Authenticity and Scholarship

Devotionally the Holy Prepuce was received as a true relic of the infant Christ, grounded in the plain scriptural fact of the circumcision in Luke 2:21. Historically and critically the claim collapses under its own multiplicity: at the height of the cult more than a dozen churches simultaneously professed to own the one authentic foreskin, and they cannot all have been right, which casts doubt on every claimant.

None was ever subjected to scientific testing, and the Church's own decision in 1900 to forbid discussion of the relic amounted to a quiet retirement of the cult rather than any endorsement. The disappearance of the Calcata example in 1983 removed the last object that might in principle have been examined. With irreconcilable competing claims, no evidential support and formal ecclesiastical suppression, the Holy Prepuce is classed as debunked in authenticity and lost in existence.