No name for this soldier is given in the canonical Gospels; the name
Longinus is instead found in the
apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. Longinus was not originally a saint in
Christian tradition. An early tradition, found in a sixth- or seventh-century pseudepigraphal "
Letter of Herod to Pilate", claims that Longinus suffered for having pierced Jesus, and that he was condemned to a cave where every night a lion came and mauled him until dawn, after which his body healed back to normal, in a pattern that would repeat until the end of time. Later traditions turned him into a Christian convert, but as
Sabine Baring-Gould observed: "The name of Longinus was not known to the Greeks previous to the
patriarch Germanus, in 715. It was introduced among the Westerns from the Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. There is no reliable authority for the Acts and martyrdom of this saint." The name is probably Latinized into a common cognomen of the
Cassia gens, from the Greek (), the word used for the spear mentioned in
John . It first appears lettered on an
illumination of the Crucifixion beside the figure of the soldier holding a spear, written, perhaps contemporaneously, in horizontal Greek letters,
LOGINOS (ΛΟΓΙΝΟϹ), in the Syriac
gospel manuscript illuminated by a certain Rabulas in the year 586, in the
Laurentian Library, Florence. The spear used is known as the
Holy Lance, and more recently, especially in occult circles, as the "Spear of Destiny", which was revered at
Jerusalem by the sixth century, although neither the centurion nor the name "Longinus" were invoked in any surviving report. As the "Lance of Longinus", the spear figures in the legends of the
Holy Grail. Blindness or other eye problems are not mentioned until after the tenth century.
Petrus Comestor was one of the first to add an eyesight problem to the legend and his text can be translated as "blind", "dim-sighted" or "weak-sighted". The
Golden Legend says that he saw celestial signs before conversion and that his eye problems might have been caused by illness or age. The touch of
Jesus's blood cures his eye problem: The body of Longinus is said to have been lost twice, but discovered at
Mantua, together with the Holy Sponge stained with Christ's blood, wherewith it was told—extending Longinus's role—that Longinus had assisted in cleansing Christ's body when it was taken down from the cross. The relic enjoyed a revived cult in the late 13th century under the patronage of the
Bonacolsi. The relics are said to have been divided and then distributed to
Prague (St. Peter and Paul Basilica, Vyšehrad) and elsewhere. Greek sources assert that he suffered martyrdom in
Cappadocia. The
Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, Washington, DC, purports to have a holy relic, a fragment of bone, of Saint Longinus. ==Present-day veneration==