A Roman soldier performing a routine task in a quarry outside Jerusalem sparked a 2,000-year obsession with a single sentence in the Gospel of John. This deep dive tracks how an anonymous execution tool became the Holy Lance, the Spear of Longinus, and eventually the Spear of Destiny, moving from the fourth-century Gospel of Nicodemus that gave the soldier a name to the sixth-century pilgrims who claimed to see the relic in Jerusalem.

The episode follows the lance through the Sasanian capture of Jerusalem, the Byzantine monopoly in Constantinople, the sack of 1204, Baldwin II's sale to Louis IX, the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II's gift to Pope Innocent VIII as a political bribe, and the German emperors who rebranded their own Carolingian cavalry spear from Longinus to Saint Maurice and back again with silver and gold cuffs. It covers the X-ray  ...