manuscript witnesses; and the modern dates of their editions and translations. The timeline entry refers to the first of these, an approximate date for Theodore’s teaching—not the date of the extant complete codex.

What this tells us about the Shroud—and what it does not

The homily is valuable evidence for late-antique Christian liturgical interpretation: by the late fourth century, Theodore could explain altar linens as recalling the linen burial cloths of Christ. It also shows the burial story being made present to a congregation through the choreography of worship. That is meaningful historical evidence in its own right.

But Theodore does not describe a full-length cloth bearing a human image. He does not report seeing a body image, bloodstains, a particular weave, an object kept at Edessa or Constantinople, or a named relic in anyone’s custody. He does not call the altar linens the Turin Shroud. The passage therefore cannot establish that the Turin cloth existed in the fourth century or that it was the cloth imagined in this liturgical symbolism. Moving from “altar linen represented Christ’s burial cloths” to “Theodore knew the Turin Shroud” would require evidence the homily does not provide.

The careful conclusion is narrower and more useful: Theodore gives us an early, detailed account of a Christian ritual interpretation in which the altar becomes a symbolic tomb and its linen coverings recall Christ’s burial. This is evidence for the history of worship and religious imagination, not for the custody history or physical appearance of the Shroud of Turin.

Sources and further reading

1. Theodore of Mopsuestia, Catechetical Homily 15, especially §§24–29 (linen passage §26), trans. Alphonse Mingana, Commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Lord’s Prayer and on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist (Woodbrooke Studies 6; Cambridge: Heffer, 1933), pp. 85–87. English translation, Homily 15 (the online text’s paragraph pagination differs; see the section beginning “We must think of Christ…”).
2. Raymond Tonneau and Robert Devreesse, eds. and trans., Les homélies catéchétiques de Théodore de Mopsueste, Studi e Testi 145 (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1949), especially Homily 15, pp. 503–511. For the manuscript evidence and edition details, see Michel Andrieu’s review, Revue des sciences religieuses 26, no. 1 (1952): 86–88. Review and bibliographic record.
3. Jason Darrell Foster, Sursum Corda: Ritual and Meaning of the Liturgical Command in the First Five Centuries of the Church (PhD diss., Durham University, 2013), chapter 6, especially pp. 153–155. Foster summarizes the proposed 383–392 range, competing proposed locations, and scholarship on dating. Durham repository record and full text.
4. “Theodore of Mopsuestia,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., vol. 13 (2003), s.v. “Theodore of Mopsuestia”; see also the historical introduction to Mingana’s translation. Biographical overview. The broad biographical dates are secure enough for orientation; the homilies’ exact date and place remain less certain.
5. Robin Griffith-Jones, “Tomb and Temple,” in Tomb and Temple: Re-imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem, ed. Robin Griffith-Jones and Eric Fernie (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), 11–13 and n. 40. Publisher page. This provides contextual discussion of the altar-tomb symbolism and cites the critical edition.
6. Matthew 27:57–60; Mark 15:42–46; Luke 23:50–53; John 19:38–42. These are the Gospel burial narratives underlying Theodore’s liturgical remembrance; they are not independent evidence identifying a surviving textile with the Turin Shroud.