The Catholic mystic Catherine of Siena claimed that, in a vision, she received the Holy Prepuce or foreskin as a wedding ring symbolising her marriage to Christ. A certain Saint Bridget made it known she had received bits of prepuce from an angel which she put on her tongue and gave her orgasmic-like sensations.
During the middle ages, there were at least 14 claimants to the title of the Holy Prepuce in churches around Europe. In 1421, Henry V sent for one of them, the Holy Prepuce of Coulombs in France, because it was believed that its sweet scent would help his wife, Catherine of Valois, have an easy childbirth.
But maybe all of these many foreskins were phonies. In the 17th century Catholic scholar Leo Allatius suggested that Jesus's prepuce had ascended to Heaven at the same time as Christ and might have become the rings of Saturn.
Or did it? Only last month archaeologists at the Mount of Olives cemetery outside the walls of Jerusalem claimed to have found a casket containing the prepuce. It would have been removed from the infant Jesus on his eighth day and buried by his mother.
The contentious afterlife of the holy foreskin should give us pause when we consider the latest claim about holy relics, namely the suggestion of Titanic director James Cameron to have found the tombs of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their son. It's a find that would seem to confirm the notorious claims in Dan Brown's bestselling book about Jesus's sex life. Indeed, you might be forgiven for treating Cameron's press conference in New York public library as a pitch for a film sequel of the Da Vinci Code. In such an atmosphere, there are only two people in the world qualified to judge whether these caskets are authentic - Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, during a long, really boring movie.
What is certain is that there is an awful lot of supposed Christian relics around - the Holy Sponge, the Spear of Destiny, Veronica's Veil, the Holy Umbilical Cord, Christ's Tears, His Milk Teeth, among them. Erasmus joked that so many pieces of the True Cross were in circulation that Jesus must have been crucified by a whole forest.
But the sage of Rotterdam was writing in different times. Then, holy relics were popularly assumed to have magic powers. Indeed, it was just these supposed powers that the 16th-century Council of Trent derided as a hangover from pagan times, decreeing that "every superstition shall be removed and all filthy lucre abolished".
Why so many purported relics are coming to light in recent years (in 2003, for instance, the bones of Jesus's brother, James, were allegedly found in Jerusalem) is another matter. Are we more credulous, or just better at archaeology? Certainly, superstition has not been removed, nor filthy lucre abolished.
In any event, Cameron's find has been greeted with scepticism. "We know that Joseph, Jesus and Mariamene were all among the most common names of the period," said David Mevorah, a curator of the Israel museum in Jerusalem. "To start with all these names being together in a single tomb and the leap from there to say this is the tomb of Jesus is a little far-fetched, to put it politely."