Do Angels Have Wings?

I was curious a while ago why angels are always depicted with wings. Because in the angels-saved-me accounts, you generally hear about angels *appearing* on the scene to help someone, not flapping in like great big ol’ condors.  

Even in the bible it says the angel who was dispatched to tell Mary that her baby was going to be Jesus ‘came to her’ (nothing about wings). “[He] said ‘Greetings! The Lord has blessed you and is with you.’ Mary was very startled by what the angel said and wondered what this greeting might mean.”

A thing as big as a man flapping in would be noteworthy, yet it says she was afraid of his greeting, what he said. Nothing about winged beings.

Doreen Virtue, who has done a lot of work around describing angels says the wing thing is all a misunderstanding.

“Interestingly, angels never used their wings for transportation. The angels explained that they only appeared with wings so that we would recognize them. Apparently the early Renaissance painters mistook the angels’ aura glow for wings, so they painted them that way. Ever since the angels have shape-shifted to meet our expectations. Angels transport themselves—not through wing-propelled flight, but through mental manifestation. In other words, they imagine where they want to be, and they’re instantly there.”

A site called  “A Witness to the Truth of the Bible” more or less agrees with this but blames the pagans:

“The idea of wings probably entered 'Christianity' through the ideas of Paganism. Many of the pagan 'Gods' had wing.[sic]

These inventions of man would have been given wings because in ancient times this was the only known way of flying and traveling swiftly.”

-- and gives many examples of how angels appeared to everyone to look like ordinary men:

“We can see that angels were in the form of men because often they are described and mistaken for 'men'. Consider these verses:

“And the angel of the LORD appeared unto the woman, and said unto her, Behold now, thou art barren, and bearest not: but thou shalt conceive, and bear a son… And Manoah arose, and went after his wife, and came to the man, and said unto him, Art thou the man that spakest unto the woman?”  [Judges 13:3+11]

Angels may spake, but apparently they don't fly.

The reason the wings thing might make even a fig of a difference is this: people who believe in angels say that angels help us a lot and that we all have one or some guardian angels who constantly help us. And that we can ask for their assistance. 

So if we can only see angels in terms of winged beings flapping into our lives, then we could be missing the rather ordinary-looking entities who may appear at our sides trying to offer us guidance or assistance.  We may be missing something important. 

It's a bit like those people who envision Jesus arriving for the Second Coming on a cloud vs. those, like the Christian painter Stephen Sawyer, who can imagine Jesus arriving next time in blue jeans . . . or  that Jesus might manifest as a homeless person asking for some cash and see how his followers behave.

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P.S.   Doreen Virtue adds that faeries are a bit different in the wings dept.: “Fairies, in contrast, do use their wings to get round. Even though they’re much smaller than angels, fairies have denser bodies—similar to the difference between the weight of a large cloud versus a wooden pencil. So, while the fairies are brilliant manifesters, they still rely upon the physics of wings to transport themselves.”