Does Jesus' Foreskin Still Exist?

STOLEN! Jesus' foreskin! Well, maybe not. But 2000 years after his birth, where might Jesus' foreskin be? And why does it matter to people? Kate is joined by Dr James White for this episode to find out how the Holy Prepuce has supposedly survived the last two centuries, and what it has meant to the people devoted to it. James is a historian of late medieval Europe, with a special interest in the body, gender, and religion. He teaches at the University of Alberta, where his research has focused on late medieval devotion to the Holy Foreskin and anti-Jewish condemnation of circumcision by Christians. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Subscribe to the new Betwixt The Sheets YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BetwixtTheSheetsPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

  Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:35Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters! It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to yet another episode of Betwixt the Sheets. Hello, hello! I'll put the kettle on, how fab to see you. But before you can sit down and get yourself too comfortable, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adulty way, coming around on subjects new to being adult too. Right, okay, I'll get the cups out.

• 1:03Kate Lister?

  Ciao bella, salve! Welcome to Italy! I won't try and do the accent, I won't offend our Italian friends like that. It's 1983 and we are in the mountaintop town of Calcaterra, 30 miles north of Rome. And I say mountaintop, it's really more like a mountain edge, a tumble of medieval stone buildings perched high on a cliff edge, merging into the rock face below. New Year's Day everywhere else, but here is usually chocolate pyjamas and a long nap on the sofa, but here, January 1st is another day for celebrating. It's time to parade the Holy Pupus, Jesus's foreskin, all about town. What do you mean you prefer a nap? How dare you?

• 1:48Kate Lister?

  But there's been a crime, a calamity, the Holy Artifacts gone. It has been stolen from its very, very secure location in a shoebox underneath the parish priest's bed. Or was it at the back of his wardrobe? Nobody's entirely sure. But are there any leads to go on? Who's pinched it? Was it taken by an opportunist? Misplaced by the priest? Or could it have been stolen by masked Vatican agents, sent on a mission to silence the embarrassing tittle-tattle about this particular holy relic? Well, I think I am about ready to find out.

• 2:42Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. In recent episodes, we have been on a hunt for famous penises all throughout history. We have been on the search for Tutankhamun's eternal erection. We have uncovered Napoleon's bonapart. Hey! And now we are on the hunt for Jesus's foreskin. But why would it have been kept? Who supposedly had it all these years? And why does anybody care about it as much as they clearly did? Today, I'm joined by Dr. James White from the University of Alberta to find out more. Is everybody ready? I know I am, let's do it.

• 3:26Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only James White, how are you doing?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  I am good, how are you, Kate?

• 3:35Kate Lister?

  Well, I'm insanely excited to be talking to you, because when we were thinking of subjects we could do episodes on, we were discussing the possibility of Christ's foreskin. I thought, maybe there's not enough there, if you'll pardon the pun, for an entire episode. But you did your whole PhD on this. James, how did you come to this subject?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  I did. So I came to it, sort of through accident. I came to it through Catherine of Siena, 14th century saint. But with Catherine, we have the letters that she dictated, and we have her extremely long holy biography, written by her confessor. And the holy biography usually goes into all of the stuff with her devotion to Jesus and fasting and all sorts of body-oriented things. And it says that she had a mystical marriage to Jesus, and in it, she received a wedding ring.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  I mean, it was a really nice wedding ring, but it was a, you know, standard wedding ring with diamonds and pearls. Maybe not standard, but, you know, understandable.

• 4:54Kate Lister?

  Yeah, it'll do the job.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then in her own letters, she writes to all of these other women, saying that they have Jesus's foreskin as a wedding ring.

• 5:08Kate Lister?

  I beg your pardon.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  So in Catherine's own letters, she doesn't really claim the foreskin for herself. She claims it for other women and tells them that they have it. And I thought, there is something weird going on here.

• 5:23Kate Lister?

  Mm-hmm, I should say so. That sounds intensely weird.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  As I started to investigate it, I thought, with Catherine, usually it's her confessor, biographer, who is talking about her body and Jesus's body and all of these issues all the time. And Catherine really doesn't do that in her own writings. She focuses on politics and encouraging people to be better Christians. And so I thought, there's some sort of disconnect here, that, like, why is he writing about this non-bodily thing, you know, which is the standard wedding ring? And she's telling women that they have Jesus's foreskin?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  And I thought, there's something going on here. And then as I started to pursue it, I suddenly discovered that if you looked, Jesus's foreskin is everywhere in the Middle Ages, like literally everywhere. So that's where this came from.

• 6:29Kate Lister?

  It's so, it sounds so wild to modern ears to hear that, Jesus's foreskin is everywhere. So let's try and take this back to its origin story, because, like, why would Jesus's foreskin be out in the wild? How did this even become a thing? What are we talking about here? Before Catherine of Siena starts telling people that they're wearing it as a wedding ring?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  It starts to become a thing around the year 1100.

• 6:56Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  And the idea is that if Jesus had been circumcised, which is the book of Luke, in Luke, chapter 2, verse 21, says that Jesus was circumcised as an eight-day-old Jewish boy, like Jewish boys are circumcised still today, this happened.

• 7:21Kate Lister?

  That it exists, it was a thing.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  And around the year 1100, a legend starts to develop that Mary, Jesus's mother, saved the foreskin, because obviously, as the mother of an infant, she had nothing better to do with her time.

• 7:38Kate Lister?

  Boy mums.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But she saved the foreskin, and it was later given to different people, depending on which version of the legend that you read, but figures that appear in the Christian scriptures. And in most of these stories, the Emperor Charlemagne makes a trip to Jerusalem. And now Charlemagne never actually went to Jerusalem. This is completely a made-up story.

• 8:08Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  But he took a trip to Jerusalem, and either childhood Jesus appeared to him, or adult Jesus appeared to him, or an angel, somebody appeared to him.

• 8:22Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  And told him, this relic of Jesus is buried here, in this place. And subsequently, all of these churches in Europe, largely in France because of the Charlemagne connection, many of them claim to own Jesus's foreskin.

• 8:44Kate Lister?

  Wow. So this would be a religious relic. For anyone that's listening that's not entirely sure what that is, could you just explain to us a little bit about what a relic is, a religious relic, and why it was so important?

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a religious relic is often a body part, not always, but often a body part of a saint or a particular holy figure that you could visit and you could pray in front of, and you're not, you're sort of praying to the saint, but ultimately, you're praying to Jesus, with the idea that the saint is not going to do the miracle for you. Saints cannot do miracles, but saints can, I think of them as like Jesus's best friends.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Saints can talk to Jesus and try and suggest to him that you, Kate, or me, James, needs whatever, and Jesus might be more likely to help.

• 9:47Kate Lister?

  They'll put in a word.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  It's like a letter of recommendation.

• 9:51Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  They'll put in a word for you. And if you, you know, if you make the effort to go visit the relic, to take the time, to pay the cost of the travel potentially, you've got some street cred.

• 10:06Kate Lister?

  They were a big deal in the Middle Ages, because they would, I don't see pilgrim attractions, like, if a church or a monastery had some relics, so something like the bones of a saint, or a bit of the original cross, or whatever it is, people would travel and pay to see this stuff. So this is, this is a big business.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, there is obviously the spiritual holy component.

• 10:31Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  To it. And people really did believe in these things, or they would not have. Done the pilgrimages, but it is a business. And there are instances of churches that sort of send their holy relics out on tour.

• 10:49Kate Lister?

  Oh, wow.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Um, sort of in a way that the museum in Bayreuth right now has the Bayreuth Tapestry on tour.

• 10:58Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  At the British Museum.

• 11:00Kate Lister?

  Do they still trade in relics today, the Catholic Church? Or is this something that that's kind of been left in the past? Is there still an interest in relics?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Of course, I'm less familiar with the modern day setup. There is still an interest in relics. I don't know if there is necessarily a trade.

• 11:16Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  In them.

• 11:18Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Like there was in the Middle Ages.

• 11:19Kate Lister?

  And I guess anything that belonged to Jesus Christ himself or was said to belong to Jesus Christ himself. That is, that's, that's the best relic because he wouldn't have left much behind, would he? Body wise, maybe some, some fingernails. I don't know if he ever got his hair cut, but the foreskin is something of his body that he would have left behind.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, that's one of the things that I argue is in my dissertation is that the reason that the foreskin becomes such a thing in the late Middle Ages is that, yes, we can presume that if there was a human Jesus, that he clipped his fingernails and cut his hair and blah, blah, blah. You know, standard grooming things. But nothing in the Christian scripture says that. But it does say, and we can presume that he has baby teeth and all of this stuff. But nothing in the Christian scripture says anything about that. But it does say that he was circumcised.

• 12:25Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  And if you're circumcised, obviously there's

• 12:31Speaker 01

  a bit of flesh that has been removed. And presumably might exist somewhere.

• 12:48Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with James after this short break.

• 12:54Kate Lister?

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• 13:40Kate Lister?

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• 14:27Kate Lister?

  Hello, Betwixters. I am jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up a camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.

• 14:56Kate Lister?

  Right, let's get on with it.

• 15:09Kate Lister?

  So where does it start turning up? Who claims, first of all, do we know? Like, I've got it, it's over here, it's, it's, it's in this church in France.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know the first one that claims it, but one of the very early ones is Chahou in France. And then there are a couple of subsequent ones that claimed it almost just instantly right afterward.

• 15:32Kate Lister?

  Multiple people are saying they've got this.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:35Kate Lister?

  Oh, right.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  At least from the records, start showing up in France and then spread to Germany and England, Austria, Italy. There was, I think, one in Spain. They end up everywhere in Europe.

• 15:52Kate Lister?

  Do we know how many there were all at the same time simultaneously? How many have you counted?

• 15:58Speaker 01

  I have not counted them, but there was a, a scholar named Robert Palazzo, who has done more work on that kind of documentary evidence than I have. And he has counted at least twenty-five.

• 16:13Kate Lister?

  Twenty-five?

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Yes, so more than two dozen.

• 16:17Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  They all claim the, well, not all of them, but they mostly claim the Charlemagne story. And since Charlemagne ruled over all of what is today France and most of modern day Germany and Austria and northern Italy, they all just sort of trace it back to, yes, it came to us from Charlemagne. Or came to us from Charlemagne and then monastery number one, that went to monastery number two, and now we have it. So they all have these kind of claims that ultimately go back to the Charlemagne legend.

• 16:57Kate Lister?

  They're all claiming the same thing. Is there any evidence that there was, like, any in-house fighting amongst these people that have got, that said they've got the relics? Was anybody, or were they all peacefully existing, saying that, well, look, either this guy had twenty-five penises or, or twenty-four of you are lying?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Or it was very, very large.

• 17:17Kate Lister?

  Or it was very large, yeah, I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, maybe they could, yes, yeah, they could, it could have been trimmed that way perhaps.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  I think most of them were probably pieces of umbilical cords, like from animals.

• 17:27Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Like to, you know, address this on a very physical level. But no, not a lot of in-house fighting. A lot of it is, I mean, there were two churches in the Middle Ages that both claimed to have the body of Mary Magdalene.

• 17:45Kate Lister?

  Oh, right.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  And Mary Magdalene's body does, obviously does not exist in two separate places. That's not how this works. So the Middle Ages were very good with understanding concepts of matony, which obviously is a modern theoretical term that they would not have known. But concepts of matony, which is the idea that, for example, if I say we need more boots on the ground in a war, I don't actually mean that we need more boots, like we don't need more actual footwear. I'm using matony as a stand-in that means we need more soldiers.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  And medieval people were very good at, again, still without knowing that term or that necessary theoretical concept, they were very good at understanding that.

• 18:43Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  And so if you had the arm bone of whoever your favourite saint is, if you had the arm bone of that person, it sort of meant that the entire person was there. And the Holy Foreskin, I think, works in the same way. That wherever this exists, Jesus exists. And we also have to work with the idea here that with the Eucharist, with the Holy Bread and the Holy Wine, that's already being produced all over Europe.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  And so wherever the Eucharist is, that's where Jesus's whole body is. And there are actually theological discussions about when you consume the Eucharist, what part of Jesus's body are you consuming?

• 19:38Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Like, are you consuming his left toe or his?

• 19:42Kate Lister?

  Good point. I've never thought of that before.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So and they decided, no, you're consuming the whole body of Christ.

• 19:50Kate Lister?

  How would people have worshipped this particular relic, the foreskin of Christ? I mean, was there any particular, like, process that would be followed? Or would you just go to the church and just, and just pray at it? I mean, were any miracles attributed to any of these?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  I'm not aware of any particular miracles attributed to them. And you would have just gone and worshipped it in the same way that you would for any other relic. It's just, you know, a particularly special one.

• 20:18Kate Lister?

  It's a very special, this is, this is top-tier relic. But it is interesting that this idea of Christ's foreskin also shows up in visions of medieval nuns and mystics in oddly erotic ways. You mentioned Catherine of Siena there, wherein Christ's foreskin as a ring, we'll unpack that. But also someone like, was it the Austrian mystic Agnes Blandbecken, who said that she had visions of having Christ's foreskin in her mouth? What is your interpretation of things like this? Because again, as a modern audience reading this, you're, you're just sitting there going, Agnes, I'm sorry, what? What is happening here?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  You're sitting there thinking, this is like oral sex.

• 20:56Kate Lister?

  Yes, exactly that, yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  There's no way around thinking of it. The interesting thing with Agnes, because she does have an experience where she has something appear in her mouth on January first.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Which is used to be the feast of the circumcision. It's the eighth day of Christmas. So it would be the eighth day of Jesus's birth. She's contemplating where his foreskin, the circumcision, all of that, might be. And she feels something in her mouth and she swallows it and then it happens again and she swallows it. And it happens about, it happens, I think it says a hundred times.

• 21:36Kate Lister?

  Wow, okay.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  And eventually she hears a voice that tells her that it's Jesus's foreskin. That she's been swallowing. And the text says specifically, and this is a bit, I started to say this is a bit graphic, but what have we been talking about? We're, we're, we're past that point. That it has the texture of the membrane of the inside of an egg. It's very specific.

• 22:04Kate Lister?

  Wow, Agnes, okay.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  But the interesting thing with Agnes is that her biography also contains a lot of visions that are very clearly erotic, like she has visions of naked priests. Dancing with naked virgins and, and things like that. And the biography is always very clear to emphasize that she felt no erotic or sexual pleasure during any of this.

• 22:35Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  During any of these visions, he's or she just, you know, having visions of the glories of heaven. So the biography is very aware of the sexual components of her visions. There is absolutely no attempt to address the sexualization or the erotic nature of the foreskin vision.

• 23:00Kate Lister?

  So we're just gonna move right past it. We're not, we're not gonna unpack this at all. That's the biographer's take.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Well, I, I don't even think that it's not even that we're not going to unpack it. I think they didn't even process it.

• 23:13Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  As erotic.

• 23:15Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Because there's so much care taken elsewhere to unpack and explain things when it could be seen as erotic.

• 23:24Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  This one, no, there's nothing. And so I think what Agnes is doing is that she's seeing or in this vision, understanding the Eucharist as consuming the body of Christ.

• 23:40Kate Lister?

  Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, we're joining the dots now. It's starting to make more sense. Okay.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Consuming the foreskin as literally the body of Christ. Not a piece of bread that you're told is a body of Christ. But one that, you know, I mean, bread looks and smells and tastes like bread and blah, blah, blah. Regardless of what you're told about it, it looks and tastes and smells like bread. She's going for the real thing that might actually be on earth and available to her.

• 24:19Kate Lister?

  Okay, this makes, I mean, it's, it's an interesting choice because she could have had any body part of Christ, I suppose. But then again, this is a part that we know was cut off.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  It goes back to the part that we know was cut off.

• 24:32Kate Lister?

  Well, so, all right. So, okay. So maybe there is an argument then, because again, when I first read that account, I was like, Agnes, what on earth is happening here?

• 24:39Speaker 01

  What are you doing?

• 24:40Kate Lister?

  Like, what are you doing? Like, I can't not read it as sublimated eroticism, but this kind of makes more sense.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  There's a reason she didn't become a saint.

• 24:51Kate Lister?

  Oh, yeah, just looking down her list of miracles at the Vatican. No, I very much think not. But there's a whole bunch of these women saints and, and women mystics and women nuns who are having maybe not erotic visions about Christ's foreskin, but certainly erotic visions about Christ. I mean, you mentioned Catherine Sienna. Like, what do you think's going on there as a scholar? Do you think this is all just religious devotion manifest through what we think of as erotic imagery? And sex actually had nothing to do with it and that's just us being smutty?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  I mean, medieval people could be smutty as well.

• 25:24Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Uh, they, we, they were not, they did not grow up in the, in the post-Victorian age. Uh, there's a wonderful French fable. It's called a fablio, which is sort of a fun, short story. Usually they're satirical and make fun of priests or kings or, you know, what have you for sexual escapades or not behaving as they should. But there's a wonderful one that in English translates to the young woman who could not stand to hear people talk about fucking.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  And that's literally the word that it uses. Like, it does not use a euphemism or anything. That is literally the word that it uses. And it includes all sorts of euphemisms in the story itself about a man's steady stallion.

• 26:27Kate Lister?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Which of course refers to his penis and the woman's agreeable pit. Which of course refers to her vagina. So medieval people knew about sex.

• 26:40Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Like they, yeah, again, they were not, they were not post-Victorian. We cannot

• 26:47Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  About these things. They were aware of this when these female mystics are talking or writing about what we would think of as quite erotic encounters with Jesus. Stories of potential pregnancy or licking his blood from his side wound.

• 27:05Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Kind of holy vampirism, I think of it. They obviously knew that there was a sexual component there. You know, they were not blind to this factor. But I don't think that it was the driving motivation. Uh, for Catherine and the wedding rings. Catherine very much associates the circumcision with Jesus as the first shedding of Jesus's blood, because of course you bleed during circumcision.

• 27:39Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  She very much associates that with the passion on the cross and the last shedding of Jesus's blood and then the crucifixion and the resurrection. I think Catherine is making a blood

• 27:56Speaker 01

  association there between first shedding and last shedding of blood. Because, you know, you can't wear Jesus's actual cross

• 28:08Kate Lister?

  No.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  On your, on your finger. It's, it's much too large. But you could wear his foreskin still as a sign of that first shedding of blood.

• 28:18Kate Lister?

  It's an absolutely wild image, isn't it? Just like that you would have Christ's foreskin wrapped around your finger. But I guess it shows the power of this relic and how seriously it was taken and the belief in it.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Yes, and, and I think the general belief in the late Middle Ages on a an extremely high focus on the humanity of Jesus and

• 28:43Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Body of Jesus. And it, it's like a pendulum swing. Because before then, people had focused very much on the divinity of Jesus. And Jesus enthroned up in heaven and, you know, he will come to judge the living and the dead and all of that.

• 29:05Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  And then it shifts over into, in the late Middle Ages, from about twelve hundred to fifteen hundred. Shifts over into really focusing on the body component. Since Jesus is supposed to be both divine and human.

• 29:26Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  The pendulum really goes to the human component.

• 29:31Kate Lister?

  And there was

• 29:32Speaker 01

  And then with Martin Luther, it all goes back again to the divine part with the Protestant Reformation.

• 29:37Kate Lister?

  Yeah, stop messing around with your relics, Catholics. That was, that was a big part of the Reformation, wasn't it? Was, was getting rid of the relics.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:44Kate Lister?

  Wasn't there a pope? I mean, it was, it was way after the Middle Ages, but wasn't there, but they got so cross about all of this discussion around Christ's foreskin that eventually there was a pope that went, right, that's it. Nobody's allowed to talk about it anymore. Stop it. You've gone too far. This isn't something that we're interested in. Behave yourselves.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Yes, during the French Revolution, because a lot of these were in France.

• 30:06Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  And the French Revolution went through a anti-religious, very like enforced

• 30:13Kate Lister?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  secularism component. They tore down gargoyles and statues from Notre Dame and all of that.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Uh, most of the foreskin relics were lost. They were lost during the French Revolution because of that, because most of them were in France. In the early nineteen hundreds, so we're fast forwarding in time here, in the early nineteen hundreds, the Catholic Church underwent a modernisation movement and a, okay, let's get rid of some of this stuff that we're being criticised for doing, or it seems blasphemous or weird or goofy or what have you. And the Pope at the time said, okay, no more Jesus's foreskin.

• 31:04Kate Lister?

  No.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  They do not exist, they're not real. If one exists, if one exists, it's in this one little town in Italy, north of Rome, called Calcutta, but it's not real. If any of them exist, it's real.

• 31:22Kate Lister?

  What a weird thing to say.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  But if any exists, and so in Calcutta, they were allowed on January first, again, the Feast of the Circumcision, the eighth day after Jesus's birth, they were allowed to bring it out, do a procession around the church, which is something that had been done for hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of years with relics to kind of re-consecrate the church every year. You would do that. They could do it on January first, and then the relic went right back where it had always been, in a box, under the priest's bed.

• 32:08Kate Lister?

  Oh, well, that sounds very safe. That sounds like a great place to, to keep that. Why, why would the Pope say, look, none of them are real, but if anywhere it's this one, but that one's not real even, even that, it sounds like such a strange, like, why wouldn't you just come out and go, look, that's all nonsense, stop it, behave yourselves?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  The one from Calcutta had supposedly, and there are lots of legends around these things, which is why I keep having to say supposedly, um, had been stolen from the Vatican in Rome in the fifteen hundreds and taken to this little town. And so that's why that one was.

• 32:48Kate Lister?

  Possibly, okay.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Possibly.

• 33:00Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with James after this short break.

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• 34:17Kate Lister?

  It doesn't sound like the safest place to be keeping a holy relic of that magnitude. I mean, whether or not it actually was, or whatever it is that's saying, but in a box under a priest's bed?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  No, it's not the safest place. There's actually a journalist named David Forley, who has written an excellent book about these very modern day events with the Holy Foreskin. And, no, it's not the safest place. And there are different stories about whether it was stolen, or lost, or potentially a rich, you know, antiquities collector, couple showed up and bought it, or had it, or they had it stolen. There are all sorts of theories and ideas.

• 35:10Kate Lister?

  So it got stolen? It went missing? It's not there anymore?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  No, it's not there. Whether it was stolen or went missing, was lost, whatever.

• 35:17Kate Lister?

  Bum, bum, bum.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  It's as of nineteen eighty-three, it is not there anymore. There are officially no more Holy Foreskin relics.

• 35:29Kate Lister?

  Do we have any leads on this? Who would, was it, was it the Catholic Church? Was it all about Da Vinci Code and the Catholic Church did it to cover it up?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  That's one of the theories, but again, it's a theory.

• 35:40Kate Lister?

  It's a theory. But they don't have it. So that was the last one, and that one is no more?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 35:47Kate Lister?

  And is there anyone having visions about this? Or is the foreskin just like, it's just all gone completely?

• 35:52Speaker 01

  It's just gone. And part of it, I think, is because if we go back to the early nineteen hundreds, when the Pope said, you know, it's like, these things are not real.

• 36:04Kate Lister?

  Yep.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Except this one, but they're not real, but this one, and blah, blah, blah, back and forth. Uh, there was actually a prohibition, and, and, and an order of excommunication of being kicked out of the church, issued for anyone who spoke or wrote about this particular relic, except again, for the one that was kind of sort of semi-allowed. And I think that's why there's been so much silence about it. Uh, the last book-length study of

• 36:42Speaker 01

  it was in nineteen seventeen, uh, by a German author who had been a Dominican priest and became very dissatisfied with the Catholic Church and decided to write this very personally driven thing about it. Now, he did a lot of research, and it was very helpful for me, because he did do a lot of research, but he was also obviously religiously motivated in what he was writing, uh, whereas I am not. But that's, was the last book-length piece.

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Otherwise, it's been, there have been a few articles here and there. It's been mentioned in a book, but that's the last thing in over a hundred years.

• 37:33Kate Lister?

  So as a, a final question then, James, you did your PhD on this. Does that mean you're out? You've been excommunicated?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  You know, well, I'm not Catholic.

• 37:42Kate Lister?

  Oh, they can't kick you out?

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Well, I guess they could, but I was not part of the community in the first place.

• 37:49Kate Lister?

  Did you get any pushback at all, um, about the subject?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  I have not. As a medievalist and someone who studies saints and relics, I'm not here to decide whether these miracles were real or relics existed, whether they were effective. I'm not here to decide that seven hundred years later. I'm here to determine why people thought that these could be real, what value it gave to them, what emphasis did they place on them and why. And so I've generally not received any pushback with the Holy Foreskin, because I'm not questioning whether it's real or not real, or pushing one way or the

• 38:32Speaker 01

  other. I'm just saying, people believed in this. Let's try to understand what they made sense of it seven hundred years ago.

• 38:41Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  What theological concerns did it raise for them? Because it did raise them. If Agnes Blanbiken can consume Jesus's body as the Eucharist itself, do you need a priest?

• 38:55Kate Lister?

  Good point.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  The priest's function is to consecrate the bread and wine and turn it into the body and blood of Christ. If you can get the body of Christ itself, like the actual body, do you need a priest? And then if Jesus is resurrected, and medieval Christians believed in perfect bodily resurrection, and they did not believe in circumcision, that was what Jews did at that time period. Medieval Christians, no. So there is a tension there, and that's something I'm investigating now, with this tension between worshiping a savior who has been

• 39:36Speaker 01

  very bodily Jewish, while also having increasing antisemitism.

• 39:42Kate Lister?

  Hmm.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  There was a, a tension there. But to go back to the main point, if Jesus is resurrected and doesn't have his foreskin with him, but you believe in perfect bodily resurrection, that means Jesus isn't resurrected perfectly.

• 39:59Kate Lister?

  Good point.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  And if Jesus can't be resurrected, I mean, we're talking about Jesus here. If he can't be resurrected perfectly, what hope do you have for it? You're not Jesus.

• 40:11Kate Lister?

  That's a big theological point, that one. I wouldn't have even thought of that.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  There are a lot of these theological concerns and the concerns with the eroticism and understanding how these women are interpreting it in ways that they probably did understand, had an erotic component, but they also gave their own meaning to it. So that's my focus. The point that I will go back to really quickly, there was one guy who did email me and say that he was a descendant of the bloodline of Jesus.

• 40:47Kate Lister?

  Hello, right?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And why wasn't I studying him instead?

• 40:53Kate Lister?

  Fair point.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  It's like, um, we are not going to respond to this email.

• 40:59Kate Lister?

  It's not nice of him to get in touch and, and let you, and let you know.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Thank you for writing, but I am not going to hit the reply button.

• 41:07Kate Lister?

  Dear God, no. James, you have been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, not to email you and tell you that they are descended from Jesus Christ and would you like to know about their foreskin?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  No, don't do that.

• 41:19Kate Lister?

  Don't do that. But if they wanted to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Are you on social media at all?

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Um, not particularly on social media, but I am available. Uh, if you search for me on the University of Alberta website, if you search my name in the directory, I'm there. And you can find me and there's a description of my research and my teaching on that site.

• 41:46Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much. You have been fabulous.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 41:55Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to James for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov, produced by Sophie G. The senior producer is Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt and Sheats, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.