A Skull in Prague

Nathan N

Jun 20, 2026

The stories surrounding many relics in the traditions of Christianity are fictions. Cyril of Jerusalem claimed that the true cross was dispersed over all the world, but some might rightly wonder about the multiplication of its pieces and the forest-fulls that would be gathered were they all brought in.

I don’t know where the cross is; it may well be Mediterranean dust by now. If so, then piety and spirituality would grow from that fact, not in spite of it. Alas, who knows?

To call a relic “fiction”, however, seems a secular impulse. While technically often true, it denigrates Christian piety and casts too skeptical a gaze at the possibilities of long and venerable traditions, or the importance of the symbolic. “Pious fiction”, meant in the least pejorative sense, is perhaps better?

But even fake relics can call to the higher sensibilities of someone concerned with doing justice to the Christian history.

For example, I remember reading some of the 11th-century French epic La Chanson de Roland years ago in the Harvard Classics, and reading of the mighty and indestructible “Durandal”, a blade-relic wielded by the titular hero. A tooth of Peter studded its hilt, and in the same was contained a garment of Mary, the blood of Basil of Caesarea, and a hair of Saint Denis (that’s Denee). If one had to take up a holy weapon for the fight, who wouldn’t want such a blade? They say it could cleave boulders in two.

Legends of the fabled blade have come down through history. Today only oft-stolen replicas embed a cliff-face at Rocamadour in France.

But it would mean something to possess such a relic if it were real. Even the most skeptical among us know this because because the replica’s cheapness is borne from its being a simulacrum of something real—even if only real in fantasy. A real relic would at one and the same time bolster the very notion of the importance of relics while it would evacuate the awe that attends those which are obviously false.

There may be many such real relics. But I have only one to tell of today.

It’s an account that came to me in the course of my studies affected me somewhat significantly when it did. It has to do with Luke the evangelist, author of the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which texts have been the main focus of much of my research over most of the last decade.

I shouldn’t say it “has to do” with Luke.

It is Luke.

Who is Luke?

The classicist Steve Reece proved to be a formidable examiner when I met him on the day of the defence of my PhD dissertation. He was kind, unconvinced by some of the arguments in what he’d read by me, and serious about his task. “I see you have your United Bible Society Greek New Testament. Why don’t you open it up and we begin there?”

You can imagine my trepidation and excitement at going back and forth on the finer points of grammar with a classical philologist who took his PhD at UCLA before I was even born (a year before, but still). The texts were texts we both had studied, and we were off to the races. The experience was wonderful.

I did not know who was chosen/agreed to come as an external examiner until the moment of the exam. But I had been asked months before to send a list of 3-4 names of people I thought would be good. Reece was on the top of the list, since, while being a classical scholar, he had recently published major monographs in the area of New Testament, specifically the texts of Paul’s letters, the background and content to Luke and Acts, and (more recently) on names in Luke and Acts.

It was Reece’s work on the “formal education of the author of Luke-Acts” that first endeared me to his scholarship, and it was in that work that I found a delightful and captivating summary of the traditions of a relic of Luke which utterly astounded me and of which I had almost no prior awareness.

I relate the basics below with added information of my own.

First, who is Luke?

One, we know Luke by name in the New Testament only from Paul. Paul names him, alongside others, as a friend and companion in Colossians 4:10-14, in Philemon 23-25, and in 2 Timothy 4:9-13. In this last passage (in 4:11), Paul says “only Luke is with me”, during his second Roman imprisonment.

Two, this “Luke” is, according to tradition, the author of the third Gospel and Acts. The name appears in every titulus we have, is the unanimous tradition of the church for the first eight centuries, and would be a baffling selection for a clever forger so early, when names of the apostles were right there. Since in the preface to Luke’s Gospel he refers to himself (“it seemed good to me” 1:3), and to his recipient (“most excellent Theophilos” 1:3), it is obvious that the latter knew the former, and knew who was sending him the book when he got it. Otherwise, as I. H. Marshall said some years ago, “we are left with a mental image of Theophilus sitting at home after a messenger has delivered a parcel and scratching his head, saying ‘Who on earth of my friends has sent this and dedicated it to me?” Doubt it.

Three, we have a tradition about Luke that, by my lights, helps us place his conversion somewhere in his own story. The tradition comes from the Anti-Marcionite prologue to Luke’s Gospel, written shortly after the Marcionite controversy; perhaps this was written in the late second century.

Luke is a Syrian of Antioch, a physician by craft. He had become a disciple of the apostles, and later followed Paul until his [Paul’s] martyrdom, having served the Lord continually; unmarried and childless, he died at 84 years in Boeotia, full of the Holy Spirit.

The tradition that Luke was an Antiochene is solid, and the note that he first followed the disciples and Paul only later, meshes with the fact that Paul names Luke only late in his ministry (I cover this in greater detail in my book). It means that Luke was converted, probably in Antioch, sometime during the course of his own narrative. I think I know when this happened and where in the text, but I’ll leave that to the book.

This tradition of the Anti-Marcionite prologue is confirmed in other early sources, or assumed to be true by them, as Reece notes, for example that he died and was buried in Thebes (in Boeotia).

So this was Luke in his life and death, according to tradition.

A Skull in Prague

Reece details the accounts as follows:

• In the twentieth year of Constantius, Luke’s bones were transferred to Constantinople and reburied there (according to Jerome)
• Luke’s remains became lost to view
• Constantine’s son Constantius had built a Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople in the fourth century that housed the remains of Luke, among other apostles, and that Luke’s remains, which had become lost to view, were discovered and reinstalled during the rebuilding of the church by Justinian in the sixth century (according to Procopius)
• Luke’s skeleton was later removed from Constantinople, perhaps during the iconoclastic movement in the eighth or ninth century, eventually ending up, in the Benedictine Basilica of St. Justina in Padua, Italy, where it currently resides (a 15th century lawsuit in Venice seems to corroborate this)
• Charles IV (Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia) had the skull removed from the skeleton in 1354 and taken to the Cathedral of St. Vitus in Prague, where it can be seen today.
• The sarcophagus of Luke in Padua was reopened in 1998 for examination
• The leaden coffin within the sarcophagus contains an intact male skeleton (minus the skull) that appears to have decomposed in this very coffin. At 180 centimetres × 48 centimetres × 40 centimetres, happens to fit perfectly into the empty marble sarcophagus at the orthodox church in Thebes that claims to be the site of Luke’s original burial
• The skeleton in Padua has been compared to the skull in Prague, and they fit precisely at the conjunction of the first cervical vertebra of the spine and the occipital condyles of the skull
• A tooth found on the floor of the coffin in Italy fits into the right socket of the skull’s jawbone in Prague
• The skeleton in Italy and the skull in Prague belong to the same man. The body has been tested by paleo-anthropologists:
• He was 163 to 165 centimetres tall, had good posture and a healthy physique, he was right-side dominant, had a narrow head and face, narrow shoulders, very narrow hips, and endured periods of heavy work as a youth and some nutritional deficiency during growth (common). He suffered general osteoporosis, arthrosis of the lumbar spine, and pulmonary emphysema; he died between the ages of seventy and eighty-five (recall the Anti-Marcionite prologue that put his death at 84)
• Radiocarbon dating proves it to be an antique body, but the ranges are large: somewhere between the first and fifth century
• Genetic testing of two teeth indicates Syrian (but possibly Anatolian) origin.
• In 2000, the Roman Catholic Church gave one rib of the body to the Greek Orthodox Church in Thebes that claims to be the original site of the burial.

So, whether in Prague, in Italy, or in Thebes, one could find the relics of a man who, so many years ago and full of the Holy Spirit walked in Paul’s circle, and among the apostles, and was inspired to write more of the New Testament than any other single author (and this from a Gentile).

The expanses of time and culture of time pass away, and we come face to face with the past through such a relic. This is a spiritual confrontation, for we can see ourselves as part of the same sweeping history, and these relics tell a story that is bound up with holy scripture and connect us to it in singularly special ways. By the leading of the Holy Spirit, it “seemed good” to this man to write an “orderly account” to his friend Theophilos. He wrote it so that Theophilos might know the truth about the life and times of Jesus, and the universal significance of his death and resurrection and coming judgment, and the transformation of those who called upon his name.

I believe he joined himself to Paul in Caesarea sometime between 58-60 CE, while Paul was in prison. He worked with others there to fill out his story of Paul, and then himself embarked on the final leg of a great adventure, on a ship of Adramyttium, and joined Paul on a voyage to Rome.

A storm would await them as they reached famous Crete, and there Luke saw the hero take his stand, an exponent of monumental faith in the one true God who would rescue the whole lot to an unplanned shore on the Island of Malta. There came the colossal wreck, but all were saved.

The account is a marvel of history and storytelling, and they would eventually make it to Rome, where Luke’s story ends with Paul in prison, but unbounded in his proclamations.

sarcophagus at Padua

The Last Word

But is the relic Luke? What would it mean? There is positive circumstantial evidence for the tradition of this body, but we can’t know if it is Luke’s body. Positive evidence for a theory or tradition is not the same thing as sufficient evidence. And even with such a basis of evidence, there have still been two skulls kept, one in Prague, and one in Rome. Whatever the one in Prague is, the one in Rome is not. And if relics matter at all, then, because the skull in Prague exists, the skull in Rome must detract from that “mattering”.

It raises another question that attends to a curiosity in the Gospel texts: they are all formally anonymous. None of the texts names their author. I’m not saying the traditional authors are not the authors—I think the case is good that they are. But that the texts and authors are not concerned to tell you that.

Luke, like the other Gospel writers, is self-effacing. Some ancient historians were too, as an act of implicit rebuke against the historians more concerned to memorialize themselves. The Gospel writers do not memorialize themselves. They memorialize Jesus.

My heart pounds even now at the thought of this relic, and to think of the historian whom I have studied for so long, sailing Aegean seas and walking Mediterranean shores, praying with Paul and sensing himself to be carried along by the Holy Spirit in his high calling.

But I see that Luke erased himself to reveal others, one other.

So I say preserve the fire of this history, find a certain comfort in its heat, but know that it is light unto a higher vision.