God: An Anatomy

by Francesca Stavrakopoulou

Meanwhile, in the Gospel of Thomas (another influential work), Jesus goes further, casting childlessness as a divine blessing: ‘The days will come when you will say, “Blessed is the womb which has not conceived and the breasts that have not given suck” ’.

But validation might also be sought by means of the taste test: a physician would be appointed by local clergy to nibble a piece of the latest relic to confirm whether it was vegetal matter, animal leather, or human foreskin.38 Its sanctity might also be confirmed by its flavour. Sacred relics were believed to give off a sweet scent; they surely tasted sweet, too. This was indeed the experience of the thirteenth-century Beguine mystic Agnes Blannbekin, who claimed Christ’s foreskin tasted gloriously sweet. Agnes was regularly swallowing the Holy Prepuce, which miraculously manifested itself on her tongue when she received Communion on the annual Feast of the Circumcision. She reported its consistency was ‘alike the skin in an egg’, and that, when she felt compelled to put her finger in her mouth to touch it, ‘that little skin went down her throat on its own’, filling her limbs with a sweetness so great it appears to have triggered an orgasmic out-of-body experience.39

Blended with the virulent antisemitism of the West, artistic representations of Christ’s circumcision often portrayed a chubby white baby Jesus as the self-sacrificing victim of the bloodthirsty, hooked-nosed Jewish circumcisers surrounding him. Frequently garbed in the imagined vestments of the ancient Jewish priesthood, or topped with the distinctive peaked hat that had become a conventional, malevolent marker of ‘Jewishness’ in European art, these men are regularly depicted crowding around the child, leering at the large blade menacingly positioned at his tiny genitals.42 In some works, the ugly caricaturing of Jewish ritual was further embellished by the deliberate mis-gendering of the circumciser as a hideous, villainous woman. In the masculinist world of medieval and Renaissance Christianity, circumcision was still closely associated with castration. The Jewish ‘mutilation’ of the genitals was therefore cast as a feminizing, sexually abusive wound, fating little boys to an unmanned adulthood.43

The biblical God cannot and should not be let off the hook. Here, he is a predatory alpha male, whose sexual entitlement entirely shapes the identity and fate of this displaced and vulnerable young girl.

As Europeans invaded other people’s homelands in Africa, Asia and the Americas, and began the violent colonial process of brutalizing, exploiting and profiteering from two thirds of the world, the white-skinned European Christ lent his support to the conquest, oppression, enslavement and trafficking of those cast as black-, brown-, dark- or red-skinned – regardless of whether these people were already deemed appropriately God-fearing or not. By the late fifteenth century, the biblical story of Noah’s son Ham had been twisted into an anti-black myth of African origins.

But the party isn’t over. El gathers his drinking companions and they move on to the next venue – an exclusive drinking club known as the marzeah, of which El was divine patron.

By the first century CE, a Palestinian Jewish group known as the Essenes was said to be so stringent in honouring God’s sacred time that they would avoid defecating on Shabbat.

Assuming (of course) male anatomy, rabbis decreed that people were to turn their backs to the direction of the temple when urinating, shielding God from their penises, and face the direction of the temple when defecating, so as to hide their buttocks.

One particularly nervous rabbi is said to have had a pet lamb trained to accompany him to the toilet, while another installed a small opening in the wall of his privy so that his wife could rest a comforting, protective hand on his head while he was in there.47

Philosophically and doctrinally, the body of God would eventually disappear, leaving in its place the incarnate Christ. And yet the religious realities of God’s body would be impossible to erase. God’s breath would be materialized and enshrined for all to see, hear and touch in the ‘in-spirational’ Christian Bible itself, as one of its sacred texts declared: All scripture is God-breathed.59 Like the grin of the Cheshire Cat, it was the breath of God that would remain, as his body gradually vanished.