other · 30 · Jerusalem
No gospel contains this. There is no woman with a cloth on the road to Golgotha in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, and no Veronica anywhere in the New Testament. What there is: a relic at Saint Peter's called the Veronica by the eleventh century, a devotion that grew around it, and a name that most philologists read as vera icon — true image — turned into a person. The Acts of Pilate then attach the name to the woman with the issue of blood from Mark 5, which is a second identification stacked on the first. This dataset keeps the row and marks it legendary, on the same principle as James in Hispania and Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury: the claim is weak and its effects are enormous, and a reader who finds nothing here would reasonably assume the story is in the gospels. Marking it is the only way to say that it is not.
The sixth station of the cross, and one of the largest devotions in Western Christianity resting on nothing in scripture.