Was the woman who touched Jesus’s cloak Veronica?

What the Gospels say

Mark tells it inside another story. Jairus, a synagogue leader, is leading Jesus to his dying daughter through a pressing crowd. In that crowd is a woman who has bled for twelve years, has “suffered many things by many physicians,” has spent all she had, and is only getting worse (Mark 5:25–26).

having heard the things concerning Jesus, came up behind him in the crowd and touched his clothes. For she said, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be made well.”

Under Leviticus 15, a flow like hers made her ritually impure, and whatever she touched as well. Impure is not sinful, but it kept her at the edge of village life. Matthew and Luke say she touched the fringe of his cloak, the tassels that Numbers 15:38 commanded on every Israelite garment. The bleeding stops. Jesus turns and asks who touched him. Trembling, she tells him “all the truth,” and he calls her “Daughter” (Mark 5:33–34).

Mark, Matthew and Luke all tell the story. Not one of them gives her name.

A statue at Caesarea Philippi

The first writer to say more is Eusebius of Caesarea, writing around AD 300. In his Church History (7.18) he reports that the woman came from Caesarea Philippi, at the springs of the Jordan, and that at the gate of her house stood a bronze statue: a woman on her knees, hands stretched out toward a standing man. Eusebius says he saw it himself. He still gives her no name.

Then she gets a name

The name appears in the Acts of Pilate, a Christian account of Jesus’s trial later known as the Gospel of Nicodemus and usually dated to the fourth century. Witnesses step forward to defend Jesus before Pilate. A woman cries out from a distance that she had bled for twelve years and was healed when she touched the hem of his garment, and her testimony is waved away because she is a woman. Some Greek copies call her Bernice, Berenikē; the Latin calls her Veronica (Acts of Pilate 7).

Berenike is a Macedonian name meaning “bringer of victory.” Medieval writers explained Veronica instead as vera icon, “true image,” a pun that leads straight to the second story.

Veronica’s veil

By the Middle Ages another legend had grown. On the road to Golgotha a woman of Jerusalem wipes the sweat and blood from Jesus’s face with her veil, and his face stays printed on the cloth. Later versions have her take it to Rome, where it cures the emperor Tiberius. The scene became the sixth Station of the Cross, “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.” A relic called the Veil of Veronica is kept in St Peter’s Basilica, where Francesco Mochi’s marble Veronica rushes forward with her cloth from a niche in one of the piers under the dome.

No Gospel has this scene. Luke mentions only the women of Jerusalem who mourn as Jesus passes (Luke 23:27–28).

Two women, one name

So the answer is no, with a footnote. The Bible’s bleeding woman has no name. Ancient tradition gave her one, and a later legend gave the same name to a woman with a different story, until the two blurred, much as Mary Magdalene was merged with other women (Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute?). In Mark the nameless woman gets something better than a name: she is the only person in that Gospel whom Jesus calls “Daughter.”