Witness at the Cross: A Beginner's Guide to Holy Friday by Amy-Jill Levine

Author:Amy-Jill Levine [Levine, Amy-Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Holidays, Easter & Lent, Christian Education, Adult
ISBN: 9781791021122
Google: 8lV0zgEACAAJ
Amazon: B095KYGZ2R
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2021-12-14T18:30:00+00:00

Reception History

Developments of the centurion’s story do not stop at the cross or in the conversation with Pilate. The soldier who pierces Jesus’s side in John enters reception history through an early Christian apocryphal text, called the Acts of Pilate, as Longinus. The name may derive from the Greek word for “lance,” the lance or spear that also shows up in legends of the Holy Grail.

In some later versions of his story, he becomes a type of a later Prometheus: living in a cave, he is mauled each night by a lion, he recovers, repeat. More popular is his conflation with the centurion who proclaims Jesus “Son of God” and “righteous/innocent” in the Synoptics. In this tradition, the soldier becomes a Christian and enters the list of saints in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and various Orthodox communions. In other versions of the story, he was blind, but the blood that flowed from the wound in Jesus’s side healed him. In still others, he was martyred in Cappadocia. His statue, by Bernini, is in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He looks good.

The centurion finds his way into more recent work. In George Stephens’s 1965 The Greatest Story Ever Told, John Wayne (in an uncredited role) plays the centurion at the cross. A legend—since legends beget legends—offers that Stephens directed the Duke to speak with awe, so the Duke recited, “Aww, truly this man was the son of God.”

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