The invasion left half the population dead and many sacred relics were destroyed or stolen. It remained in the papal Sancta Sanctorum reliquary until the sacking of Rome in 1527. One of those alleged foreskin relics arrived in Rome around 799 AD when King Charlemagne presented it as a gift to Pope Leo III. "And, of course, this is not just a saint, this is Jesus' body," said White, referring to the holy foreskin. Such holy relics were believed to withstand natural decay and were considered "incorruptible." Throughout the history of Catholicism, relics - be they an alleged piece of the holy cross or the toe or finger of a saint - have been considered key to communing with the divine.
"And one of them had a lightbulb moment and thought, 'Whoa, we could really make a heavenly sum if we, you know, told monks and priests and so on that we have a piece of Christ's flesh for sale!' Not surprisingly, the relic had the miraculous power of duplication, and depending on what sources you read, there were a dozen or almost two dozen places around Europe, mostly in France for some reason, that claimed they actually had the holy foreskin." Relic culture When they got to the Book of Luke, they read the part about Christ being circumcised on his eighth day," said David Farley, author of An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic and Italy's Oddest Town.
"You know, what probably happened was some clever relic collectors were thumbing through the Bible. The first mention of Jesus' circumcision can be found in the Book of Luke 2:21. For example, Judy Garland's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz now have an estimated worth of up to $3 million US. He says contemporary obsessions with celebrity objects could be seen as bizarre to people outside our culture. We're not the ultimate modern, evolved human beings that we sometimes think we are." "People 700 years in the future are going to think we're pretty strange, too. "I think studying the holy foreskin is a nice ego check for all of us," said White. And they developed a devotion to it."Īnd it wasn't considered a strange devotion in the minds of Christians for nearly 1,000 years.
And in the Middle Ages, people developed this idea that his foreskin might still exist on Earth. "The idea is that Jesus, as a Jewish boy, was circumcised when he was eight days old, like Jewish boys are. "The holy foreskin is both an object and an idea," White explained to CBC Radio's IDEAS. 'My job is to try to get into the heads of medieval people and figure out what connections they were making and why,' says James White, a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta (Laura McLean)
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