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Did you know there were medieval debates about whether Jesus was circumcised and--if so--whether the foreskin went to heaven when Jesus ascended or was somewhere on earth still? Dozens of places claimed to have His foreskin, which known as the Holy Prepuce.
Some legends claimed Charlemagne had the Holy Foreskin, which was given to him by an angel. Others say that King Baldwin I of Jerusalem gave it to Europe after the First Crusade and that it caused miracles, including once dripping three drops of blood during Mass.
Some theologians got VERY UPSET at the idea that Jesus' foreskin (or milk teeth or fingernails) did not rise to heaven when the rest of Him did. In the 1100s, Guibert of Nogent denied that the Foreskin could still be on earth bc, like our bodies will in the End Days, it must rise
St. Catherine of Siena claimed in a letter that God married holy virgins (including possibly herself) with a ring made from his foreskin. Birgitta of Sweden wrote of a vision in which the Virgin Mary and she talked about the Foreskin and where it was currently located (Rome).
Most extraordinarily, Agnes Blannbekin, a 14th-cent Beguine nun, wrote she meditated on the Foreskin and it appeared in her mouth, tasting sweet. She swallowed it and it reappeared. She swallowed it 100s of times. Thus, she began to glow so brightly that she could see herself.
The cult of the Holy Prepuce was popular in the later Middle Ages, as both Caroline Walker Bynum and Andrew S. Jacobs have written. Jacobs' great book on the topic notes how the idea of Jesus, a Christian, being circumcised presented problems to medieval Christians anti-Semitism
Jacobs: "the doctrine of transubstantiation brought with it a new and horrible slander against the marginalized Jews of Europe: accusations of host desecration, the torture of Christ’s body anew by perfidious Jews seeking to reenact the Passion" (x).
Jacobs: "The foreskin of Christ, that theologically innovative relic, might allow Christians to imagine, in complex fashions, their relationship to Jews and Judaism, and even imagine Christ in that Jewish matrix" (xi).
Anyway, the Middle Ages were weird, and medieval Christians thought about a lot of strange stuff. And even seemingly silly stuff like this came weighted with a lot of religious significance and played a part in the violence of Christians towards Jews.
