again to the count of the cycle of all the days is called the eighth, while it remains the first.”132 Resurrected on the eighth day of the week, Jesus both embodies and performs a “true circumcision,” a moral purgation of the community formed in him. Christians are constituted (in Pauline language) as the body of Christ, and that body has been circumcised.
The association between resurrection and circumcision recalls the connection between circumcision and baptism that some scholars, as we have seen, find in Colossians 2:12. It is debatable whether Justin himself makes this connection, although twice in the Dialogue he seems to come close.133 Early in the Dialogue, he exhorts Trypho and his companions to abandon Jewish “foolishness” and embrace true religion: “Wash therefore, and make yourselves clean, and remove the wickedness from your souls [Isa 1:16], as God orders you to be washed in this bath, and be circumcised in the true circumcision.”134 Later, speaking once more of “spiritual (
But just as Roman stereotypes simultaneously affirmed the totality of Rome while dangerously embedding the non-Roman other within, Christian circumcision likewise created and disrupted religious boundaries. In the mid-third century, Cyprian of Carthage was surprised to learn that at least one North African bishop was adapting the “law of ancient circumcision” to regulate infant baptisms in his church. Specifically, this bishop, Fidus, was taking up wholesale the “eight-day” standard of infant circumcision and using it to argue that no infant should be baptized before its eighth day.140 This literal transference of circumcision law to baptismal regulation troubled Cyprian and his fellow bishops, precisely because it blurred the boundary between “old” and “new” Israel that circumcision normally articulated. They reiterated to the bishop that literal, Jewish, carnal circumcision had been but a “type” (imago) which had “ceased with the supervention of truth.”141 Cyprian and his episcopal colleagues find that they must insist on circumcision as an institution of distinction and boundary: “we think that no one should be kept from obtaining grace because of a law which was previously instituted, nor that spiritual circumcision should be impeded by fleshly circumcision, but that any person at any time should be admitted to the grace of Christ.”142 The problem is that the Christian signification of circumcision has become lost in a prior, Jewish signifying system. In order to correct this, Cyprian reintroduces the mediating sign of Jesus’ body: “For the eighth day—that is, the first day after the Sabbath—would become the day on which the Lord rose up, and would make us live and would give us the spiritual circumcision: this eighth day, that is, the first day after the Sabbath, the Lord’s Day, went before in an image. But this image has ceased now that the truth has supervened and spiritual circumcision has been given to us.”143 Through Jesus, Fidus must come to understand eight as “eight,” and circumcision as “circumcision.”144 Otherwise, the distinction between Judaism and Christianity is lost.
Fidus’s attempt to control the signifying power of circumcision may strike the bishops of third-century North Africa as overly “Judaizing” (although it seems Fidus was just as concerned with ancient concepts of hygiene), but in one sense it was entirely Christianizing. By seeking to institute and control a system of distinguishing signs—and by privileging circumcision in that system of signs—Fidus was following in the footsteps of Jesus followers from Paul onward. Christians, drawing on the stereotyping gaze of Roman imperialism (as did non-Christian Jews), were teaching themselves to view the world in a new way. The metaphorical, typological, and allegorical implications of circumcision as a sign of Christian distinction would continue to proliferate through late antiquity.145 The person of Jesus—in direct and indirect ways—played a central role in this symbolic proliferation.
That the person of Christ, in his earthly incarnation, should function as a destabilizer and resignifier of cultural symbols reminds of us the great distance between early Christian concepts of divinity and history and our own. In the twenty-first century, it is commonplace to see Jesus as distinctly embedded in and defined by the world of signs, symbols, and values we imagine he inhabited. Christians and non-Christians alike assert, “Jesus was a Jew.” Such a statement makes sense to modern readers: Jesus is explained by his symbolic world. Circumcision signifies Judaism, Jesus circumcised is Jewish. But early Christians, as we have seen in this chapter, did not engage so straightforwardly with their universe of cultural signs. The Roman economy of identity was charged with power, knowledge, and resistance, and to engage in that circulation of signs was to open up the possibility of resignification. Jesus Christ, incarnate among Jews, was precisely resistant to the signifying power of cultural signs. On his person, they could mean anew.
Circumcision, already an overburdened and contested sign before the spread of Christianity, acted as a kaleidoscope in which gentile Christians saw themselves reflected and refracted, and through which they also gazed upon their despised “other,” the Jews. As we have seen, this simultaneous appropriation of and fear of the sign of circumcision amplifies and twists discourses of identity and stereotype already at work at the fractious contact zone of Jews and Romans. In the nascent literature of Christian difference—apologies, treatises, texts adversus Iudaeos—these contact zones are reconfigured and reimagined. In the texts that will become embedded in the New Testament, we see the first hints of this discourse of identity and difference through circumcision pushed onto the incongruous and unique body of Christ.
Chapter 2
(De-)Judaizing Christ’s Circumcision The Dialogue of Difference
The I hides in the other and in others, it wants to be only an other for others, to enter completely into the world of others as an other, and to cast from itself the burden of being the only I (I-for-myself) in the world.
—Mikhail Bakhtin
Circumcision and the Dialogic Imagination
Over a quarter century ago, the historian of early Christianity Robert Markus elegantly noted: “The history of Christian self-definition cannot be written in terms of a steady progression from simple to complex. In one sense the whole of the church’s history is a growth in self-awareness; every important encounter with a new society, a new culture, with shifts in men’s assumptions about their world, themselves or God, with upheavals in the values by which they try to live, brings with it new self-discovery. Psychologists have long been telling us that we discover our selves only in encounter: what is self and what is not self are disclosed to us in the same experience.”1 Markus envisions the early Christian “encounter” as the site of both estrangement and self-discovery, in the same moment recognizing “the other” and (thereby) creating an awareness of “the self.” More recently, in an essay likewise surveying the theoretical developments of the study of early Jewish and Christianity identities, Judith Lieu notes with approval the historian’s focus on the continuous construction of communal “boundaries,” rhetorical and yet effective means of distinguishing “self” from “other”: “While not the only model for understanding the construction of identity,
