Kelley Spoerl: Epiphanius on Jesus' Digestion

This paper will follow upon the paper I presented at the conference in 2011: "Eustathius of Antioch on Jesus' Digestion." There I discussed a fragment from Eustathius of Antioch's Contra Ariomanitas in which Eustathius deployed an Aristotelian physiological scheme involving the digestive tract to argue for the existence of a human soul in Christ as the subject of the human emotions and changes therein recorded in the gospels. This paper will investigate a claim made in the anti-Apollinarian section of Epiphanius's Panarion 77: that while having a complete human digestive system, Christ never used it to excrete solid waste. According to Epiphanius, some Apollinarians reasoned that if Christ had a flesh like that of ordinary human beings, he must have excreted like them. Since this is an unacceptable conclusion, Christ's flesh must therefore have been different from normal human flesh. Epiphanius combats the implicit Docetism of this claim while simultaneously confirming his opponents' denial that Christ excreted solid waste. In this paper I will consider whether  this discussion in Epiphanius bears any relation to the Eustathian claim that Christ had a normal digestive system; how this claim became implicated in the anti-Apollinarian debate (likely resulting from speculation about the consubstantiality of Christ's humanity with his divinity); and the background to one argument Epiphanius makes in support of his claim that Christ did not defecate: rabbinic commentary on Deut. 23:13-14, that during the Exodus, the Israelites did not excrete the manna God miraculously sent to nourish them.