***SPOILERS for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny***
The opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny with Indy and Basil Shaw infiltrating a Nazi plunder train presented the filmmakers with the opportunity for a significant ‘bait and switch’. Some of the fun in the run up to a new Indiana Jones film, show or game is trying to figure out/guess what the ‘MacGuffin’ – the object or device that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters – is going to be if it is not specifically named in the title.
One such long-proposed historical item to succeed the Ark of the Covenant, Sankara stones, the Holy Grail, and the crystal skull of the movies and the lost city of Atlantis, the ‘Staff of Moses’ or the upcoming Great Circle of the video games was the Spear of Longinus. There may even have been a nice nod to these long-standing rumours that the Spear of Longinus could be a MacGuffin for an Indiana Jones movie in the title of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, as one other name given to the Spear of Longinus (as well as the Holy Lance) is the ‘Spear of Destiny’. Indeed, Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny was a 1995 Dark Horse Comics mini-series.
The filmmakers could have added an extra level to this ‘bait and switch’ had they followed Temple of Doom and Last Crusade in having a less identifying title – instead of Dial of Destiny, they could have gone with something like Indiana Jones and the Dawn of Destiny. Of course, given that the film has a completely different subject, revealed in the title and the opening act, the Spear of Longinus is relegated to the framing ‘sub-MacGuffin’ as the fictious Chachapoyan fertility idol (ROTLR), the remains of Nurhaci (TOD), a very real 16-17th century emperor of Qing China, a fictionalised ‘Cross of Coronado’ (TLC) and Area 51 and some of its supposed contents (KOTCS).
But what was the Spear of Longinus that Indiana Jones and the Nazis thought they had found? In the Gospel of John, what would become known as the Spear of Longinus, Spear of Destiny or the Holy Lance was a lance used to pierce the side of Jesus of Nazareth to make sure that he was dead before taking his body down off the cross for entombment.
“One of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance (λόγχη), and immediately there came out blood and water.”
John 19:34
The name of the solider who wielded the lance and stabbed the body of Jesus is not recorded in the New Testament; indeed, it does not appear in any surviving material until late manuscripts of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus attached to the 4th century Acts of Pilate. Within them, the soldier is not only identified as a centurion, but given the name Longinus; hence his ‘god-piercing’ lance became known as the ‘Lance/Spear of Longinus’.
The earliest depiction of the lance appears on an illuminated manuscript of a Syriac gospel by Rabulas in 586; the manuscript itself is in the Laurentian Library in Florence. The ‘Holy Lance’ (or in more recent occult settings – the ‘Spear of Destiny’) became revered in sixth century Jerusalem, although the association with the centurion or the name Longinus does not appear in such eastern reports until the 8th century, perhaps 400 years after it had been ‘introduced’ in the west by the Gospel of Nicodemus.
As might be thought with such a relic, there are at least four items that claim to be the Spear of Longinus or parts of it on display around the world. Unsurprisingly, one such relic presented as the Holy Lance is in St. Peter’s, Vatican City. It has a long history of seeming provenance. Several sources – the Breviary of Jerusalem (c.530), Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum (c.540-548), an anonymous pilgrim from Piacenza – posit the presence of this relic in Jerusalem during the 6th century, with specific mentions of its resting in either the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of Zion.
The Chronicon Paschale has it as one of the relics taken by the Persians upon their capture of Jerusalem in 614, and then returned to Niketas, cousin of the emperor Heraclius, who brought it to Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The next time it was mentioned in the sources – when the De Locis Sanctis describes the pilgrimage of Arculf in 670 – the Holy Lance was back in the Holy Sepulchre, possibly returned to Jerusalem along with the True Cross in 629 after the end of the Romano-Persian War. This is the last mention of it for almost 300 years and the next time it appears, it is in the Church of the Virgin of the Pharos in Constantinople.
The Latin emperor Baldwin II (1228-1273) sold the point of the lance to Louis IX of France, who placed it in Sainte Chapelle in Paris. It was moved to the Bibliotheque Nationale during the French Revolution, but has since disappeared.
The main part of the lance blade remained in Constantinople until that city fell into the hands of the Ottoman Turks, whose sultan, Bayezid II, sent the relic to Pope Innocent VIII as part of a prisoner agreement. Innocent’s tomb depicts him holding a spear blade in recognition of his reception of the Holy Lance.
Even at the time, there were doubts over the authenticity of this Holy Lance, due to the presence of other relics claiming to be the Holy Lance and not just that in Paris, a drawing of which was compared with that in the Vatican, leading to the satisfaction of Benedict XIV that the point and the blade were from the same lance.
One such other Holy Lance known in the late 15th century was that then in Nuremburg and now in the Imperial Treasury in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. It came into the possession of the Holy Roman Emperors in the 10th century, and despite it being a Carolingian style blade, it was passed off as the lance of St. Maurice, that of Constantine I and then finally the Holy Lance. It was also claimed that the nail embedded in its tip was one used during the Crucifixion, although being of the same metal as the blade, it is almost certainly from the same 8th/9th century period. This Holy Lance was moved to Nuremburg in 1424, only taken from there in fear of French Revolutionary armies, first to Ratisbon, then Passau, Linz, Vienna and then Hungary, before settling in Vienna.
Another Holy Lance known to the Vatican in the 15th century was in Armenia. Reputedly brought there by the Apostle, Judas Thaddeus, the Armenian Holy Lance is not recorded until the 13th century and was first housed in the monastery of Geghard before being moved to the religious capital of Armenia, Vagharshapat. It was removed by Russians to Tblisi in 1805, only to be returned to Vagharshapat, where it is on display in the Manoogian Museum.
Perhaps the most famous iteration of the Holy Lance was involved in the First Crusade. During the desperate Siege of Antioch in June 1098, with the crusaders facing starvation and an enormous Turkish force, a monk named Peter Bartholomew claimed that a vision from St. Andrew told him that the Holy Lance was buried in the Church of St. Peter within Antioch.
This was possibly based on pre-existing reports from the 10th century that the lance was located there. After digging in the church, Bartholomew claimed to have found a lance and, despite the doubts of many (some of whom had likely seen the Holy Lance in Constantinople the previous year), it appears that the ‘discovery’ provided enough of a morale boost to lead the crusaders to victory over the besieging Turks in the subsequent Battle of Antioch.
Despite this seeming miracle, many continued to doubt the authenticity of the lance, leading to Peter Bartholomew voluntarily undertaking an ordeal by fire to prove himself and the veracity of the lance. He died from the burns he suffered as a result, with the lance significantly discredited.
After the demise of Peter, the champion of the Antiochene Holy Lance was Raymond, count of Toulouse; however, his closeness to it did not breed the kind of military and political success he personally would have wanted. While the First Crusade was a success in not only claiming Jerusalem and establishing several other crusader states, Raymond himself was did not achieve a state of his own.
In search of aid, he may have brought the Antioch lance to Constantinople, which must have caused some awkwardness, given the presence of another Holy Lance. It is uncertain if Raymond left his lance in Constantinople or took it back to the Holy Land with him to be lost at the disaster he suffered in Anatolia in 1101 or at the Siege of Tripoli, where he perished in 1105. The lack of historical record of the Antioch lance may portray just how discredited it had been by Peter’s ordeal, Raymond’s struggles in the Levant and its comparison with the ‘actual’ Holy Lance in Constantinople.
If Raymond did leave it in Constantinople, it was not recognised as a Holy Lance by the Byzantines, with Bohemond of Antioch swearing an oath to the emperor Alexios I on the Constantinopolitan Holy Lance in 1108 and several 12th century documents recording only a single Holy Lance in the Byzantine capital. Might it even have been that either of the Holy Lance pieces sent west from Constantinople, by Baldwin II to Paris or Bayezit II to Rome, was this Antiochene lance (cf. Runciman (1950) 206-207)?
But what of the man who supposedly wielded the lance that pierce Jesus’ side? A tradition recorded in the possibly late 4th century Letter of Herod [Antipas] to Pilate had it that Longinus suffered greatly for his postmortem wounding of Jesus. Akin to the punishment of Prometheus for his giving of fire to man, Longinus was trapped in a cave where he would suffered a sustained mauling by a lion throughout the night, only for his wounds to heal during the day. This cycle was to last until the end of time (Ehrman and Pleše (2011) 523).
However, another, more widespread tradition sees Longinus associated with the unnamed centurion present at the Crucifixion who, upon seeing the upheaval caused by Jesus’ death, proclaimed him to be the Son of God (Matthew 27:54; Mark 15:39). This posits Longinus as one of the first Christians and Roman converts in late antique western tradition, although as mention above, aspects of this tradition do not seem to have appeared in eastern Christianity until the 8th century.
Another later addition to the tradition is how Longinus was cured of poor eyesight through his contact with Jesus’ blood and presumably his faith in Jesus being the Son of God, a faith he was reputedly martyred for in Gabala, Cappadocia.
‘His body’ was lost at least twice throughout history, only to be found either on Sardinia or at Mantua in northern Italy in 1304, together with the Holy Sponge still stained with Jesus’ blood. This saw the addition to Longinus’ story that he assisted with cleaning Jesus’ body when it was taken down from the cross. Longinus’ own body was then given to the Basilica of Sant'Agostino in Rome, although no official tomb of St. Longinus is presented to the public.
With its history and supposed miraculous powers (i.e. it could harm the Son of God and was covered in His blood), the Spear of Longinus has appeared in numerous other movies, TV shows and video games beyond the Indiana Jones series: The Passion of the Christ (2004) Hellboy (2004), Constantine (2005); The Unit, Legends of Tomorrow, Neon Genesis Evangelion; Wolfenstein 3D, Persona 2: Innocent Sin, Tomb Raider: Chronicles, to name but a scant few.
Bibliography
Asbridge, T. ‘The Holy Lance of Antioch: Power, Devotion and Memory on the First Crusade’, Reading Medieval Studies 33 (2007) 3-36
Ehrman, B.D. and Pleše Z. The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. New York (2011)
Runicman, S. ‘The Holy Lance Found at Antioch’, Analecta Bollandiana 68 (1950) 197-209
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