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The Face Veil

In this paper I wish to suggest an interpretation of the face veil (soudarion) which, according to Jn 20:7, Simon Peter and the Beloved Disciple found in the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning. This verse of the fourth gospel has occasioned some of the most ingenious hypotheses, not to mention some of the wildest flights of fancy, in the history of johannine exegesis. At risk of adding to one or both of these questionable categories, I would like to propose yet another interpretation which I will summarize here by way of introduction: The face veil is best understood as a johannine semeion, i.e., as a sign in and through which a properly disposed person can encounter the glory of God revealed in Jesus. It is difficult to treat any passage of John's gospel without getting oneself involved in the numerous critical questions about the fourth gospel which remain unsolved. The position one adopts on these questions inevitably determines, to some extent, one's exegesis of the passage under consideration. This is perhaps especially true for the resurrection narrative material and particularly for the tomb account in Jn 2O:l-10. The passage raises at least the question of sources (Brown, 1970: xiii-mi; Ghiberti: 79-99), of the necessity of resurrection material in a gospel in which the glorification of Jesus is accomplished by his death on the cross (Suggs: 325; Evans: 1 16; Schlier: 25-26), of the identity of the Beloved Disciple and his relationship with Simon Peter (Barclay; Mahoney), of the relationship of seeing to believing (Schneiders: 227, n. 15), and of the role of the signs in faith (Nicol). Obviously, it is impossible to treat all of these preliminary questions directly in a paper of this length. But I think it important to state,without attempting to fully justify them, three critical presuppositions which govern the proposed exegesis of the w. 3-8 and the resulting interpretation of the face veil as a johannine semeion.