Jesus was a man of many foreskins. So starts one of the Middle Ages’ dirtiest jokes, in which a theologian remarks on the sheer number of claimed relics of “the Holy Prepuce” (the punchline: he must have been very well endowed).

People, even Christians, have always found humour and absurdity in divinity, so there’s little new in comedian Reuben Kaye’s off-colour one-liner on Network Ten’s The Project. Far more noteworthy is the lameness of his joke-telling. “Nailed” as a double-entendre. Cringe. I heard that one back in high school.

Comedian Reuben Kaye on The Project.Credit:Network Ten

To be really offensive about Christianity you have to be far more creative these days. Remember Popetown, a 2005 adult sitcom billed as “Father Ted meets South Park”. It imagined the pope as a petulant child voiced by Ruby Wax? In one episode, a look-alike Jewish comedian played by Jackie Mason replaces him, all Prince and Pauper. Oy vey.

Or South Park itself, just as irreverent, after creator Matt Stone declared “open season” on Jesus. It had him swear and cuss and kill, with such scenes that attracted the usual handwringing from professional offence merchants and latter-day Mary Whitehouses.

Serious and committed Christians, however, ought to recognise a spoonful of satire is no threat to faith or salvation. A self-confident religion takes criticism and doesn’t rush to demand retribution against its heretics.

As the BBC’s supremely cynical send-up of PR agents, Absolute Power, put it in an episode which imagines a Tony Blair type competing to become archbishop of Canterbury: blasphemy? “What other business would complain when people shout out the name of the shop?”

The Holy Family with Saint Barbara and the Young Saint John the Baptist by Paolo Veronese.Credit:Summerfield Press/Corbis via Getty Images) .

In fact, Christianity has long traditions of sexualising Jesus in ways far more subtle and profound than anything Kaye’s lips can manage. Returning to the holy foreskin, Agnes Blannbekin, a 14th-century nun, used to tell her sisters about her visions of swallowing it “hundreds of times”. Renaissance portraits of Christ on the cross often show him with an erect penis – a theological point to emphasise his humanity.

Madonnas and child from that era, too, will show Mary gazing at Jesus’ genitals or even cupping them. Same principle: he is God the son but also God the father.