Urban myth or not?
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/archive/permalink/the_holy_foreskin
This anecdote has been widely repeated on the Internet and on television. So, I was surprised to find that Allatius’s notorious essay isn’t online somewhere.
From my research, it seems that while Allatius did write an essay with that title, it was never published, meaning we can’t check whether he did believe that the rings of Saturn were Christ’s, uh, “praeputio”. De Praeputio is listed in in Fabricius’s Bibliotheca Graeca (a 1728 bibliography of Greek writers), citing this 1668 booklet where it is mentioned as an essay scheduled to appear in Volume 8 of a projected 10-volume set of Allatius’s works. However, WorldCat notes that these volumes were “apparently never published.”
Most web sites and blogs that repeat the story cite no sources or references for the claim. Those who do cite a source can only name the 19th century British atheists G.W. Foote & J.M. Wheeler, in their chapter on relics in their 1887 polemic, Crimes of Christianity.
Unfortunately Foote and Wheeler don’t tell us how they found out about this obscure and unpublished 17th century essay, of which nobody else seems to have first-hand knowledge.
When I contacted the Vallicellian Library in Rome (which holds Allatius’s manuscripts) they replied that their catalog of his unpublished works is not complete (sheesh, after 300 years you’d think they might have got around to it!), but De Praeputio does not appear in the current catalog.
So, this presumably means: (1) the essay is somewhere in the Vallicellean but has not been indexed; (2) it is held in some other library or archive; (3) it is a “lost” work. In any case we can’t check it.
I have also contacted a college professor who is an expert on Allatius. He too has never seen the essay in question, but from what he knows of Allatius he thinks it unlikely that he would have proposed such a bizarre notion about Saturn.
Any thoughts on how we can resolve this literary mystery?