doing when he structured the sentence with this ambiguity in place. Circumcision (which, elsewhere in the letter, rather neutrally equates to “Judaism”) juxtaposed with Christ’s body becomes a radical resignifier. It can emanate from Christ or remain on his skin’s surface; in either case, it cannot help but be swept up in the cascade of literal and figurative corporeal moments of Christ’s life that structure the entire passage. It may very well refer to Christ’s crucifixion, because this section of the letter has so disembedded “circumcision” from its normal religious, political, and cultural significations. By bringing the circumcision into contact with Christ—wielded by him or against him—the author of Colossians has succeeded in prising it free not only of Roman control, as in Paul’s letters, but of Jewish control as well. Whether Christ’s circumcision is baptism or crucifixion or both, it is no longer a sign of the covenant of Abraham or the legible symbol of Roman imperial subjection. It is Christianized, and totally open to multiple new meanings.
Luke’s Jewish Messiah for Gentiles
The author of the Gospel of Luke is slightly more willing to imagine the messianic circumcision. A set of parallel passages recounts the nativities of John the Baptist and (in Luke’s account) his cousin Jesus. At the climax of both come their circumcision and naming: “And it was the eighth day, and they came to circumcise the child, and they called him by the name of his father, Zechariah” (Luke 1:59; NRSV modified); “And the eight days were fulfilled to circumcise him, and he was called by the name Jesus, which he was called by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21). Multiple parallelisms link these nativities:77 both infants are announced by angelic visitors (Luke 1:11–20, 26–38); both infants have special names, divinely preordained (Luke 1:13, 60–63; Luke 1:31, 2:21); both births are bracketed by Temple worship (Zechariah does Temple service before John’s birth [Luke 1:8–9], Mary and Joseph go to the Temple for purification after Jesus’ [Luke 2:22–24]); and both children are the occasion for songs of praise from their parents (Zechariah [Luke 1:67–79] and Mary [Luke 1:46–55], respectively).
Both passages are also grammatically evasive on the moment of circumcision itself, as no finite verb (“he was circumcised”) describes the act of circumcision. In John’s case “they came to circumcise him” (
Nonetheless modern commentators have little to say specifically about Luke’s circumcised messiah,79 other than to note that this event combines with the rest of the “prologue” of the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1–2) to create a deeply Jewish point of departure for a messiah who will, ultimately, deliver salvation to gentiles.80 Indeed, for most modern scholars Jesus’ circumcision is absorbed into the larger question of Luke’s (seemingly) incongruous emphasis on the particularities of Law and Temple in his universalizing gospel.81 Of the four canonical gospels, Luke’s is typically considered the most gentile in its orientation;82 the author crafts a “gospel for the gentiles” both theologically (a “universal” salvation that supplants the old covenant [see Luke 16:16]) and stylistically (a more urbane, sophisticated literary presentation).83
Luke’s incongruously Jewish opening chapters have vexed New Testament scholars for centuries. Early source critics explained these early, more Jewish passages as the calcified remains of an older gospel source preserved—like an extinct theological fly in more precious amber—in the layers of Luke’s gospel.84 This early stratum may retain early traditions about Jesus the Jew, but those early traditions are effectively neutralized by being preserved in a more evolved text. Later redaction criticism focused on Luke’s authorial motives in combining stories of Jesus’ Jewishness with theological messages of universal salvation.85 François Bovon imagines the evangelist as a gentile who, once drawn to Judaism as a “god-fearer,” now sees the value in leaving Judaism behind. So the narrative of Jesus’ Jewish childhood becomes something like a fond memory that carries nostalgic value, but little theological significance.86 Raymond Brown likewise understands “a Lucan view of the Jewish Temple and its ritual more in terms of nostalgia for things past, rather than of hostility for an active and seductive enemy.”87 Such commentary frames the first chapters of Luke, including the passage on Jesus’ circumcision, as splashes of theological color: an acknowledgment of the resolutely past-tense significance of Israel, a kinder and gentler mode of theological supersessionism.88
A more creative redaction-critical explanation for the early emphasis on Law and Temple in Luke’s work was raised by John Knox, and recently defended by his student Joseph Tyson.89 For these scholars, the redacted fragments of Luke-Acts, replete with Jewish color, do not look back (in triumph or nostalgia) to a primitive moment of the Jesus Movement; rather, they bear witness to a later debate among gentile Christian groups in the mid-second century: the rise of Marcionite Christianity. In the early second century, Marcion preached a popular form of Christianity that sharply distinguished Christian salvation from the prior—material, legalistic, judgmental, and Jewish—covenant. Christianity, and Jesus, had nothing to do with the Creator God of the Old Testament and his Jewish worshipers, Marcion taught. His later detractors accused him of producing a corrupt and truncated New Testament, purged of Jewish elements, in order to spread his heresy.90
Knox and Tyson have argued that the reverse might be true: perhaps Marcion’s shorter, less Jewish gospel preceded the canonical Gospel of Luke, indeed, prompted the fuller, Judaized nativity.91 Speaking specifically of Luke 1–2, Knox writes: “Marcion would surely not have tolerated this highly ‘Jewish’ section; but how wonderfully adapted it is to show the nature of Christianity as the true Judaism and thus to answer one of the major contentions of the Marcionites! And one cannot overlook the difficulty involved in the common supposition that Marcion deliberately selected a Gospel which began in so false and obnoxious a way.”92 Although this last point may be somewhat unfair—no one has argued that Marcion had multiple narratives of Jesus’ life at his disposal and quirkily chose the one least suited to his theological agenda93—the overall idea that proto-orthodox expansion can explain the textual and canonical history of Luke as well as Marcionite truncation has found some traction in recent years. Tyson concludes that “[the] work as a whole, Luke-Acts as we know it, surely served as a formidable anti-Marcionite text.”94 Central to Tyson’s argument are the highly “Jewish” chapters of Luke 1–2,95 particularly the account of the circumcision: “it is important to observe that the vital link with Judaism signified by Jesus’ circumcision would have been highly offensive to Marcion and his followers.”96 Although creative in its canonical revision, the “Knox-Tyson theory” participates in a well-established scholarly attempt to explain—and explain away—the presence of such an anomalous feature as Jesus’ circumcision in the gentile gospel. The time frame has simply been moved up several decades, and the target of Luke’s anomalous narrative (Jews, gentiles, or Marcionites) shifted to suit. Redaction criticism, early and late, rhetorically isolates and, in a sense, evacuates the Jewishness of the circumcision of Jesus. It is not “really” a part of Luke’s gospel, and therefore easy to read right past.
Two twentieth-century commentators have attempted to explain the Jewishness of Luke’s first chapters, and the circumcision specifically, in a way that does not view these passages as anomalous to Luke’s “real” theological perspective. Jacob Jervell sees no incongruity between the Law-fulfilling Jesus of Luke 1–2 and the messianic community envisioned generally by Luke-Acts.97 For Jervell, the circumcised messiah fits neatly into what was, at its origins, a fundamentally Jewish-Christian messianic movement: “Luke must indicate
