mechanics of this doubled understanding of Christ, circumcision, and Law are not fleshed out. Justin merely asserts that—somehow—Jesus’ participation in the rite of circumcision provides the rationale for its discontinuation. The fact that Justin follows up his point on the Mosaic Law with a typical litany of patriarchs “righteous before the Law” only muddies his point further.32 For Christ was precisely not “righteous before the Law,” but rather (Justin argues) he was righteous despite, and within, the Law. Only the Jews, Justin remarks (and Trypho curiously concedes) actually needed the harsh yoke of the Mosaic Law, “because of the hardness of their hearts and their tendency to idolatry.”33 Neither the righteous patriarchs before the Law nor their spiritual descendants (the Christians) had need of such a burden. Where, then, does that leave Christ? Would he not have demonstrated the impermanence of the Law much better by not submitting to its yoke?
As we shall see, later interpreters of the divine circumcision handled the logic of Christ’s circumcision with more finesse and creativity. Yet, I suggest, the incompleteness of Justin’s own argument is exactly the point in the Dialogue: in it, we hear the articulation of anxiety about Justin’s Christian identity, an anxiety that is neither dismissed nor glossed over. An earlier moment in the Dialogue clarifies this resistance to an absolute resolution of the difference between Jew and Christian. When Justin delivers his dictum on the negative, pedagogical nature of the Jewish Law (imposed because of the “hardness” of the Jews’ hearts),34 Trypho challenges him. Trypho queries Justin: “But if someone, who knows that this is so [i.e., the Law does not contribute to righteousness], after he knows that this one is the Christ, and clearly he has believed in him and he wishes to obey him and also to observe these [laws], will he be saved?”35 Justin makes his own curious concession: “I said: ‘As it seems to me, Trypho, I say that such a one will be saved, as long as he doesn’t struggle in any way to convince others (I mean those from among the Gentiles who have been circumcised from error through Christ) to keep these things with him, saying that they won’t be saved unless they keep them. Just as you yourself did at the beginning of these speeches, proclaiming that I wouldn’t be saved until I kept them!’”36 Justin draws the barest line between Christians who keep the Law, but don’t bother their gentile coreligionists, and Jews like Trypho, who will not realize the “truth” about their own Law and will insist on imposing it on others.
But Trypho astutely notices how Justin hedges here (“as it seems to me,”
As this earlier discussion in the Dialogue suggests, the brief moment of unease surrounding Christ’s circumcision and Justin’s halfhearted attempts to suggest that this sign was, at once, a disapprobation of Jewish Law and a key to special Christian insight into that Law bespeak a profound blurring of distinction and problematization of difference. By the end of the Dialogue, difference seems to win the day over reconciliation: both Trypho and his attempts to secure a scriptural and theological middle ground with Justin are rejected. Yet this is far from a triumphalist Christian text; Trypho also remains unconvinced of Justin’s arguments, and there is no conversion of the Jewish interlocutor to constitute the Dialogue’s “happy ending.”39 This ambiguous conclusion suggests, again, that we should direct our attention away from any unequivocally triumphant message of Christianity facing and defeating its Jewish “other” (whether real or imaginary), and focus instead on the ambivalent, dialogic process in which this confrontation is framed. The point seems to be not so much erasure or capitulation of “the other,” but rather the preservation of that still, disturbing voice within Christianity. Justin leaves various questions of Christian truth relatively unresolved in this text; even the central Christian argument against Judaism—true “Law” versus Torah, true “Israel” versus the Jews—is ultimately disrupted by the dialogic back-and-forth, the heteroglossic lack of clear differentiation.
In a text whose fundamental purpose would seem to be the articulation of the difference between Judaism and Christianity, absolute difference from the Jew is deferred. The brief discussion of Christ’s circumcision neatly encapsulates both the desire for certainty and the deferral of that certainty. Since Christ’s circumcision cannot, for Justin, affirm the sort of valorization of Jewish Law desired by Trypho, it must (somehow, even paradoxically) affirm the contingency and impermanence of that Law. Yet this assertion of the Jewish Law’s impermanence is only possible because the Jewishness of Christ’s circumcision establishes a dialogic space in which Trypho and Justin can communicate, in which Justin can assert that his knowledge of Jewish Law is superior to that of the Jews. Christ’s circumcision, a small feature in this very long text, becomes a resonant echo of Trypho himself: the reminder, and remainder, of the Jewish voice required to establish Christian truth that can therefore never be fully silenced.40
Origen and Celsus
An even more complex interweaving of the “other” voices of Christian difference appears in the next century in Origen’s Against Celsus, written at the behest of Origen’s patron Ambrose.41 Although ostensibly an “apology” addressed to a (dead) pagan critic, this text is also an illuminating counterpart and double to Justin’s “anti-Jewish” dialogue with Trypho. First, scholars have suggested that the interlocutor of Origen’s apologetic text, Celsus, a younger contemporary of Justin, may have composed his True Doctrine as an answer to Justin’s several “philosophical” Christian texts.42 We are therefore picking up the threads of a century-long dialogue between parties seeking to “out-know” and thus outargue their opponents, an empire-wide antiphony of religious differences.43 Second, Origen’s response to Celsus also takes the form of a literary dialogue after the fact: Origen composes his defense of Christianity against its long-dead pagan despiser as an interlinear response, preserving large chunks of Celsus’s own words and responding to them piece by piece. Because of this purposefully dialogic format, Origen’s apology Against Celsus sounds like a chorus of juxtaposed, competing religious voices.
Scholars usually read this text with an eye to “Christian-pagan” relations in late antiquity. But the insistent interplay of pagan, Christian, and Jewish voices also creates a deliberately tangled interpenetration of Christian self and Jewish other. The Jewish voice plays a significant role in this “anti-pagan” apology. In addition to the posthumous voice of Celsus and the determined responses of Origen, we also hear the careful interpellation of a dissonant Jewish voice claimed by both Celsus and Origen. Celsus’s Jewish voice comes in his introduction of a prosopopoeial first-century Jew as a mouthpiece for criticisms of Jesus and of Jewish converts to Christianity.44 Origen’s responding Jewish voice comes through his display here (as throughout his oeuvre) of “firsthand” knowledge of Jews and Judaism acquired in the course of Origen’s scriptural and exegetical studies.45 We could read this Jewish interpellation as Origen’s reappropriation of the Jewish origins of Christianity, made necessary by the caustic and deprecating Celsus, as Origen claims early on: “Celsus … thinks it will be easier to falsify Christianity, if, by making accusations against its source, which lies in Jewish doctrines, he would establish
