Electrosnack

Why? Why not?! I'm a history geek and when I heard the words "holy" and "foreskin" in dangerous succession to each other, it couldn't be ignored. That there were people for centuries venerating a supposed foreskin of Jesus really fascinated me. Was it the real flesh of Christ? Probably not. But that people at one time believed it was very intriguing to me. Then I started doing some research and found there was a whole cult of the Holy Foreskin in centuries past.

Excellent question, wickensworth. I didn't go into this topic much in the book but in the documentary I interviewed a molecular genetic pathologist who confirmed that it would be possible to find out the DNA of Christ if the relic were in the right (or wrong) hands. Of course, this is assuming the the piece of flesh is really that of Jesus Christ.

You ThaBomb! Thanks. Unlikely. The molecular genetic pathologist I interviewed in the doc said, if preserved properly (as it was said in the Gospel of the Infancy that after Jesus' circumcision his foreskin was put in a jar of preservative oil) that a piece of flesh could last 2,000 years. The Holy Foreskin didn't start actually popping up in churches and monasteries in Europe until around the 11th and 12th centuries. There was an origin tale tied to it, that Charlemagne received the relic from an angel while praying in Jerusalem and he then gave it to Pope Leo III in the year 800. The earliest I could find this tale was in a document in the 1090s. After that it was repeated many times. So, likely, the piece of flesh people were venerating was some poor soul's foreskin but not likely to be Jesus's. That's just my take on it, though.

I haven't tried that one yet. Note to self: try that tonight.

I love this. I have to say, in doing my research on this topic, this was a twist I wasn't expecting at all. Leo Allatius, who wrote that the foreskin is the rings of Saturn, is also responsible for writing the first treatise about vampires.