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After putting down the first Jewish revolt, Titus carried on a torrid love affair with the beautiful Hasmonean princess, Berenike (Bernice), at Banias (Caesarea Philippi). He wanted to make her Empress, but the people of Rome wouldn't stand for it, so he sent her back to her country to wait -- and never called.
Eusebius of Caesarea Maritima, in the fourth century, recorded seeing at Banias a piece of bronze statuary in which a woman bending on one knee extended her hand as a suppliant to a standing man whose hand reached toward her. This may have been a local memory of the Titus-Berenike affair. Or it could have been related to Hadrian's coins, which showed the Emperor in a similar gesture, restoring rights to his provinces. The Christian citizens of Caesarea Philippi (Banias), however, interpreted the pair of statues as representing Jesus healing the woman with an issue of blood. By the fourth century they were calling her Berenike!
According to another legend, current by 400, Jesus sent his portrait to a princess of Edessa named Berenike. The two or three Berenikes were then identified. B became V and we got Veronica. In medieval legend, she acquired her picture of Jesus not from correspondence with him, but rather from the cloth she used to wipe his face on the Via Dolorosa.
For most of the above we used Chadwick, pp. 280-281.
The Via DolorosaStopping at the Stations of the Cross
© 2003 Near East Tourist Agency (NET) Text © 2003 Stephen Langfur
Scripture taken from the NEW A
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