Did Jesus Poop?
What Jesus said and did when he was alive is, quite clearly, a subject of great interest to Christians today. And the New Testament tells us a great deal about some of the details of Jesus’ life: he was circumcised, he was rude to his parents, he walked around (sometimes on water), he rode donkeys, he cried, he got angry, and he shared meals with his followers. The Bible says absolutely nothing about Jesus’ sex life (although Dan Brown has hypothesized quite enough about that already), but it’s equally silent on the question of digestion. Everybody poops, but did Jesus?
If you’re thinking “yes, he was a human being, but oh my g-d why are you bringing this up? talking about Jesus’ bowel movements is like discussing my parent’s sex life” then that’s understandable. But if it seems like we at The Daily Beast have jumped the shark this week, then you’ll be interested to know that this was a centuries long debate among the Church Fathers, for whom digestion was often a much more important question than sex.
In the second century a popular Christian teacher named Valentinus wrote in a letter to a man called Agathopous that Jesus “was continent, enduring all things. (The risen) Jesus digested divinity: he ate and drank in a special way without excreting his solids. He had such a great capacity for continence that the nourishment within him was not corrupted, for he did not experience corruption.” In other words Jesus was special and never defecated although, as scholar Christoph Markschies has written, Valentinus was talking about Jesus after his resurrection so we are already in “special” territory.