(c. 1440), Dominican monastery of San Marco, Florence.]]
The Holy Lance (also known as the Spear of Destiny, Holy Spear, Lance of Longinus, Spear of Longinus or Spear of Christ) is the name given to the lance that pierced Jesus's side as he hung on the cross in John's account of the Crucifixion.
Biblical references
The lance (Greek: longche) is mentioned only in the
Gospel of John () and not in any of the
Synoptic Gospels. The gospel states that the Romans planned to break Jesus' legs, a practice known as
crucifragium, which was a method of hastening death during a crucifixion. Just before they did so, they realized that Jesus was already dead and that there was no reason to break his legs. To make sure that he was dead, a Roman soldier (named in extra-Biblical tradition as
Longinus) stabbed him in the side.
}}
The phenomenon of blood and water was considered a miracle by Origen. Catholics generally choose to employ a more allegorical interpretation: it represents one of the main key teachings/mysteries of the Church, and one of the main themes of the Gospel of Matthew, which is the homoousian interpretation adopted by the First Council of Nicaea, that "Jesus Christ was both true God and true man." The blood symbolizes his true humanity, the water his divinity. A ceremonial remembrance of this is also done when the Eucharist is celebrated. A small amount of water is poured into the wine before consecration, which acknowledges Christ's humanity and divinity.
Longinus
miniature, Rabula Gospels, with the legend "Loginos"]]
The name of the soldier who pierced Christ's side with a longche is not given in the Gospel of John, but in the oldest known references to the legend, the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus appended to late manuscripts of the 4th century Acts of Pilate, the soldier is identified as a centurion and called Logginus or Longinus (making the spear's "correct" Latin name Lancea Longini).
A form of the name Longinus also occurs on a miniature in the Rabula Gospels (conserved in the Laurentian Library, Florence), which was illuminated by one Rabulas in the year 586. In the miniature, the name LOGINOS (ΛΟΓΙΝΟC) is written in Greek characters above the head of the soldier who is thrusting his lance into Christ's side. This is one of the earliest records of the name, if the inscription is not a later addition.
Relics claimed to be the Holy Lance
There have been three, or four, major relics that are claimed to be the Holy Lance, or parts of it.
Vatican lance
carrying one of the instances of the Holy Lance in one of the battles of the
First Crusade]]
No actual lance is known until the pilgrim Antoninus of Piacenza (AD 570), describing the holy places of Jerusalem, says that he saw in the Basilica of Mount Zion "the crown of thorns with which Our Lord was crowned and the lance with which He was struck in the side". A mention of the lance also occurs in the so-called Breviarius at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The presence in Jerusalem of this important relic is attested by Cassiodorus (c. 485 - c. 585) as well as by Gregory of Tours (c. 538 – 594), who had not actually been to Jerusalem.
In 615 Jerusalem and its relics were captured by the Persian forces of King Khosrau II (Chosroes II). According to the Chronicon Paschale, the point of the lance, which had been broken off, was given in the same year to Nicetas, who took it to Constantinople and deposited it in the church of Hagia Sophia, and later to the Church of the Virgin of the Pharos. This point of the lance, which was now set in an icon, was acquired by the Latin Emperor, Baldwin II of Constantinople, who later sold it to Louis IX of France. The point of the lance was then enshrined with the Crown of Thorns in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. During the French Revolution these relics were removed to the Bibliothèque Nationale but subsequently disappeared. (The present "Crown of Thorns" is a wreath of rushes.)
As for the larger portion of the lance, Arculpus claimed he saw it at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre around 670 in Jerusalem, but there is otherwise no mention of it after the sack in 615. Some claim that the larger relic had been conveyed to Constantinople in the 8th century, possibly at the same time as the Crown of Thorns. At any rate, its presence at Constantinople seems to be clearly attested by various pilgrims, particularly Russians, and, though it was deposited in various churches in succession, it seems possible to trace it and distinguish it from the relic of the point. Sir John Mandeville declared in 1357 that he had seen the blade of the Holy Lance both at Paris and at Constantinople, and that the latter was a much larger relic than the former; it is worth adding that Mandeville is not generally regarded as one of the Middle Ages' most reliable witnesses, and his supposed travels are usually treated as an eclectic amalgam of myths, legends and other fictions.
Whatever the Constantinople relic was, it fell into the hands of the Turks, and in 1492, under circumstances minutely described in Pastor's History of the Popes, the Sultan Bayazid II sent it to Innocent VIII to encourage the pope to continue to keep his brother and rival Zizim (Cem) prisoner. At this time great doubts as to its authenticity were felt at Rome, as Johann Burchard records, because of the presence of other rival lances in Paris (the point that had been separated from the lance), Nuremberg (see "Vienna lance" below), and Armenia (see "Echmiadzin lance" below). In the mid 18th century Benedict XIV states that he obtained from Paris an exact drawing of the point of the lance, and that in comparing it with the larger relic in St. Peter's he was satisfied that the two had originally formed one blade. This relic has never since left Rome, where it is preserved under the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica, although the Church makes no claim as to its authenticity.
Echmiadzin lance
The lance currently in
Echmiadzin,
Armenia, was discovered during the
First Crusade. In 1098 the crusader
Peter Bartholomew reported that he had a vision in which
St. Andrew told him that the Holy Lance was buried in St. Peter's Cathedral in
Antioch. After much digging in the cathedral, a lance was discovered. This was considered a miracle by the crusaders who were able to rout the
Muslim army besieging the city and decisively capture Antioch. Some Early Modern scholars (e.g.
Odorico Raynaldi in
Annales ecclesiastici and the
Bollandists) believed that this lance afterwards fell into the hands of the Turks and was in fact the lance that Bayazid II sent to Pope Innocent and which is now in the Vatican.
Vienna Lance (Hofburg spear)
The
Holy Roman Emperors had a lance of their own, attested from the time of
Otto I (912-973). In 1000
Otto III gave
Boleslaw I of Poland a replica of the Lance at the
Congress of Gniezno. In 1084
Henry IV had a silver band with the inscription "Nail of Our Lord" added to it. This was based on the belief that this was the lance of
Constantine the Great which enshrined a nail used for the Crucifixion. In 1273 it was first used in the coronation ceremony. Around 1350
Charles IV had a golden sleeve put over the silver one, inscribed "Lancea et clavus Domini" (Lance and nail of the Lord). In 1424
Sigismund had a collection of relics, including the lance, moved from his capital in
Prague to his birth place,
Nuremberg, and decreed them to be kept there forever. This collection was called the
Reichskleinodien or
Imperial Regalia.
When the French Revolutionary army approached Nuremberg in the spring of 1796 the city councilors decided to remove the Reichskleinodien to Vienna for safe keeping. The collection was entrusted to one "Baron von Hügel", who promised to return the objects as soon as peace had been restored and the safety of the collection assured. However, the Holy Roman Empire was disbanded in 1806 and the Reichskleinodien remained in the keeping of the Habsburgs. When the city councilors asked for the Reichskleinodien back, they were refused. As part of the imperial regalia it was kept in the Imperial Treasury Schatzkammer (Vienna) and was known as the lance of Saint Maurice.
During the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed to Germany, the Reichskleinodien were returned to Nuremberg and afterwards hidden. They were found by invading U.S. troops and returned to Austria by American General George S. Patton after World War II.
Dr. Robert Feather, an English metallurgist and technical engineering writer, tested the lance for a documentary in January 2003. He was given unprecedented permission not only to examine the lance in a laboratory environment, but was also allowed to remove the delicate bands of gold and silver that hold it together. In the opinion of Feather and other academic experts, the likeliest date of the spearhead is the 7th century A.D. - only slightly earlier than the Museum's own estimate. However, Dr. Feather also stated in the same documentary that an iron pin - long claimed to be a nail from the crucifixion, hammered into the blade and set off by tiny brass crosses - is "consistent" in length and shape with a 1st century A.D. Roman nail.
According to Paul the Deacon, the Lombard royal line bore the name of the Gungingi, which Karl Hauck and Stefano Gasparri maintain identified them with the name of Odin’s lance, Gungnir (a sign that they probably claimed descent from Odin, as did most of the Germanic royal lines) Paul the Deacon also notes that the inauguration rite of a Lombard king consisted essentially of his grasping of a sacred/royal lance. Milan, which had been the capital of the Western Roman Empire in the time of Constantine, was also the capital of the Lombard kings Perctarit and his son Cunipert, who became Catholic Christians in the 7th century. Thus it seems possible that the iron point of the Lombardic royal lance might have been recast in the 7th century in order to enshrine one of the 1st century Roman nails that St. Helena was reputed to have found at Calvary and brought to Milan, thus giving a new Christian sacred aura to the old pagan royal lance. If Charlemagne’s inauguration as the King of the Lombards in 774 had likewise included his grasping of this now-Christianized sacred or royal lance, this would explain how it would have eventually become the oldest item in the German imperial regalia. We might also note that the Iron Crown of Lombardy (dated to the 8th century), which eventually became the primary symbol of Lombardic kingship, takes its name from the tradition that it also contains one of the holy nails. Alternately, since Gregory of Tours in his Libri Historiarum VII, 33, states that in 585 the Merovingian king Guntram designated his nephew Childebert II his heir by handing him his lance, it is possible that a royal lance was also a symbol of kingship among the Merovingian kings and that a nail from Calvary was in the 7th century incorporated into this royal lance and thus eventually would have come into the German imperial regalia.
Other lances
Another lance has been preserved at
Krakow,
Poland, since at least the 13th century. However, German records indicate that it was a copy of the Vienna lance. Emperor
Henry II had it made with a small sliver of the original lance. Another copy was given to the Hungarian king at the same time.
The story told by William of Malmesbury of the giving of the Holy Lance to King Athelstan of England by Hugh Capet seems to be due to a misconception.
Modern legends
Richard Wagner
In his opera
Parsifal,
Richard Wagner identifies the Holy Spear with two items that appear in
Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval poem
Parzival, a bleeding spear in the Castle of the
Grail and the spear that has wounded the
Fisher King. The opera's plot concerns the consequences of the spear's loss by the Knights of the Grail and its recovery by Parsifal. Having decided that the blood on the Spear was that of the wounded Saviour - Christ is never named in the opera - Wagner has the blood manifest itself in the Grail rather than on the spearhead.
Trevor Ravenscroft
The "Spear of Destiny" is a name given to the Holy Lance in various accounts that attribute mystical powers to it. Many of these have originated in recent times, and several popular
New Age and
conspiracy theory books have popularized the legend of the Spear.
Trevor Ravenscroft’s 1973 book, The Spear of Destiny (as well as a later book, The Mark of the Beast), claims that Adolf Hitler started World War II in order to capture the spear, with which he was obsessed. At the end of the war the spear came into the hands of US General George Patton. According to legend, losing the spear would result in death, and that was fulfilled when Hitler committed suicide.
Ravenscroft repeatedly attempted to define the mysterious “powers” that the legend says the spear serves. He found it to be a hostile and evil spirit, which he sometimes referred to as the Antichrist, though that is open to interpretation. He never actually referred to the spear as spiritually controlled, but rather as intertwined with all of mankind's ambitions.
Howard Buechner
Dr. Howard A. Buechner, M.D., professor of medicine at
Tulane and then
Louisiana State University, wrote two books on the spear. Buechner was a retired colonel with the
U.S. Army who served in World War II and had written a book about the
Dachau massacre. He claims he was contacted by a former
U-boat submariner, the pseudonymous “Capt. Wilhelm Bernhart,” who claimed the spear currently on display in Vienna is a fake. "Bernhart" said the real spear was sent by Hitler to
Antarctica along with other Nazi treasures, under the command of Col.
Maximilian Hartmann. In 1979 Hartmann allegedly recovered the treasures. Bernhart presented Buechner with the log from this expedition as well as pictures of the objects recovered, claiming that after the Spear of Destiny was recovered, it was hidden somewhere in Europe by a Nazi secret society. After contacting most of the members of the alleged expedition and others involved, including
Hitler Youth Leader
Artur Axmann, Buechner became convinced the claims were true.
References
Further reading
Brown, Arthur Charles Lewis. Bleeding Lance. Modern Language Association of America, 1910
Childress, David Hatcher. Pirates and the Lost Templar Fleet: The Secret Naval War Between the Knights Templar and the Vatican. Adventures Unlimited Press, 2003.
Crowley, Cornelius Joseph. The Legend Of The Wanderings Of The Spear Of Longinus. Heartland Book, 1972.
Hone, William. The Lost Books of the Bible. Bell Publishing Co., 1979.
Rutman, Leo. Spear Of Destiny: A Novel. Pinnacle Books, 1989.
Sheffy, Lester Fields. Use of the Holy Lance in the First Crusade. L.F. Sheffy, 1915.
External links
Piercing an Ancient Tale Solving the mystery of a Christian relic by Maryann Bird is an article in the European Edition of TIME magazine on British metallurgist Robert Feather’s scientific examination of the Spear in Vienna.
Category:Christian folklore
Category:Crusades
Category:Imperial Regalia of the Holy Roman Empire
Category:Medieval legends
Category:Mythological weapons
Category:Relics associated with Jesus
Category:Spears
Category:Christian terms
