The Thrust of the Holy Lance of Longinus
The story of the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine I is a powerful tale marking the birth of the Holy Roman Empire. It is said that around 312 CE, only 6 years into his reign and at a time when his rule was threatened by civil war and rebellion, he had a dream. The night before he went into battle at the Milvian Bridge in Rome against Maxentius, the leader of those opposing his rule in the West, he dreamed that a fiery cross appeared in the midday sky, and in it were the words “in this sign, conquer.” It was this dream, which some have claimed was a waking vision, that led to Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Flying the sign of the cross on his banners and emblazoning it on his soldiers’ shields, he was victorious, and afterward, he Christianized the Roman Empire. It was a watershed event in Christian history. But how true was it? The sources of this story, court bishop Eusebius and court adviser Lactantius, could not even agree on what it was Constantine saw, a cross or the superimposed first two letters of Christ’s name, chi and rho, a sort of monogram. Moreover, the notion that it was a waking vision or even a kind of miraculous celestial event that may have been seen by others appears to be a later embellishment by Eusebius. Indeed, there swirl around Constantine many dubious legends related to Christianity, and perhaps the most questionable and yet most influential centers on his mother, Flavia Helena, now the canonized St. Helena, the simple daughter of an innkeeper who had become empress upon marrying Constantine’s father. According to legend, and again, the story is murky here, after her son’s conversion to Christianity, when she was nearly eighty years of age, she undertook an arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. She went seeking the place of Christ’s crucifixion and was led to a temple dedicated to Jupiter that Roman emperor Hadrian had built atop the ruins of a former temple. This she tore down, and beneath the rubble, she is said to have discovered not only Jesus’ tomb, into which Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus deposited his remains, but also a treasure trove of crucifixion relics, most famously, the True Cross. It was after this alleged discovery that Constantine ordered the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which encompassed both the site believed to be Golgotha, where Christ was crucified, and the place said to be his tomb. Destroyed and rebuilt numerous times, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands today as one of the most important places in Christendom, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are, of course, numerous reasons to look on this legend doubtfully. First, to get it out of the way, in the tomb, there is a limestone burial bed that is claimed to be where Christ’s body was laid out, but in 2017, scientists tested the quartz within the masonry of this limestone bed, and using optically stimulated luminescence, were able to determine that the bed was built circa 345 CE, that’s after the deaths of both Helena and Constantine, and a full decade after the church was first consecrated. But even without such scientific debunking, the tale itself is hard to believe. It is not only hard to credit the notion of an eighty-year-old woman overseeing the destruction and excavation of the site, especially when the stories make it sound like she was digging through the rubble with her own hands, but when we consider exactly what has been claimed was found there, it simply strains credulity. Through the years, every possible Crucifixion relic imaginable was claimed to have been discovered at that site by St. Helena: not just the True Cross, but all three crosses used on the day of the Crucifixion, the placard placed on Christ’s cross, the seamless tunic stripped from him before his torture, the crown of thorns placed on his head, the nails used to crucify him, and even the marble stairs that Jesus climbed to Pontius Pilate’s palace, and, unbelievably, as I have mentioned before in one of my Xmas specials, the remains of the Three Wise Men. All of this, remember, is said to have been uncovered beneath the rubble of a Roman pagan temple by an elderly empress. Clearly the tale was simply used in later pious frauds as a go-to, readymade provenance for fraudulent artifacts. And one cannot help but wonder, then, about the original discovery of the site, if it happened at all as is claimed. In some versions of the story, a guide led Helena to the site. Could this person have simply been putting one over on the old woman? Might he have perpetrated one of the earliest pious frauds by planting “relics” there for her to find? It’s impossible to know now, but we see in the story how religious belief breeds superstition, which further breeds myth and legend and fraud, and this is a perfect explanation of the further, expansive myths surrounding one of the most mysterious and famous relics said to have been discovered by St Helena: the Holy Lance, used by the Roman centurion Longinus to pierce the side of Christ on the Cross.
Although, as we will see, the story of the Holy Lance has been expanded in legend to extend much further back in time than its presumed origins at the crucifixion, the most accepted birth of this relic is at the death of Christ, on the day memorialized as Good Friday. The lance is actually mentioned in a canonical gospel, the Gospel of John, which states that Jesus was already dead when the Roman soldiers came to break his legs, a common practice in crucifixion called crurifragium, meant to hasten the deaths of the crucified by preventing them from raising their chests to breathe, and thus also preventing those being crucified from being set free and escaping in the night. One of the soldiers is said to have thrust his lance into Christ’s side, and a mixture of blood and water issues from the wound. Many are the interpretations of the significance of this blood and water. Some find metaphorical and spiritual meaning in it, while others are rather more materialist, arguing that this little detail proves the veracity of the account because it demonstrates that Christ had already died from asphyxiation, that fluid had built up around his heart as circulation ceased, and the lance pierced his pericardial sac, releasing this fluid. But to the first century author of this gospel, the detail of the blood and water seems less important than the act of piercing him itself and the fact that Christ escaped having his legs broken. This is emphasized in John because it is said to represent a fulfillment of prophecy, as Psalm 34 verse 20 states “He keeps all their bones, not one of them will be broken.” Never mind the fact that this Psalm is describing how God rescues all the righteous from afflictions, rather than representing an explicit prophecy of the Messiah. This is somewhat common, though. For example, Matthew points out the drink of vinegar and gall offered to Christ, and more than one gospel features the detail that vinegar is given to him later, in a sponge on a stick lifted to his lips, and these details were important to the authors because it hearkens back to Psalm 69, a kind of prayer about delivery from one’s enemies, which mentions that the speaker is given gall to eat and vinegar to drink. Likewise, John indicates that the piercing by the lance connects Christ to other scriptures that mention one who is pierced and then looked upon. The gospel writers are clearly engaged in a process of religion-making here, scouring the Psalms and other verses in an effort to prove that Christ’s death fulfilled prophecy. Interestingly, though, it is only in the Gospel of John that this piercing with the lance is even related. Other gospels mention various conflicting miraculous signs upon Christ’s death, darkness at noon, the Temple curtain rent in half, or an earthquake that disinters the remains of saints from their tombs, and afterward mention that one Roman centurion watching Christ reacts to the sign by acknowledging that he was the son of God, or at least that he was innocent. In later retellings, this centurion who changes his mind about Christ is conflated with the soldier who pierced his side, but there is no real reason to believe the two characters are the same. The account of the piercing of Christ’s side with the lance is just another way that the Gospel of John is different from the other, Synoptic gospels, which as I’ve discussed in previous posts like The Beloved Disciple and the Authorship of John, appears to be a composite text composed some decades after the other gospels. Thus it is here, it seems, that the myth of the Holy Lance was invented, in an effort to further connect Christ to prophecy, by the unknown author or authors of the Gospel according to John.
Depiction of Helena finding the True Cross from an Italian manuscript circa 825
The centurion who wielded the lance would not receive a name until centuries later, in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, the same text that inspired much of the Grail legend that would be intertwined with that of the Holy Lance. This work, also called the Acts of Pilate, is a composite as well. Some of the oldest passages of it are believed to have been written to counteract or refute another 4th century work also called the Acts of Pilate, this one anti-Christian. The extent of the mention of the Holy Lance in this apocryphon is one line, which adds nothing to John’s account beyond the name of the soldier being “Longinus.” It has been suggested, though, that the etymology of the name proves it was entirely made up or the result of a misreading, as the name Longinus appears to just be a Latinization of the Greek word for lance, lonche. But once the figure had a name, there was no stopping the legend. Eventually, he became a full-fledged saint, and the full name of Gaius Cassius Longinus appeared out of nowhere. It may seem quite odd for a Roman soldier who stabbed Jesus to be canonized as a saint, but according to the Christian view of the account, Longinus’s act was one of mercy. It’s said that he knew Jesus’s followers needed to bury him before the Sabbath, and thus he needed to prove Christ was dead before the other soldiers broke his legs and left him for dead overnight. Thus Longinus pierced Christ in order to show he was dead and allow him to be buried according to Jewish custom, or according to some interpretations, he actually killed Christ with his thrust, putting him out of his misery and ensuring that prophecy would be fulfilled by making the breaking of his legs unnecessary. This certainly puts a positive spin on a seemingly callous act. According to the hagiography of Saint Longinus, we learn that he inherited the lance from his father, who had been given it by Julius Caesar himself, and that he had very poor eyesight but was miraculously healed and could see perfectly after the blood of Christ trickled down his lance and touched his hand. It is said that after this miracle, he left the service of Rome and devoted his life to his newfound Christian faith, either as a monk or as a wandering sage. According to one account he was tortured by the Roman governor of Caesarea and executed. Like the relics of Christ, and his own lance, there are numerous competing claims about what happened to his body, which as a saint would itself be a powerful relic. Pieces of his body have been claimed at different times to reside in Cappadocia, in Turkey; on Sardinia, an isle in the Mediterranean; in a castle in Prague, Czechoslovakia; and of course, in the Vatican. However, hagiographic writings, that is biographies of saints, are notorious for their fictionalizing of figures, even when, unlike Longinus, their actual existence seems more likely. But interestingly the hagiography, which was in such a large part responsible for the legend of the Holy Lance, completely contradicts the story of St. Helena, as it’s said, rather than interring it in Christ’s tomb with all the other Crucifixion relics, that Longinus kept his lance.
Just where the Holy Lance ended up, whether carried by Longinus himself or taken by others, is a question with many convoluted answers. Among the first rumors of its whereabouts are the accounts of 6th-century scholars and pilgrims to the Holy Land. Both Gregory of Tours and Cassiodorus claimed that the Holy Lance was in Jerusalem, though neither had been there and seen it for themselves. One anonymous pilgrim, called by historians the Piacenza Pilgrim after the city in Italy from which he hailed, claimed to have seen it around 570 CE in a church on Mount Zion. And a Latin guidebook for Christian pilgrims of uncertain date also mentions its presence in Jerusalem. In the early 7th century, following the Persian sack of Jerusalem, one Greek chronicle relates that the tip of the lance was snapped off and carried to Constantinople. In the late 7th century, Arculf, a Frankish pilgrim who was supposedly shipwrecked in Scotland on his return from the Holy Land and related the things he had seen there, claimed to have seen the Holy Lance, or what remained of it, in the “basilica of Constantine,” in other words, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. These may have been tall tales, or they may have been true accounts of people having witnessed early pious frauds circulating the region. Whatever the case, around the 8th century, the presence in Constantinople of the entire Holy Lance, along with the Crown of Thorns, was attested to by numerous pilgrims. Whether this was the broken tip of the lance previously said to have made its way there, now attached to a replica lance for exhibition, or whether the rest of the Lance that Arculf had seen was later taken to Constantinople as well to be reunited with the tip, as others claim, is entirely unclear. What we see, here, though, is the beginning of a process of multiplication, as Holy Lances begin appearing all over the place.
Image of Longinus the saint.
In the year 1098, the army of the First Crusade, on its way to seize Jerusalem from the Saracens, sacked the city of Antioch and found themselves in a terrible pickle. Arab and Turkish forces promptly besieged them, and they were running out of food. That was when one peasant knight from Provençal named Peter Bartholomew claimed that he had received a vision. An angel had visited him, he said, and revealed that the Holy Lance was buried beneath the cathedral of St. Peter right there in Antioch. The bishop who traveled with the army was skeptical. First, Bartholomew was a drunk and a rake, not the sort of man whom angels visit, and second, he most probably was aware of the claims that the Holy Lance resided in Constantinople. But Peter Bartholomew’s patron, Raymond, the Count of Toulouse, was intrigued. So they excavated beneath the cathedral while the armies of Islam waited outside the walls. At first, they found nothing and were about to give up, but then, rather suspiciously, Peter Bartholomew himself jumped into the hole and suddenly produced an iron spearhead. The discovery convinced their beleaguered forces that God was on their side, and a further vision proclaimed by Peter Bartholomew inspired the starving men to burst out from the walled city in a last-ditch attack, and miracle of miracles, they actually routed their enemies in a glorious triumph that they largely attributed to their discovery of the Holy Lance. Only afterward did doubts creep in, as men began pointing out that this was a spear, not a lance, and that the Holy Lance was actually in Byzantium. Some said they had actually seen it there. Peter Bartholomew insisted that his find must be the real deal, though. After all, it had shepherded them to an unlikely victory against those they considered infidels. In a gambit that seems to indicate he truly believed in the spear himself, Peter Bartholomew volunteered to undergo an ordeal by fire to prove his Lance was genuine. Logs were stacked and set on fire, and Peter, carrying the iron spear, walked through a narrow passage between them, passing through the fire that he seems to have been sure would not harm him so long as he carried the relic. Instead, he was horrifically burned when he emerged and perished from his injuries. This Lance was discredited by Peter’s death in the ordeal, though some tried to say maybe it wasn’t the Lance of Longinus but actually one of the Holy Nails. By then, though, this supposed relic had served its purpose by then, and already there were others being proclaimed elsewhere.
Certainly the most famous of artifacts claimed to be the Lance of Longinus is the Hofburg Spear, or Holy Lance of Vienna. This weapon, which is typical of the Carolingian period, is a winged lance with a pointed, ovular hole chiseled out of the blade for the placement of an ornamental pin in the core of the weapon’s head. Interestingly, this artifact has a long history. Originally, it was actually said to be the lance of Saint Mauritius, the legendary 3rd-century leader of the martyred Theban Legion who resisted the Christian persecutions of Emperor Maximian. As an artifact associated with a saint, then, it was already a holy relic, but it was not considered a relic of the Crucifixion until the 10th century. The story connecting this relic to the crucifixion actually comes from one single account, by Luitprand of Cremona, as an addendum to his narrative of Otto the Great’s struggles against rebellious dukes. Interestingly, this first account, which discusses Otto’s veneration of the lance and how it ensured his victory in battle, claimed that it was important not because it was the Lance of Longinus, but because it had once belonged to Emperor Constantine. The connection to the crucifixion came with the claim that a nail from the crucifixion, supposedly retrieved from the Holy Land by St. Helena, was fastened to the lance, and this claim remains today, with the central pin within the blade asserted to be a Holy Nail. Luitprand is clear about custody of this lance strengthening claims to the throne. Thus this lance, which was already associated with Holy Roman Emperors before Luitprand mythologized it, became a symbol of legitimacy inextricably linked to sovereignty and divine right. Interestingly, it would not be until the 13th century that this lance, which had never previously been claimed to be the Lance of Longinus, came to be considered the Holy Lance—twice holy, really, in that it was claimed to be the Lance of Longinus with a Holy Nail attached! In the 11th century, a silver covering was placed over the blade by Henry IV, inscribed Nail of Our Lord, and demonstrating the evolution of its legend, in the 14th century, Charles IV replaced it with a golden covering that read “Lance and Nail of the Lord.” By that time, it was already being used officially as part of the coronation, cementing its further role as symbol of royal legitimacy. By the 15th-century, it was officially considered part of the Imperial Regalia, kept at Nuremberg. It would be moved from there to Vienna, Austria, when the French Revolutionary Army marched on Nuremberg in 1796, eventually coming into the possession of the Habsburg dynasty. The evolving claims about the Holy Lance of Vienna show that everyone wanted a Holy Lance of their own, to the point that they sought to mythologize their past in order to write themselves into the story of the Holy Lance.
A depiction of the discovery of the lance at Antioch.
While physical lances and spears were showing up and being mythologized on all sides of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, a rather unique Holy Lance legend developed in England, inextricably linked with the legend of the Holy Grail. This began in France, however, in the work of Chretien de Troyes that I discussed so much in the previous post. In his story, Perceval, the young knight, as a guest of the Fisher King, sees a bleeding lance carried in the grail procession. It is certainly debatable whether de Troyes intended this image of a bleeding lance to represent the Holy Lance. As I stated in my last post, the image of blood running down the length of a lance certainly recalls the hagiographic legends of the Holy Lance, and how Christ’s redemptive blood ran down it and touched Longinus’s hand, thereby healing his poor eyesight. Moreover, as his patron Philip of Flanders was a crusader, he very well may have heard the story of the lance found at Antioch and wanted the fabled Holy Lance written into this chivalric romance. However, most grail romances—those of Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, for example—do not explicitly relate this bleeding lance to the Lance of Longinus. Even Robert de Boron, who incorporated the apocryphal tale of Joseph of Arimathea from the Gospel of Nicodemus into Grail lore, makes no mention whatsoever of Longinus or his lance. Instead, in de Troyes, the lance is discussed only as a powerful weapon, one so powerful that a single blow from it could destroy all of England. In von Eschenbach, it is the poisonous weapon that grievously wounded the Fisher King. Some scholars have therefore suggested that the image was rather meant to reference a fairy spear of Celtic legend, the Fiacail or Luin, which causes great destruction and is venomous. Or perhaps it was intended to represent the spear of the legendary King Cormac of Ireland, called the Crimall or the Bloody Spear. But just as with the Grail, in continuations and later works the sacred dimension of this lance is stressed, and it becomes the focus of Sir Gawain’s quest. If Chretien de Troyes did not intend this identification in the first place, if it was not suggested to him by his patron, it didn’t really matter, because such is the nature of the Holy Lance myth that it becomes identified with any lance or spear mentioned in history. Once the idea was dreamed up that Longinus and his lance accompanied Joseph of Arimathea to ancient Britain, any and all lances or spears prominent in ancient British lore could be said to have been the Holy Lance, even though there had never been any indication that they were the Holy Lance before the Grail Romances. So the spear wielded by legendary warrior queen Boudica, who led an uprising against the Roman Empire, is claimed to have been the Holy Lance, and even King Arthur’s mythical spear, the Rhongomyniad, can be said to have been the Holy Lance, all with no evidence or without even a shred of corroboration in folkloric traditions.
This same superimposing of medieval myth over ancient lore extended even further back, with some developments of the Holy Lance legend seeking to trace its existence prior to when it came into Longinus’s possession. These tales, again, find mention of a lance or spear and argue this too must have been the fabled Holy Lance. Thus the spear thrown by King Saul at the young David must too have been the Lance, and Joshua must have raised this very lance at the head of the army of Israelites as the walls of Jericho fell, and when the priest Phinehas brought an end to a plague visited on the Israelites for sexual intermingling by running an Israelite man and a Midianite woman through with a javelin while they were in the act, that also must have been the Holy Lance in his hand, the conspiracists will say. One alternative history even traces the origin of the lance to Tubal-Cain, a descendant of Cain and a metalsmith mentioned briefly in Genesis. According to this legend, Tubal-Cain saw a fire fall from heaven, and when he looked for where it had fallen, he found a strange metal. That’s right, this legend, attributed to “ancient” Masonic texts, claims that the Holy Lance was forged more than 3000 years before the Common Era from a meteorite, a magical weapon formed of extra-terrestrial metal. To corroborate this notion, some armchair etymologists have claimed that the name Cain means “spear,” and Tubal means “bringer,” making Tubal-Cain literally mean “bringer of the spear.” Here’s the thing. This legend certainly did originate from the alternative histories of Freemasonic ritual, as with their focus on crafting, they revere Tubal-Cain as a supposed originator of such arts. His name is even a secret password used by Masons to recognize each other. But as I’ve spoken about before, despite what Freemasons claim about their order, this fraternal organization began in the Middle Ages as a guild system providing lodgings for traveling stonemasons who plied their trade far from home, working on the construction of great castles and cathedrals. The mythical ideas about the order’s ancient origins did not emerge until the 18th century, when it became a different sort of organization, an old boy’s club composed of upper-crust “speculative” masons, rather than actual stonemasons, whom they would call “operative” masons. Stories like these about Tubal-Cain were just the result of a secret society romanticizing its past. And the etymology of Tubal-Cain is entirely wrong. Cain actually means “smith,” or “forger.” The idea that it meant “spear” may derive from the fact that spears were, of course, forged. And Tubal means “spice,” giving the sense that Tubal-Cain’s workmanship represented a seasoning or improvement of the art of smithing. All of it, then, much like the legend of Longinus, is just an embellishment of a single mention in the Bible of a person described only as “a forger of all instruments.”
Photo of the Hofburg Spear said to be the Holy Lance and claimed by Trevor Ravenscroft to be the object of Hitler’s obsession. Photo credit: Saibo (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Among the worst of the speculators and fabricators of the myth of the Holy Lance, and the person almost single-handedly responsible for the conspiracy theories surrounding it today, was Trevor Ravenscroft, author of The Spear of Destiny. Ravenscroft is among the worst offenders in speculating about ownership of the Holy Lance throughout history, claiming as if it were fact that the relic was carried into battle by 45 different emperors. I have spoken about Ravenscroft before, briefly, in part two of my series on Nazi Occultism. If you aren’t familiar with his book, it posits that Hitler saw the Holy Lance of Vienna at the Hofburg in his youth, researched it and discovered its power, and was inspired to seize power by the relic, which he eventually acquired through his annexation of Austria in 1938. I recently reread the book, and I honestly can’t understand how anyone takes it seriously. As I said before, he makes claims that biographers of Hitler have proven inaccurate, including claims about where he was and what his financial situation was at certain times, and the plot of his story contains too many coincidences to be credited. Like most conspiracists, he takes material out of context and presents material from unreliable sources as if they were fact, relying on quotes from Hitler’s school friend August Kubizek, whose credibility has been challenged by scholars, to portray Hitler as being obsessed with the Hof Museum and some research that he was undertaking in its library. In fact, after cashing in with his book on young Hitler, Kubizek admitted in a private letter to an archivist that Hitler was not so studious and never seemed much of a reader. More than this, though, Ravenscroft presents direct quotations from Hitler about his obsession with the Holy Lance that are not at first properly cited. Eventually it becomes clear that these quotations were supposedly told to Ravenscroft by a Grail researcher named Walter Stein. Much of the book depicts Ravenscroft’s conversations with Stein, and the central conceit of the book is that Stein would have written himself about all this first-hand knowledge he had of Hitler’s occult obsession with the Lance, if he had lived long enough.
In fact, none of the written work that Stein left behind indicates that he had any interest in the Holy Lance, beyond its connection to Grail lore, and there is no evidence that he ever met Hitler as the book claims. More than this, during a court case in which Ravenscroft sued a novelist for using his intellectual property in a work of fiction, Ravenscroft essentially admitted that he’d made the whole thing up, that he’d never even met Stein except through the faculties of a medium in a séance, and that all the unsupported historical claims he made in the book were dreamed up through transcendental meditation. In retrospect, this should have been obvious. In the very introduction of the book he describes a process of writing about history and discovering previously unknown truths about the past through a “transcendent faculty” or “clairvoyant vision” and only later seeking confirmation of findings through historical research. One would be hard pressed to describe a less reliable approach to historical research than this. The truth of the matter is that Hitler was interested in the Hofburg Spear, though all signs indicate that he was only interested in it as part of the regalia that represented imperial legitimacy. To acquire the regalia would be good fodder for his propaganda machine; that is all. Through his psychic research, Ravenscroft supposedly learned that General George Patton personally recovered the Spear of Destiny at the conclusion of World War II, and that possession of the Holy Lance is what thereafter transformed America into a global superpower. In fact, there’s no record of Patton ever handling the artifact himself—that too must have been glimpsed in a vision—and the U.S. promptly returned it, with the rest of the Imperial Regalia, to the Hofburg. It boggles the mind that anyone could read this book and think it presents accurate historical fact. And yet some do, and from this morass of conspiracy speculation have sprung further bonkers conspiracist claims, like those of Jim Keith, Jerry E. Smith, and George Piccard, claims of Hitler’s survival and phony decoy lances kept in secret Antarctic bases, and of course, flying saucers thrown in for good measure.
A photograph of the less-than-credible Trevor Ravenscroft. (Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.)
Today, the number of relics contending for the title of the Holy Lance has diminished. The broken tip of the lance once venerated in Constantinople was sold to the French Crown and enshrined in Paris, but during the French Revolution, it disappeared. The other, intact lance venerated at Constantinople was seized by the Turks and was later sent to Rome, but with the rival lance in Nuremberg, as well as another that had cropped up in Armenia, the Church has never made any official claim of its authenticity. It is kept with other relics beneath the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, and it’s trotted out, along with other relics, during Lent, to be gawped at. The lance discovered buried at Antioch by Peter Bartholomew may have been lost when the army of Raymond, Count of Toulouse, was annihilated by Turks in the doomed Crusade of 1101, but interestingly, Raymond of Toulouse may have given the Antioch lance to the emperor when he returned to Byzantium. And that means that the lance given back to Rome may actually have been the lance found at Antioch. Ironically, in the 18th century, the Catholic Church declared the lance found at Antioch, possibly the very one that they display every year, to be a pious fraud. As for the Hofburg Spear, in 2003, scientific tests demonstrated that the body of the spear was no older than the 7th century, in one swift stroke cutting through decades of conspiracy theory BS. As for the pin in the center of the blade, claimed to be a Holy Nail, this could not be dated and is said to be at least consistent in size and shape with a Roman nail of the 1st century. But it must be remembered that even if this were proven to be a 1st century Roman nail, that doesn’t mean it is genuinely from the Crucifixion. There are nails all over the world that are claimed to be Holy Nails, far too many nails for them all to be genuine. The phenomenon of pious fraud leaves us unable to give credence to any of them.
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Until next time, remember, there is a difference between popular books on history, and actual historical research. Sometimes you can tell by looking at the book flap and checking out the author’s bona fides, but on The Spear of Destiny, it claimed Ravenscroft “studied history under Dr. Walter Johannes Stein for twelve years,” which we now know to be a lie. You might also discern the quality of such a book by examining how it is categorized. The fact that Ravenscroft’s book is categorized under “occultism” is a pretty clear indication that it shouldn’t be read as if it were a reliable work of history.
Further Reading
Adelson, Howard L. “The Holy Lance and the Hereditary German Monarchy.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 48, no. 2, 1966, pp. 177–92. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3048362. Accessed 14 June 2023.
Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Brown, Arthur C. L. “The Bleeding Lance.” PMLA, vol. 25, no. 1, 1910, pp. 1–59. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/456810. Accessed 14 June 2023.
Callahan, Tim. “Holy Relics, Holy Places, Wholly Fiction.” Skeptic, 13 Sep. 2022, https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/holy-relics-holy-places-wholly-fiction/
Cavendish, Richard. “The Discovery of the Holy Lance.” History Today, vol. 48, no. 6, June 1998, www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/discovery-holy-lance.
Jarus, Owen. “’Tomb of Jesus’ Dates Back Nearly 1,700 Years.” 28 Nov. 2017, www.livescience.com/61043-tomb-of-jesus-excavated.html.
Nickell, Joe. Relics of the Christ. University of Kentucky Press, 2007.
Nitze, William A. “The Bleeding Lance and Philip of Flanders.” Speculum, vol. 21, no. 3, 1946, pp. 303–11. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2851373. Accessed 14 June 2023.
