Centuries later, he was made a Saint by the early Church.Īs Sidney Kirkpatrick points out in his book Hitler’s Holy Relics, Longinus’ significance is not in his martyrdom, but in his fulfillment of Zechariahs’ prophecy in the Old Testament: He was arrested after many years of travel and forced to renounce his faith. After that day, Longinus left the army and used his status as a Roman citizen to travel across the Empire and tell his story. Recognising this miracle, Longinus kneeled before the cross. These gospels also say that when Longinus withdrew the lance from Jesus’ side and blood spurt forth, a few drops fell into Longinus’ eyes, healing his vision miraculously.
These texts describe Longinus as a centurion who had served Rome on many campaigns, and who had been assigned to Mount Calvary by Pilate, after his eyesight had deteriorated, preventing him from joining active service. The New Testament passage (John 19:34) doesn’t name the soldier, although he is identified as Longinus in one of the apocripha, the Gnostic Gospels that were not chosen to be part of the orthodox Gospel at the council of Nicea in 325 AD. To ascertain whether Jesus was dead, a Roman soldier drove a spear into his side, with blood and water spurting forth from the wound. According to Jewish law, execution could not take place on a holy day and his body had to be removed and buried before sunset. Jesus was crucified on a Friday before Passover. The lance’s sanctity is linked to its use at a key moment in Christ’s life: his crucifixion. Their importance lies in the fact they captured the devotion and imagination of generations of Christians. One is on display in the Vatican, although the Church has made no claim as to its authenticity, and the other is kept in Echmiadzin, Armenia.īut the key to relics is not their authenticity. In the Spear of Destiny’s instance, there are two more known examples of the same relic. The Knights Templar were often employed to assess the genuine nature of a relic.īecause of the fall of the Roman Empire and the clandestine nature of the first Christian colonies, it is impossible to know how genuine some relics really are and there are often several copies of the same relic. The crusades brought another wave of relics to Europe and relics became a profitable trade, exploited by merchants who sold false ones. The first and most famous relic reaching the Holy Roman Empire was a piece of the actual cross unearthed by Helena, emperor Constantine’s mother, when she visited Jerusalem in c.325 AD. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land were the second reason for the development of relics. Santiago de Compostela in Spain is a good example. Much of the medieval hagiographical material was didactical and some of it was used to promote pilgrimages to the holy relics. In France and Italy, these accounts spread across a much wider audience because they were translated into the vernacular, the language used by common people at the time. These accounts begun in the fourth to sixth centuries AD among some of the first Christian colonies in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire and later spread to Western Europe.
Hagiography (from the Greek hagios, meaning “saint” and graphe, meaning “writing”) as a literary genre included the story of the life of a saint, the miracles performed during his life and those performed by his body after death. First, because of the emergence of hagiography as a literary genre across Europe. Relics gained importance in the Middle Ages for two reasons. According to Christian tradition, the object has the power to perform miracles. It is hard to understand the significance of this lance as a “holy relic” after all, why should we treasure an object that was used to torture someone? The history of this lance is long and controversial.Ī “relic”, from the Latin reliquiae (literally, “remains”) is an object that belonged to or an actual part of a saint’s body. The Holy Lance as displayed in the Schatzkammer