One Ring to Find Them, One Ring to Bind Them, and One Unholy Flesh Ring to Water Their Eyes and Blind Them with the Funky

While a thousand years ago holy men would go to great lengths to acquire relics, one of the oddest heists did not occur until 1983.

Being Jewish, Christ would have been circumcised. That small ring of flesh would become a surprisingly important part of Christianity. The ceremony of circumcision, the brit milah or bris, was a favorite subject for painters and church walls often featured frescos of the act. The Emperor Charlemagne is supposed to have given Jesus’s foreskin to Pope Leo III as a reward for crowning him Holy Roman Emperor. Technically Charlemagne was re-gifting it, since legend says he received it as a wedding present from his wife.

Since relics were holy, and no one in the Christian religion was holier than Jesus, churches clamored to claim possession of the one true foreskin. At one point at least 18 towns promised pilgrims that their foreskin was the real deal. Over time most of these prepuces were lost or destroyed.

And then, in the early 1960s, one was re-discovered, in the little town of Fayetteville, attached to a babe in swaddling clothes (his family being slow to payoff the onesie it had on layaway), in a house not much better than a manger, born to a woman villagers said was a virgin, because if anyone said otherwise, that bitch would cut him.

It was said to glow, to cast a halo atop it, when the light passed through the blessed child's urine stream just so. Many a babysitter was struck blind by its beauty.

Bullies came from wide and far to marvel at and then kick the shit out of the Loman child, but the Truth was undeniable: he possessed The One True Foreskin.

Pictures to follow.