Longinus the Centurion

The centurion of the Gospels

Longinus enters history anonymously, in the three sentences the Synoptic Gospels give to the officer in charge of the Crucifixion. Matthew writes that "the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done," and "feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God" (Matthew 27:54). Mark sets the confession at the moment of Christ's death-cry (Mark 15:39); Luke gives it the form "Certainly this was a righteous man" (Luke 23:47). The fourth Gospel adds, without a name, the soldier who "with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water" (John 19:34).

The Church's tradition gathered these figures into one man. The centurion who confessed and the soldier who pierced are identified with each other from an early date, and the guard set over the Sepulchre (Matthew 27:62–66) is placed under the same officer's command: when the soldiers of the watch fled into the city to report the Resurrection and the chief priests "gave large money unto the soldiers" to say the disciples had stolen the body (Matthew 28:11–15), Longinus and two comrades, the tradition holds, refused the bribe and would not be silent about what they had seen. The three notices — the confession at the Cross, the piercing, and the refused silver of the Tomb — form the whole scriptural dossier of the saint, and the hymnography of his feast draws on each in turn.

The name itself is first transmitted outside the Gospels. The apocryphal Acts of Pilate (the core of the later Gospel of Nicodemus) names the soldier who pierced the Lord's side "Longinus," and it is from this tradition that the name passed to the whole figure. Scholars have long observed that the name may itself derive from the spear — λόγχη (lonchē) in the Greek of John 19:34 — though Longinus was also a perfectly ordinary Roman cognomen. The earliest surviving labelled image, the Crucifixion miniature of the Syriac Rabbula Gospels (A.D. 586), already writes ΛΟΓΙΝΟΣ above the soldier thrusting the lance: by the sixth century, name and figure were fixed together across the Christian world.

From Golgotha to Cappadocia

The hagiographic tradition — transmitted in the encomium of Hesychius, presbyter of Jerusalem (5th century), in the Synaxarion of Constantinople, and in the Lives descending from them — makes Longinus a Cappadocian by birth, serving in Judea in the auxiliary forces under the governor Pontius Pilate. A late and much-loved strand of the tradition, preserved in the Russian prayers to the saint, relates that Longinus suffered from a disease of the eyes, and was healed when blood and water from the pierced side of the Lord fell upon them: the man who gave the Savior his wound was the first to be healed by it, receiving bodily sight and spiritual sight together.

After the Resurrection and Ascension the tradition has Longinus baptised with his two faithful comrades by the apostles. Leaving military service, and with it the danger and the profit of Pilate's court, he returned to his Cappadocian homeland with his two companions and preached there what he had seen with his own eyes: the darkness, the earthquake, the opened graves, the empty tomb. The witness of a Roman officer who had himself commanded on Golgotha carried extraordinary weight, and the accounts speak of the rapid spread of the faith in his district of Cappadocia.

Martyrdom

The success of the mission was reported back to Judea. The elders in Jerusalem, the accounts relate, persuaded Pilate that the fugitive centurion was spreading sedition, and — by the machinations of Pilate and, in the fuller Lives, with a condemnation procured from the emperor Tiberius — a detachment of soldiers was sent to Cappadocia to behead Longinus and his two companions. What follows is one of the most humane scenes in the martyrology: the soldiers, arriving at his village, were met by Longinus himself, who welcomed them into his house, fed them, and lodged them, without telling them who he was. When at table they disclosed their errand, he revealed himself and presented his two companions. The startled soldiers wished to let the three escape; Longinus refused, put on his burial garment, and directed them to carry out their orders. The three were beheaded, and the bodies buried at the place of martyrdom; the head of Longinus was carried back to Pilate as proof, and by his order cast on a refuse heap outside the walls of Jerusalem.

No year is transmitted for the martyrdom; it belongs, in the logic of the accounts, to the years while Pilate still held office (he was recalled in 36/37), within a few years of the Crucifixion itself.

The finding of the head

The synaxarion account continues with the miracle that fixed the character of the saint's later veneration. A certain widow of Cappadocia, who had lost her sight and found no help from physicians, made her way to Jerusalem to pray at the holy places, led by her only son; in Jerusalem the boy fell ill and died. The martyr appeared to the grieving woman in a dream, comforted her, and directed her to the refuse heap outside the walls, telling her she would find there the head of Longinus and, with it, her sight. Led by companions to the place, she dug with her own hands, and at the touch of the martyr's head her eyes were opened. In a second vision she saw the martyr in glory with her son beside him, radiant, and heard him say that God had numbered the boy in His kingdom; she was to bury the head with her son's body in one coffin, and grieve no more. She carried both back to Cappadocia and buried them there, and the tomb became a place of healing.

From this account flows the saint's standing patronage: in Greek and Russian practice alike, Longinus is the martyr invoked for diseases and afflictions of the eyes, and the Russian Book of Needs tradition carries proper prayers to him for those "ailing in their eyes" — prayers which retell the whole story, from the drop of blood at the Cross to the widow at the refuse heap.

Relics and later cultus

The primary tomb of the tradition is the Cappadocian one, holding the head and the widow's son; the sanctuaries of Jerusalem also kept his memory, and a chapel of Saint Longinus stands to this day in the ambulatory of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, hard by the traditional places of the events in which he took part. In the medieval West a divergent legend grew up around Mantua, which claimed that Longinus had come to Italy bearing earth soaked with the Blood of Christ and had been martyred there; the basilica of Sant'Andrea in Mantua keeps relics under his name, and the Roman calendars long commemorated him on March 15 (the Byzantine East knows nothing of the Italian journey; see Disputed questions). At Rome, Bernini's colossal statue of Longinus — lance-armed, arms flung wide at the moment of confession — stands in one of the four piers under the dome of St. Peter's, where the Vatican's portion of the lance relic was kept.

The spear itself, the "Holy Lance," has a long relic-history of its own, which is noted here with reserve. A lance venerated as the one of John 19:34 is attested at Jerusalem from the sixth century (the Piacenza pilgrim saw it about 570); its point was later taken to Constantinople, passed to the Latin kings of France in the thirteenth century with the relics bought by Louis IX for the Sainte-Chapelle, and disappeared in the French Revolution; a larger portion, kept at Constantinople until the Ottoman conquest, was sent by Sultan Bayezid II to Pope Innocent VIII in 1492 and remains at St. Peter's. Rival lances — the imperial "Holy Lance" of Vienna, the lance dug up at Antioch by the First Crusade in 1098, and the Armenian lance of Geghard now at Etchmiadzin — testify to the breadth of the devotion rather than to any verifiable connection with the centurion, and none of these claims is adjudicated by the Church's calendar, which venerates the man and not the weapon.

Hymnographic and literary legacy

The oldest substantial literary monument of the cult is the encomium on the martyr by Hesychius, presbyter of Jerusalem (first half of the 5th century), which transmits the Cappadocian martyrdom and the finding of the head; the synaxarion notices are abridgements of the same tradition. In the Menaion, the canon of the saint is the work of Joseph the Hymnographer (9th century), in Tone 4, with the acrostic "I shall hymn the great glory of Longinus"; the doxastika of Vespers are ascribed to John the Monk. The hymnography returns again and again to the paradox of the executioner turned confessor: the sticheron of the aposticha has the Savior himself answer the centurion's cry with "Blessed art thou, Longinus, and thy memorial from generation to generation." Dimitri of Rostov retold the Life at length in the Slavic Menologion, and the Russian prayer tradition, as noted, composed proper prayers to the saint for the healing of the eyes.