I do not know how I missed this when it came out but when a serious peer-reviewed medical journal publishes an article on religion I would have thought I would have caught this by now. In any event it would appear that the debate that is continuing about the benefits and consequences of male circumcision (it is kind of odd that female circumcision is universally considered horrible) has looked to history for some context.
To say that the early church and later the Catholic church were obsessed with the circumcision of Jesus Christ would not be overstating the case. Theologians have had considerable difficulties with the whole concept of living a perfect life yet marked with pain, blood and loss. So the question became what happened to the part of Jesus that was removed? It seemed that at its worst there were 21 European cathedrals that claimed to have the holy relic.
There were some very strange people who had some very strange obsessions with this topic including the 17th century theologian Leo Allatius who wrote in De Praeputio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba, "that the holy foreskin may have ascended into heaven at the same time as Jesus himself, and might have become the rings of Saturn."
Science and Religion just gets stranger and stranger.
Mattelaer, JJ, et al. (2007). "The Circumcision of Jesus Christ". The Journal of Urology. 178: 31-34.LINK to Journal of Urology paper
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