Church Historians Discover St. John Not Named After Toilet

The beginning of the confusion lies in ancient manuscripts called the Dead Pee Scrolls.

Rome, March 21 – Upending one of the longest-held assumptions in ecclesiastical scholarship, the Roman Catholic Church announced this morning that it had officially refuted the notion that St. John, who is said to have baptized the baby Jesus, was named after the bathroom fixture often referred to by the same moniker.

Although the early evidence is murky, the first Church historians were certainly under the impression that the shared name was no mere coincidence, says Hugo Plunger, Associate Professor of Ecclesiastical History at  Hemmer-Royd University. No one really questioned the reasons given for the commonality, until The Da Vinci Commode came out. A man of prolific output, author Dan Brown was the first to publicize an undercurrent of alternative scholarship swirling about the issue, until enough important figures in the Vati-can decided it was time for a cessation of the fracas. “They actually used the word $#!tstorm at one point,” said Plunger.

The beginning of the confusion lies in ancient manuscripts called the Dead Pee Scrolls, until recently attributed to a Jewish sect called the Assenes, who lived in the Urean Desert. Many of their writings were e-scatalogical in nature, predicting that much of civilization would soon be washed away in a “brimstone tide”. The end-times would supposedly then usher in resurrectum for the worthy. The author of the scroll in question, known as the TP Roll because of its beginning and ending characters, logged “John, of the bathing John” as the source of the vision. Later chroniclers identified that John as John the Baptist in their Anals.

The Assene teachings in turn influenced St. Pile. In his Epissles, he goes further, and also identifies St. Peter as the first Poop. An entire school of thought in medieval scholarship poo-pooed this notion, and its chief proponent, Steppin d’Ung, published his infamous 95 Feces that instead tried to demonstrate that the John-John connection originated with the Emperor Constipatine. D’Ung eventually retracted, but not before being smeared as the “Anti-Poop” and blocked from administering the excrements.

Brown’s case rested on a version of the gospel of Mark first unearthed in Crete. Stored in what appeared to be an old chamberpot with dark, parallel streaks on it, the manuscript was spirited off to Rome, where the ex-Crete document became known as Skid-Mark.

Skid-Mark uses phrases much more in keeping with the culture in Urea at the time of John, and Brown contends that the euphemism of choice for going to relieve oneself was “Going to see Haman about a dog.” Nowhere outside Pile’s writings does the “John” turn of phrase emerge until several centuries later, when other writers simply copied Pile.

Brown is circumspect about this coup, and downplays his achievement. Asked whether he knew the evidence existed or whether it was merely a hunch, the author said, “I just went with my gut.”