​From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have used icons, images of Christ, to engage with the story of their faith. However, icons are far more than ancient pictures of Jesus: they are windows on the holy and transcendental, and they tell the New Testament story in a way that makes it real even to those exploring it from a distance. Knowing that this is a story based in geographical fact, J. Richard Smith has visited many of the places where the New Testament story happened, and here he takes us along on his travels tracing the story of icons, to places like Jerusalem, Athens, Istanbul and Cairo, and also to the final resting place of the Cloth of Edessa hidden in the hills in southern Italy. Combining spiritual writing, art history and travelogue, J. Richard Smith invites us to discover that there is more to icons than meets the eye.​

This book incorporates pilgrimage, travelogue, and the New Testament story, as told in Eastern Orthodox iconography, with visits to those sites today. Richard writes in a highly readable, engaging style with personal accounts of his journeys, meetings with people on the way and graphic descriptions of the fascinating places he has visited. He includes comments which range from the poignant to the humorous in ways which make his “travelogue” so “human” that it is hard to put the book down!

The Baroness Cox