Holy Lance
The name of the soldier who pierced Christ's side with a "lonchē" is not given in the Gospel of John, but in the oldest known references to the legend, the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus appended to late manuscripts of the 4th century "Acts of Pilate", the soldier is identified as a centurion and called Longinus (making the spear's Latin name "Lancea Longini").
Holy Lance
In his opera "Parsifal", Richard Wagner identifies the Holy Spear with two items that appear in Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval poem "Parzival", a bleeding spear in the Castle of the Grail and the spear that has wounded the Fisher King. The opera's plot concerns the consequences of the spear's loss by the Knights of the Grail and its recovery by Parsifal. Having decided that the blood on the Spear was that of the wounded Saviour – Jesus is never named in the opera – Wagner has the blood manifest itself in the Grail rather than on the spearhead.The Lance of Longinus appears in the 1995 anime "Neon Genesis Evangelion", where the seedships of an ancient progenitor species are equipped with a massive spears called the "Lance(s) of Longinus" by the humans.