The veneration of Jesus's foreskin

Sometimes, Mouse finds something that sounds totally bizarre, and yet, for centuries was considered totally normal. For example, he has written at length on the theological importance of beards. With the resurrection of The Church Mouse Blog, I'll be sharing a few more of these stories in the weeks and months ahead. Today, we have the fable of the foreskin - Jesus’s foreskin, to be precise. But before we get there, we need to back up a little.

The history of relics is worthy of a full post in its own right. It is often wrongly assumed that the veneration of relics was a medieval invention concocted by rapacious religious authorities to dupe and exploit the unsuspecting faithful. In fact, the veneration of relics goes back to the earliest days of Christianity. Drawing on stories from the Bible of the miraculous effect of touching the bones of the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings 13 or the healing of the bleeding woman by touching Jesus’s cloak, relics have always been a focus for veneration. This was taken for granted by writers like Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa and Chrysostom.

The Church’s position of relics was first formalised at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. They agreed that only God performs miracles and only God is worthy of worship, so icons and relics are not worshipped and contain no inherent magical qualities. However, they could act as a focus of worship of God, and the saints could intercede on our behalf with God. The council concluded (my emphasis):

The divine apostle Paul said: The sins of some people are manifest, those of others appear later. Some sins take the front rank but others follow in their footsteps. Thus in the train of the impious heresy of the defamers of Christians, many other impieties appeared. Just as those heretics removed the sight of venerable icons from the church, they also abandoned other customs, which should now be renewed and which should be in vigour in virtue of both written and unwritten legislation. Therefore we decree that in venerable churches consecrated without relics of the holy martyrs, the installation of relics should take place along with the usual prayers. And if in future any bishop is found out consecrating a church without relics, let him be deposed as someone who has flouted the ecclesiastical traditions.

Thus, the Church formally established the requirement for all Churches to have a relic, and the hunt and trade in relics boomed, alongside the practice of pilgrimage to venerate a particularly holy saint or martyr’s relics - particularly those with a proven track record of miraculous results.

By the 13th century, the sale of fake relics and the exploitation surrounding them had become sufficiently embarrassing for the Fourth Lateran Council under Innocent III in 1215 to decree:

The Christian religion is frequently disparaged because certain people put saints’ relics up for sale and display them indiscriminately. In order that it may not be disparaged in the future, we ordain by this present decree that henceforth ancient relics shall not be displayed outside a reliquary or be put up for sale. As for newly discovered relics, let no one presume to venerate them publicly unless they have previously been approved by the authority of the Roman pontiff. Prelates, moreover, should not in future allow those who come to their churches, in order to venerate, to be deceived by lying stories or false documents, as has commonly happened in many places on account of the desire for profit. We also forbid the recognition of alms-collectors, some of whom deceive other people by proposing various errors in their preaching, unless they show authentic letters from the apostolic see or from the diocesan bishop. Even then they shall not be permitted to put before the people anything beyond what is contained in the letters.

Alongside this belief in relics was a particular belief in the physical resurrection. The resurrection of the dead is a central Christian belief from the earliest times, but ideas about exactly how this will happen have evolved. 

The physical resurrection expected by the average early medieval or medieval Christian involved the reconstitution of the former earthly body. They would literally rise from the grave. This caused a great deal of theological gymnastics around what constituted the essential matter of the person which would form their resurrected body and which was incidental material which would not. Not every toenail clipping was believed to be glued back to those resurrected, but surely they needed arms and legs.

This even included another strange obsession with what would theoretically happen to the body of a Christian baby which had died after existing exclusively on a cannibalistic diet - since all of their body was made up of other people’s bodies, would all of that matter reform into their original owner’s resurrected bodies and if so, would there be anything left of the cannibal baby at the resurrection? The matter was never conclusively decided.

This belief in physical resurrection led to a particular reverence for saints' bones as it was believed they continued to hold some essence of the saint after their death, and the bone would be reunited with the original owner's body when the Lord returns and there is a physical resurrection of the dead. 

Once again, it was at the Fourth Lateran Council that the nature of the physical resurrection was first formalised in Church teaching, which concluded (my emphasis):

He [Christ] will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, to render to every person according to his works, both to the reprobate and to the elect. All of them will rise with their own bodies, which they now wear, so as to receive according to their deserts, whether these be good or bad; for the latter perpetual punishment with the devil, for the former eternal glory with Christ.

It is within this belief system that one particular relic emerged - that of Jesus’s foreskin.

Jesus’s circumcision is attested in Luke chapter 2, with the presentation of Jesus at the temple for the traditional rites. Theologians began to speculate about what happened to Jesus’s circumcised foreskin, however. Surely, Jesus’s body was incorruptible, so any part of it which was separated from His body would not decay and would presumably be reunited with the rest of His body when He returns and ushers in the resurrection of the faithful.

Our first evidence of stories about the Holy Prepuce (foreskin) appear around the fifth or sixth centuries with the apocryphal Syriac Infancy Gospel. Two 12th-century copies remain, containing the story that the Holy Prepuce was preserved in an alabaster box.

The relic shot to fame at the start of the 9th century. Charlemagne established an empire of a size not seen since the fall of the Western Roman Empire across continental Europe and reclaimed the legacy of those Roman Emperors by establishing the Holy Roman Empire. He did this with the backing of the papacy and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in AD800. Christmas Day of that year, Charlemagne made a gift to Pope Leo III of the relic of the Holy Prepuce. 

Provenance for the relic was clearly an issue, so Charlemagne made the irrefutable and unprovable claim that it had been given to him by an angel while he was praying at the Holy Sepulchre. Leo III placed the relic under the altar of the Chapel of St Lawrence in Rome, originally the private chapel of the papacy.

Sadly for Charlemagne, numerous rival claims to hold the relic proliferated. Researcher David Farley identified dozens of medieval churches which claim to have the relic.

Discussion of Jesus’s foreskin was clearly not considered peculiar through the Middle Ages, although one of the stranger references came from the 14th-century saint Catherine of Sienna. She wrote about a vision she had in which she received Jesus’s foreskin as a wedding ring to symbolise her marriage to Christ. She wrote:

You see very well that you are a bride and that he has espoused you - you and everyone else - and not with a ring of silver but with a ring of his own flesh. Look at the tender little child who on the eighth day, when he was circumcised, gave up just so much flesh as to make a tiny circlet of a ring!”

When disaster struck and Rome was sacked in 1527, the relics from St Lawrence were stolen, although the German soldier who stole it was captured in Calcata, around 50km north of Rome, and the relics were housed there.

It is the Calcata relic which stood the test of time.

In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the obvious excesses of the trade and exploitation of relics were clamped down on by the Catholic Church. In the centuries that followed, talk of the Holy Prepuce became more controversial. Eventually, this led to a papal decree in 1900 threatening excommunication on anyone who even discusses the Holy Prepuce (Mouse’s source for this claim is David Farley, although Mouse hasn’t been able to track down the actual papal decree, so please drop a link in the comments if you can find it).

In 1610, Galileo Galilee pointed his telescope up at the stars and noticed something odd about the planet Jupiter. When magnified, there appeared to be what Galileo first described as ‘ears’ on either side of the planet. At first, he believed them to be two other smaller planets nearby, but as observations improved, these were found to be mysterious rings circling the planet.

This discovery coincided with the efforts of the church following the Reformation to deal with some of the excesses which had led to so much trouble. The keeper of the Vatican library at the time was Leo Allatius, who took a keen interest in the new field of astronomy, and as the tide began to turn on attempts to divorce the church from the field of scientific discovery, creative attempts were deployed to reconcile the two. And so Allatius wrote De Praeputio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba (Discourse on the Foreskin of our Lord Jesus Christ), in which he advocated the theory that Christ’s foreskin had ascended into the heavens and had been left visible in the sky and had become the rings of Saturn.

Gradually, the church withdrew support for many claimed relics, including those with a claim to be the Holy Prepuce, although Calcata clung onto belief in their prized relic, parading it through the town each year. Until 1983. The priest in charge of it had taken to hiding it under his bed for safekeeping and discovered that it had been stolen before it could be paraded that year.

And so the last remaining claim on Christ’s foreskin was lost … for now at least.

If you would like to read more about the fable of the foreskin, Mouse recommends David Farley’s book An Irreverent Curiosity: In search of the Church’s strangest relic in Italy’s oddest town.

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