Saint Longinus

The Holy Longinus was according to the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus that Roman Centurion, of Jesus after his death, a spear ( Holy Lance ) is said to have stabbed in the side and after the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark, the divine sonship of Jesus testified.

Baptism and martyrdom

The one who Jesus has opened after his death the page was in John's Gospel ( Jn 19:34 EU) named as one of the captors, who had the two next to Jesus Crucified broken legs ( crurifragium ). Only apocryphal as the soldier Longinus is named and increasingly as a captain ( Centurion ) refers.

The Adoration of the Holy Blood, the ungestockt flowed from the wound, has with Francis of Assisi and the worship of the Stigmata in the course of the 10th and 11th centuries found their way into the cult. The wound fluid Longinus is said to have ' eye condition cured, and he has collected the blood mixed with earth and was baptized. He left Palestine and announced in Mantua the gospel, from where the Holy Blood worship takes its output. To avoid persecution, he traveled to Caesarea in Cappadocia in Turkey today. Before his departure from Mantua, he buried the blood of Christ. In Caesarea he should have martyred. As such, it would have been a martyr in a double sense: in the New Testament sense, as one of the first witnesses of the divinity of Christ and the early Christian sense as a man who is killed innocent to the confession of his faith.

The Holy Lance, which since the early Middle Ages to the insignia of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the imperial regalia, belonged, was first identified in a papal letter from the first third of the 13th century with the Lance of Longinus. From the 14th century this interpretation sat through official.

Longinus in the Passionsikonographie

In Christian iconography, Longinus, together with the sponge carrier Stephaton often a pair on either side of the cross.

A statue of Longinus, created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, is located in a dome pillar niche in St. Peter's Basilica.

In folk art of the Black Forest carved Longinuskreuz found regional distribution.