On the one hand, they intensified and amplified the Roman stereotype of circumcision as the paradigmatic, and ignominious, sign of “the Jew.” That is, the sign that distinguished Jews from—and made Jews comprehensible to—Romans now performed the same functions in a new, gentile, Christian idiom. At the same time, however, non-Jewish Christians also arrogated positive Christian meaning to this sign, as they claimed for themselves the title of Israel.113
The doubled view of circumcision finds its way into anti-Jewish literature early on:114 the Epistle of Barnabas, which probably dates from the mid-second century,115 sounds the twin notes of repudiation and appropriation that will become standard in the stereotypical discourses of early Christianity. The letter as a whole interweaves a defense of Christian practices (such as baptism) and theologies (such as the passion and the new covenant) with rejections of Jewish customs and practices. The chapter on circumcision opens with a metaphor drawn from the Hebrew Bible that would become a favorite of early Christians, the “circumcised” hearts and ears (Deut 10:16, 30:6; Jer 4:4, 6:10).116 The author goes further than this metaphorical, biblical language, however, and declares that God had never ordained fleshly circumcision for the Jews: “But even the circumcision in which they trusted has been nullified. For he has said that circumcision is not a matter of the flesh. But they transgressed because an evil angel instructed them.”117 This ascription of the rite of circumcision—alone among the Jewish covenant laws discussed in Barnabas—to an “evil angel” is an extraordinary step: “B. was not willing simply to argue for the truth of the purely symbolic interpretation of the rite (as he had for sacrifice, the temple, and the dietary laws), but to demonise it.”118 Even as this sign is plotted in a distinctly religious register (the domain of angels and demons), it is simultaneously removed from the Roman economy of signs: “But you will say: Surely the people were circumcised as a seal. So is every Syrian and Arab and all the priests of the idols: so are they also part of their covenant? Even the Egyptians have circumcision!”119 Circumcision no longer retains its particular stereotypical signification in the Roman symbolic order, setting Jews apart from other provincial populations. A new system of stereotypes has taken its place; although circumcision still indicates the peculiar (demonic) quality of the Jews, Christians have seized that system of signs from Roman hands.
Yet as strong as Barnabas’s “demonization” of Jewish circumcision seems, his recuperation of the Christian meaning of this rite is equally remarkable. This chapter of the Epistle of Barnabas may contains the earliest example of Christian gematria, the symbolic interpretation of letters through their numeric equivalents (possible since ancient languages used the same symbols for letters and numbers).120 Here, the author draws on the circumcision of Abraham’s household in the Hebrew Bible:121
Abraham, who first made a circumcision, looked forward in the spirit to Jesus when he was circumcising, receiving the teaching of the three letters. For it says: “And Abraham circumcised from his household eighteen men and three hundred.” What knowledge, then, was given to him? Learn that first there are the eighteen and then, after a pause, he says “three hundred.” For “eighteen”: iota is ten and ēta is eight: you have [the first two letters of] Jesus (
Circumcision here is not just reinterpreted through Jesus, it is actually equated with Jesus, and the crucifixion, and the entire scheme of Christian messianic redemption. This remarkable act of resignification allows the author at once to repudiate Jewish circumcision (as it exists among actual Jews) and reappropriate it as a mark of distinction through (as) Jesus.
Other early Christians attempted to maintain this doubled view of Jewish circumcision, often through the prophetic metaphor of “circumcision of the heart.” Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew begins by locating his interlocutor, the Jew Trypho, squarely in the realm of the Roman political and cultural economy: “I am a Hebrew of the circumcision,” Trypho supposedly tells Justin upon meeting him, “fleeing the war just now taking place, sojourning in Greece, mainly in Corinth.”123 “The war” refers to the so-called Bar Kokhba revolt—prompted, some scholars have posited, by a Hadrianic ban on circumcision124—which had left Jerusalem devastated and the very province of Judea absorbed and renamed. Trypho’s situation, like that of Suetonius’s old Jewish tax dodger, registers both the anomaly of the “other” in Roman society as well as his legibility to the imperial gaze.
Justin affirms the designating function of Trypho’s circumcision: “For the circumcision from Abraham according to the flesh was given as a sign, so that you may be separated from other nations and from us; and so that you alone may suffer that which now you now justly suffer; and so that your lands may become deserted, and your cities burned up; and so that foreigners may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem. For not by anything else are you recognized among the other people than from the circumcision of your flesh.”125 The function of circumcision for Justin extends far beyond tax collection, however. The “just punishments” executed by the Roman army have a distinctly Christian logic: “Now these things have happened to you well and justly. For you have slain the Just One, and his prophets before him. And now you reject those who have hope in him and in him who sent him, the Almighty and the Creator of all things, God, and as much as you can you dishonor him, cursing in your synagogues those who believe in Christ.126 For you do not have the authority to become murderous against us, on account of those who now are in charge.”127 “Those who are now in charge” are the Romans, but the real power at work is “the Almighty,” who has devised a punishment for the blasphemous Jews as well as a sign to distinguish those who are to be punished. Circumcision is a Roman marker deployed by a Christian God. Once more the figure of Jesus—here crucified and daily avenged—intervenes to rewrite the script of Roman-provincial relations.
The figure of Jesus also reinscribes the sign of circumcision as a positive Christian marker, the “second circumcision” (
As in the Epistle of Barnabas, the moral purification of Christian circumcision is identified with, and performed by, Jesus himself. Justin explains this through a numerical association between the law of circumcision and the resurrection of Jesus:131 “Now the command of circumcision, ordering that these always take place on the eighth day, was an image (τύπος) of the true circumcision, in which we are circumcised from every error and wickedness through the one who rose from the dead on
