Deification and Defecation: Valentinus Fragment 3 and the Physiology of Jesus’s Digestion

Abstract

The aim of this article is to shed light on the physiological (digestive) background of Valentinus fragment 3 (Layton frag. E). When Valentinus claimed that Jesus did not excrete waste, he assumed that the regular process of human digestion included a stage in which food was putrefied in the gut. For Valentinus (and later Epiphanius of Salamis), it was unholy—and thus wrong—for Jesus to contain putrefaction (i.e., corruption). Instead, “Jesus produced divinity.” This means that Jesus produced his own immortal body (including intestines). Valentinus’s comment did not undermine Jesus’s humanity; it creatively worked out what divine humanity meant in a physiological sense. According to Valentinus, Jesus’s body was both the same as and different from (fallen) human bodies. Jesus had all the digestive organs that present humans have, but they did not work in the same way because Jesus’s self-control had changed the nature of his body, immortalizing and deifying it.