Authenticity and Scholarship

In the Eastern tradition the Mandylion was received as a genuine, miraculously produced likeness of Christ, and it carried immense authority in the theology of images, especially after the iconoclastic controversies. Historically, the evidence is textual and late: the earliest layer of the Abgar story speaks only of letters, the physical image enters the record in the sixth century, and its miraculous origin is a matter of belief rather than demonstration.

Because the object vanished in 1204, no scientific examination is possible, and modern scholarship, surveyed for example in Mark Guscin's study of the Byzantine sources, treats it as a relic whose history can be documented but whose authenticity cannot be tested. Some writers have speculatively linked the Mandylion to the Shroud of Turin, folded to show only the face, but this remains conjectural. The image is therefore classed as debated in authenticity and lost in existence.