as Lieu goes on to suggest, the repetitious effort to draw boundaries between “Jew” and “Christian” in the ancient world hints at the instability of these same boundaries: “selectivity, fluidity, dynamism, permeability are all intrinsic to the construction of boundaries…. Where rhetoric constructs the boundary as immutable and impenetrable, we may suspect actual invasion and penetration.”3 Like Markus, Lieu focuses on texts in which Christianity and Judaism rhetorically enact their difference with the “other” in order to produce something like a coherent self, an “imagined homogeneity.”4 For both scholars, it is the moment of putative boundary making, as the “self” gazes at and engages with the “other,” that fascinates. Our ancient Christian sources abound with such moments of encounter, of back-and-forth between Christian and non-Christian. Indeed, much of our textual resources constitute a cacophonous series of dialogues, a library of discourses fixated on that moment of differentiation: heresiologies, apologies, and texts adversus Iudaeos that place the Christian self in “conversation” with a heretical, pagan, or Jewish other.
Literary theorist Terry Eagleton articulates how identities emerge out of chains of overlapping dialogues: “Like the rough ground of language itself, cultures ‘work’ exactly because they are porous, fuzzy-edged, indeterminate, intrinsically inconsistent, never quite identical with themselves, their boundaries modulating into horizons.”5 For Eagleton, as for Lieu, communal identity (“culture”) claims a wholeness and finitude that masks fragmentation and incompleteness: the “boundary” between persons and groups, on closer examination, turns out to be an ever-receding horizon. Eagleton’s comparison with the “rough ground of language”—which also aims for a precision that is lacking in the execution—further echoes the dialectic ground of early Christian culture. As Mikhail Bakhtin long ago asserted, and his cultural studies descendants have elaborated, “language—like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives—is never unitary.”6 Our encounters with the world, framed by language, are (in Bakhtin’s now familiar terms) dialogical—“an encounter within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses”7—and therefore can never be reduced to a singular, “unitary” selfhood. Dialogue provides the appearance of discrete identities, a formal separation between self and other (speaker and addressee); yet at the same time it confounds those identities, grounding them necessarily in a temporary space of identification (communication).8 Dialogue creates difference and yet elides that same difference; as Eagleton suggests, “culture” operates in much the same fashion. “Self” can only ever emerge from the dialogic imagination as the strange and contingent interaction with the “other.”9
The notion that identity emerges within a cacophony of strange, overlapping voices—that the singularity of identity is, in actuality, a product of multiple voices or, to use Bakhtin’s felicitous term, “heteroglossia”10—would surely come as little surprise to the architects of the ancient Roman Empire, as we have already seen. To a world teeming with unfamiliar signs and sounds, the Romans (as they told themselves) brought order, meaning, and stability. The vast frontiers of this empire did not coalesce around the homogeneity of a nouvel Hellenism, but through a carefully managed spectacle of heterogeneity. To be Roman was to exert an ostentatiously precarious control over an omnipresent parade of “others”; to engage with, and even internalize, their strange voices. To consider Roman power, therefore, is to contemplate the triumph of the dialogic imagination of Rome—the back-and-forth between domestic metropolis and alien provinces—on a grand cultural and political stage.11
To reimagine in a similar fashion the formation of early Christian culture as the product of a shifting and unstable dialogic imagination is, in some ways, to continue and expand the work on “others” and boundaries that presently permeates the study of ancient religious identities, particularly our many “dialogue” texts.12 To read such texts dialogically, in a Bakhtinian sense, is to refuse the absolute separation of self and other that ancient Christians anxiously demand. Dialogues do not merely construct a boundary, isolating and segregating a Christian from a non-Christian. Dialogues internalize the other, creating fissures and contradictions within.13 If Christians persist in defining themselves in contradistinction to some other—pagan, heretic, or Jew—they make that other an indispensable part of “Christianness” (in the same way that “Rome” comes to be understandable through its relationship to “the provinces”).14
In this chapter I turn to examine the circumcision of Christ in a variety of “dialogue” texts in order to interrogate more deeply this Christian dialogic imagination, which both projects outward and internalizes a necessary other.15 My goal is to highlight the ambivalent and incomplete separation of “self” and “other” that lies beneath the totalizing veneer of early Christian discourses, with particular attention to Judaism. On Jesus’ body, the otherness of Judaism both articulates and disrupts the Christian self. Christ’s body becomes the site of a “de-Judaization” that is always incomplete, that continues to echo with the sound of Jewish origins.
I examine here two types of dialogue texts. I begin with the formal, “external” dialogues: texts that depict the explicit interaction between Christianity and Judaism. First, I look at Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew and Origen’s Against Celsus (with particular focus on the passages in which the pagan writer Celsus introduces a fictitious Jewish interlocutor to debate Jesus and the Christians). We have already met Justin and Origen in Chapter 1, where they contributed to the general transformation of Jewish circumcision into a distinctly (yet ambivalently) Christian sign. In this chapter, we see both Justin and Origen authoritatively appropriating the voice of Jewish otherness in the production of Christian truth and laying the groundwork for establishing Christ’s circumcision as thoroughly Jewish even as it articulates a logic of Christian supersession of Judaism. In stark contrast to these texts of seeming dialogic realism stands the later Altercation of Simon the Jew and Theophilus the Christian, a possibly early fifth-century dialogue that survives in a Latin recension. Here the voice of the other is but a tinny echo of an earlier Jewish intransigence, drowned out by the Christian voice in a manner that makes all too clear the ease with which a Christian could master and swallow up Jewish otherness.
In the final section of this chapter I turn to an internalized mode of Christian dialogic: the emerging literary genre of “question-and-answer” texts (erotapokriseis), in which the Christian subject is formally split—“never quite identical” with itself, in Eagleton’s words—in the fractured production of an ideal Christian identity. Here anonymous Christian ignorance replaces earlier Jewish opposition, creating a more subtle interiorization of Jewish challenge. Both sets of dialogic texts, the external dialogue and internalized erotapokriseis, inscribe the unrealized desire to establish that “horizon” where Judaism ends and Christianity begins. That horizon of religious difference remains intractably hazy: in the dialogic imagination of Christ’s circumcision, Christians repeatedly internalized the stark otherness of Judaism. Their differentiating rhetorics disclose a sense of permeability and indeterminacy that re-Judaizes even as it de-Judaizes.
Talking Back: Christian Dialogues
When analyzing the numerous dialogues of early Christian literature, scholars are often caught up in trying to tease out the social reality of the dialogue setting.16 Some historians prefer to read these texts addressed to “outsiders”—such as the second- and third-century apologies, or the various adversus Iudaeos texts framed as responses to intractable Jews—as evidence of real, antagonistic interaction.17 The apologists are responding to real pagan criticisms (and perhaps even expect that the imperial authorities to whom they address their “defenses” will be sympathetically responsive); the treatises adversus Iudaeos are likewise reacting to the criticisms of real Jews encountered in the public square, in formal or spontaneous debate. Others prefer to interpret these texts as internal documents, produced to delineate the boundaries of Christianity for insiders using the fiction of external animosity.18
