The word occurs twice in the New Testament (Matthew 15:17, Mark 7:19) and was unknown in classical texts.
[1] Wycliffe avoided the reference to a privy with "and beneath it goeth out," while Martin Luther translated the word as natürliche Gang ("natural course"),[2] though Tyndale's "and goeth out into the draught" is more clear.
Perhaps due in part to Luther's "natural course," various 18th and 19th Century scholars assumed it was a euphemism for the human bowel.
[3] However the discovery and publication of an inscription at Pergamon in 1901[4] confirmed that the word does, as per Latin secessus, in fact mean latrine.
[6] The following is a transcription and translation of the relevant fragment of the Greek text known in Latin as Lex de astynomis Pergamenorum and in English as Law of the town clerks of Pergamon.