Winter 1999, 2000 -- Volume 38 No. 1

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Millennial Feast of The Circumcision

by Frank R. Zindler

Either this winter or the next - ecclesiastical arithmetic is fraught with difficulty and controversy - Christians of all kinds will be celebrating the second-millennial anniversary of the birth of their namesake deity. Catholic Christians, however, will also be commemorating another anniversary seven days later - the two-thousandth anniversary of their god’s circumcision.

It is a curious fact that Christians worship a god who belongs to a different religion. Even though Jesus today sits at the top of the Christian totem pole, the biblical Jesus is clearly a Jew. Like all Jewish males, we are told, Jesus was subjected to circumcision. How a being can be born supposedly perfect - indeed be born the archetype of perfection - and still be in need of corrective surgery is perhaps the most inscrutable of all religious mysteries. The mystery deepens when we reflect that the Jewish rite of circumcision is allegedly the mark of a man’s contract (“covenant”) with a god he worships. With whom, we may ask, was Jesus “covenanting,” if he himself was the only god in town? Moreover, since the original meaning of the covenant was to increase a man’s fertility and the number of his descendants, it is clear that whoever it was who made the contract with Jesus didn’t honor the bargain. Jesus sired no children at all that the churches will admit to. If an omniscient deity had been involved in the circumcision of Jesus, wouldn’t it have known that circumcising Jesus would be no more useful than circumcising a eunuch?

However perplexing these questions might be, the fact is that the Gospel of Luke says Jesus was circumcised. Despite the fact that St. Paul and his followers rejected circumcision as unnecessary for Christians, the Christian church since ancient times has celebrated the day of Jesus’ circumcision as a holy day - the “Feast” of the Circumcision - and has celebrated it on January first! Happy New Year!

The scriptural accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension into “heaven” make it impossible to infer very much about the condition of the body he wore into outer space. For example, we do not know if he was launched with a full or empty bladder, whether or not his toenails needed clipping, how many milligrams of earwax he took along, how much nasal mucus there was in his head or on his face, or how much of the last supper remained to be evacuated from the colon. Nevertheless, we can be certain that the penis he packed along for the ride was missing a part - the foreskin.

It didn’t take Christians long to reason that if J. C. didn’t fly his foreskin to heaven, the sacred snippet must still be here on planet Earth. And so quite a few legends and traditions have come down concerning the fate of the foreskin of god. It is believed by some that the Virgin Mary carried the foreskin on her person, that the penile paring had been entrusted to St. John or Mary Magdalene, that the Apostles inherited it, that it was brought to Charlemagne, that it was stolen by Charles V in 1527, and that the divine deciduum once appeared simultaneously in twelve abbeys across the continent of Europe. It has been claimed that the relic emitted a wonderful odor and had a strange effect upon women. Some nuns were alleged to have engaged in “insolent conduct” with the relic.

The piety-provoking prepuce was also important to several female “saints.” St. Birgitta claimed to have had a vision of the Mother of God holding the foreskin in her hand, and St. Agnes of Blannbekin went berserk every January first, when she would have visions of herself swallowing the only earthly remnant of her lord. And you thought the phrase “feast of the circumcision” was just a metaphor!