Veronica of Paneas
The Holy and Righteous Veronica of Paneas, the woman with the issue of blood
Righteous · d. 1st century
Commemorated 12 July — Commemoration of the woman healed by touching the hem of the Lord's garment
Veronica — Berenice in the Greek, and in the Gospels simply "a woman having an issue of blood twelve years" — is the woman who came up behind Christ in the press of the crowd, touched the hem of his garment, and was healed on the instant, hearing from him the words "Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole" (Matt. 9:20–22; Mark 5:25–34; Luke 8:43–48). The tradition, following the Acts of Pilate, gives her the name Veronica and makes her a woman of Paneas (Caesarea Philippi, the modern Banias), where Eusebius of Caesarea reports having seen with his own eyes the bronze group she set up in thanksgiving before her house. She is commemorated among the righteous on July 12, and is not the Veronica of the Western legend of the veil.
The Gospel account
All three Synoptic evangelists set her story inside the account of the raising of the daughter of Jairus, which it interrupts. She had suffered a flow of blood for twelve years; Mark, with characteristic bluntness, adds that she had endured much at the hands of many physicians, had spent everything she possessed, and was not better but worse. Under the Law her condition made her permanently unclean and made unclean whatever she touched, so that the whole of her approach to Christ was a transgression, and this is the point of her coming from behind and in secret, and of the trembling with which she afterwards owned what she had done.
She said within herself that if she might but touch his garments she would be whole. She touched the hem — the kraspedon, the tasselled border of the outer robe — and the fountain of her blood was dried up at once. Christ, "knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him," turned in the crowd and asked who had touched him; the disciples, seeing the multitude thronging him on every side, thought the question absurd. She came forward and fell down before him and told him all the truth, and he said to her: "Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague."
The Fathers read the episode as the pattern of faith that seizes grace without waiting to be summoned, and read the Lord's question not as ignorance but as the means of drawing a hidden healing into open confession, so that what was received in secret should be sealed in public.
Paneas and the bronze statue
The tradition that she came from Paneas — Caesarea Philippi, at the springs of the Jordan under Mount Hermon — is old and is attached to a monument. Eusebius of Caesarea (Ecclesiastical History VII.18) writes that the woman healed of the issue of blood was of that city, that her house was still pointed out there, and that at its gate stood a bronze group on a stone base: a woman kneeling with hands outstretched and, facing her, the standing figure of a man in a double cloak reaching out his hand to her. At the feet of the statue, he says, grew a strange plant which, when it had climbed as high as the hem of the bronze robe, became a remedy against all kinds of diseases — and he adds that he had seen the group himself. It was, he thought, a relic of the pagan habit of honouring benefactors with images, made by a Gentile in gratitude.
Later writers report that Julian the Apostate had the statue thrown down and his own set up in its place, that his statue was destroyed by lightning, and that the Christians gathered up the fragments of the original and kept them in their church; the account is given by Sozomen and by other fifth-century historians. Whatever the statue originally was — and modern scholars have generally supposed a Hellenistic group of an emperor and a suppliant province, reinterpreted by the local Christians — its identification with Veronica was firm by the fourth century and carried her name and her city into the synaxaria.
The name
The Gospels do not name her. The name Berenice / Bernice (Βερονίκη, Βερενίκη) — a Macedonian royal name common in Palestine — is given her in the Acts of Pilate, the apocryphon also known as the Gospel of Nicodemus, where she appears among the witnesses who come before Pilate to testify to the Lord's miracles, saying "I had an issue of blood twelve years and I touched the fringe of his garment and was healed." From that text it passed into Greek hagiography, and thence, in the Latin form Veronica, into the West.
Beyond the healing, the synaxarists say only that she attached herself to the community of the first believers and lived out her days in holiness; the notices add no martyrdom and no apostolic journey. The Great Synaxaristes of Nikodemos the Hagiorite records that she was of Paneas and that she erected the statue out of gratitude, and it is chiefly through Nikodemos that the July 12 notice reaches modern Greek calendars.
Feast and commemoration
July 12 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 25). Hers is a synaxarion commemoration rather than a liturgical feast: no proper canon or hymns are appointed for her in the Menaion, and the day's service belongs to the martyrs Proclus and Hilary of Ancyra and to Michael Maleinos. The Gospel of her healing is read on the Sunday appointed by the lectionary rather than on her day. She is invoked in cases of haemorrhage and of chronic and shameful illness, and — by an old and touching extension — by those who have spent all they have on physicians without relief.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4
Thou didst not wait to be called, O righteous Veronica, but with faith didst touch the hem of the Saviour's garment, and the fountain of thy affliction was dried up; and hearing the word "Go in peace," thou wast made whole in body and in soul. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Kontakion — Tone 2
Twelve years of blood and twelve years of physicians had spent thee, and thou hadst nothing left but faith; and with that alone thou didst reach out thy hand in the crowd, and the Lord turned and called thee daughter. O Veronica, healed and confessing, ask healing for us who are ashamed to ask.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Veronica is almost never painted alone. Her image in the Christian tradition is the scene — the Haimorroousa — and it is one of the oldest subjects in Christian art: she appears in the third-century catacomb paintings and on sarcophagi, kneeling or crouching at the feet of a standing Christ and reaching for the border of his robe, the composition manifestly related to the bronze group Eusebius described at Paneas. In Byzantine and post-Byzantine work the scene belongs to the Gospel cycles of church walls and of illuminated lectionaries, usually paired with the raising of Jairus's daughter, which the Gospel account interrupts: Christ strides forward with the apostles crowded behind him, turning his head back over his shoulder, while the woman, wrapped in a dark mantle, kneels low behind him with her hand at his hem, and the bystanders gesture in astonishment. Where she is shown as a saint in her own right — rarely, in menologia and in modern Greek work — she stands as a matron in mantle and veil, holding a cross or a scroll.
The stored image is the miniature of the Healing of the Woman with the Issue of Blood from the Armenian Gospel book illuminated by T'oros Roslin at Hromklay in 1262 (Walters Art Museum, W.539, f. 148v): Christ in blue, turning back with his hand extended, three apostles behind him with gold haloes, two onlookers at the right, and the woman prostrate at his feet in a brown mantle, her hand at the hem of his robe. The underlying manuscript is a thirteenth-century work in the public domain and the museum's photograph is a faithful flat reproduction of a two-dimensional work, so it is stored under pd-old-work; the Walters Art Museum additionally releases its own photography freely. The image is the Gospel scene, not a portrait icon of the saint, and is described as such.
Disputed questions
- Not the Veronica of the veil. Western devotion knows a Veronica who wiped the face of Christ on the way to Golgotha and received the imprint of his features on the cloth — the vera icon, whence, by a false etymology, the name itself was explained. That episode is in no Gospel and belongs to the high-medieval Latin passion-devotion; it is not part of Orthodox tradition, which knows the acheiropoieton in the quite different form of the Image Not Made by Hands sent to Abgar of Edessa (kept on August 16). The two Veronicas were conflated in the West precisely because the healed woman already bore the name. This entry is the Gospel woman only.
- Was the statue really hers? Eusebius is a first-rate witness to the existence and appearance of the monument and an interested witness to its meaning. That the group was a pagan work reinterpreted is the ordinary modern judgement; the tradition of the Church has kept Eusebius' reading. Both are recorded here.
- The date of her commemoration. July 12 is the settled Greek and Slavonic date. Some Western martyrologies place a "Veronica" on February 4 and others on July 12, but the Western entries are entangled with the legend of the veil and with a medieval Veronica of Milan, and cannot be used to control the Eastern notice.
- A second name-tradition. A few Greek sources call her Marta or identify her with other unnamed women of the Gospel; these identifications have no early support and are not followed here.
- Not to be confused with the martyr Veronica commemorated with Speratus five days later on July 17 (Speratus and Veronica) — a quite different saint, of whom the Greek synaxarion transmits nothing but the name and a beheading.