240-Year-Old Message Found Inside Butt Of Jesus Statue–And We’re Snickering

Statue restorers in Spain have uncovered one of the oldest intentional time capsules ever discovered. How did they crack it? They looked in the crack…of a statue. Literally.

A simple statue of Jesus called Cristo del Miserere (roughly “Christ of Mercy”) had stood in the Santa Agueda cathedral in the northern Spanish village of Sotillo de la Ribera for more than 200 years. It did its job, looking beautiful and inspirational, but nobody knew that a secret and fascinating historical document lay hidden inside the statue. Specifically, in the statue’s butt.

A company called Da Vinci Restauro were restoring the statue when they removed a piece of fabric that was tastefully covering what turned out to be an apparently anatomically correct backend. They carefully dug in there and found nobody had been able to get out for centuries: a letter written in 1777 and signed by a chaplain named Joaquín Mínguez.

The note is more or less a fifth-grade-style presentation about day-to-day life in northern Spain in the 1770s but delivered to the future. He talks about the statue, its sculptor, but mostly popular pastimes of the era (card and ball games), unpopular but common diseases (malaria and typhoid), and that the harvests of wheat, rye, barley, and oats, had been bountiful for many years.

Da Vinci Restauro turned the document over to the local archbishop. He made copies of course, but then the original note from the chaplain was returned from whence it came: back into the statue’s butt.

This real-life deleted scene from The Da Vinci Code is as hilarious as it fascinating, because, come on, it’s a note hidden in a statue’s butt. Twitter people really got behind this one.

I wish that instead of news about our crazy president, we uncovered a new secret message in a Jesus statue's butt every day. pic.twitter.com/GwY3VnxCSa

— elizabeth williams (@Elizasoul80) December 4, 2017