The Jewish interlocutor, Simon, is flat and listless, providing little more than prompting for the much more fulsome and lively (and aggressive) replies of the Christian, Theophilus. “Proba mihi,” Simon repeats throughout the Altercation, “Prove it to me,” and Theophilus proceeds to prove most convincing.67 Simon’s compliant requests for more “proof” and “evidence” might read like the plaintive inquiries of a thick-headed catechumen, were it not for Simon’s occasional, and faltering, resistance and Theophilus’s sneering responses: “You speak like a Jew.”68 It comes as little surprise, then, that at the end of the Altercation, all of his questions answered, Simon the Jew converts: “Bearer of salvation, Theophilus, good doctor of the sick, I can say nothing more: command me to be catechized and consecrated by the sign of faith in Jesus Christ. Indeed I think that, through the imposition of hands, I shall receive cleansing from my transgressions.”69 That Simon’s conversion should be the “happy ending” of this later dialogue demonstrates already its distance from the dialogic imagination of Justin or Origen.
In a somewhat different register, then, this late Latin dialogue appropriates and integrates the Jewish voice into Christian truth. This Christian mastery of the Jewish voice—both repudiating and revaluing the Jewish origins of Christianity—is once more signaled by the intervention of Christ’s circumcision. The circumcision of Jesus is introduced in this instance by Theophilus the Christian, in the midst of his “proof” that Christ is the prophesied subject of Isaiah 7–8. Simon had suggested, through an intertextual reading of Isaiah 37:22 (“The virgin daughter of Zion has despised you and mocked you”) that the “virgin” of Isaiah 7:14 allegorically represented Zion. Theophilus counters that Simon’s allegory is nonsensical. Isaiah’s earlier prophecy had spoken of a literal child, “who ate butter and honey” (Isa 7:15), was born of “David’s lineage” (Isa 7:13), and who in his infancy received the “strength of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria” (Isa 8:4).
Theophilus proceeds to lay out the correct interpretation of the Isaiah passage, which subordinates any allegory to the literal interpretation: “First, it is explained that Christ ate butter and honey, in accordance with the birth of all infants. We believe this and so we maintain our faith; and certainly he was circumcised on the eighth day.”70 The author of the Altercation introduces here an argument that was used earlier against docetists and Marcionites: a literal reading of Isaiah 7 proves Christ’s fleshly infancy and consequently the reality of his human form.71 Like all children (according to this reading), Christ ate the food of infants: butter and honey. Furthermore, in proof of his real childhood, he was really circumcised. The logic seems to be that, since Christ was demonstrably a child (as his infant circumcision proves), he would certainly have eaten the foods of a child (butter and honey) and, therefore, so far fits the literal description of the child in Isaiah’s prophecy. The ritual of circumcision in this interpretation has little or no resonance with Judaism:72 its purpose is to reinforce Christ’s literal fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy. Only when the literal significance of the passage has been understood should allegory be introduced: the “butter and honey” of Christ’s infancy are additionally understood to be the “anointing of the spirit” and the “sweetness of his teaching, which we follow and so we attain faith.” The “spoils of Samaria” are likewise first read literally—as the gifts of the Magi—before being allegorized as the pagan abandonment of idolatry in the face of Christ’s truth.
This christological interpretation of Isaiah 7–8 might not seem particularly noteworthy but for the strange insertion of Christ’s circumcision. Of all the signs of Christ’s infancy that might be drawn from the gospels—swaddling, being carried, and so on—why single out such a Jewish proof in the service of refuting Jewish biblical exegesis? Partly (as we shall see) the author is laying some textual groundwork for the more robust reinterpretation of circumcision to come later in the dialogue. But I suggest he is also inverting commonly held values of Christian Old Testament interpretation. In other exegetical duels over this Isaiah passage, we tend to see the Jewish side coded as literal (the “Virgin Birth” is no more than the prediction of the birth of King Hezekiah to his “maiden” mother) while the Christian side is figural: Justin’s own interpretation of Isaiah 7 in the Dialogue with Trypho stands as an early and classic example.73 Here, however, the Jewish position is represented as too freewheeling and allegorical—the “virgin” as Zion—while the Christian insists that the literally carnal interpretation must take priority. In essence, Theophilus reverses the exegetical stream: claiming both the “carnal,” or Jewish, interpretation alongside the allegorical, spiritual reading. Jesus’ circumcision, then, represents this Christian absorption of Jewish carnality. Just as Christ took on circumcision, but seemingly only as proof of his universal humanity, so too Theophilus appropriates the fleshly, Jewish mode of reading as part and parcel of universal Christian truth.
Simon is, predictably, convinced by Theophilus’s Christianizing interpretation.74 The discussion moves on to other aspects of Jesus’ messiahship, and soon to the new covenant ushered in by Christ’s advent. Simon returns to the question of circumcision: “We indeed read many things, but we do not understand them in that way. So I want to understand, one by one, each of the things I ask you to be proven by the evidence of truth. Now, because God instructed that circumcision be performed, which he first entrusted to the patriarch Abraham, and which you professed earlier that Christ underwent (quam circumcisionem Christum habuisse superius professus es), how then are you going to persuade me to believe, you who forbid circumcision?”75 Simon picks up Theophilus’s earlier thread of the circumcision of Christ in such a way as to allow Theophilus to introduce the familiar Pauline trope of Abraham’s righteousness “before he was circumcised” (priusquam circumcideretur; see Rom 4:10). For Theophilus, Abraham’s dual status—uncircumcised believer and circumcised believer—presages the dual nature of the universal church, “showing that two peoples would come into the faith of Christ: one would come having been circumcised and one would come still having the foreskin.” Following Simon’s lead, Theophilus moves directly from Abraham’s circumcision to Christ’s: “For if Christ had not been circumcised, how would you believe me today or the prophets, who say that Christ came from the seed of David? Circumcision is in fact a sign of race, not of salvation (circumcisio enim signum est generis, non salutis).”76 Theophilus’s response is, as before, a mixture of literal and figurative interpretation, of de-Judaizing and re-Judaizing exegesis. For, on the one hand, the general thrust of Theophilus’s interpretation is spiritualizing and universalizing: the “old covenant,” and its sign of circumcision, point inevitably to the extension of salvation to all peoples, Jewish and gentile. It is, as Justin had insisted to Trypho, not a sign of salvation but one of “race” (genus). Theophilus adds to Justin’s earlier reading of Christ’s circumcision the notion of messianic condescension: Christ had no need of circumcision, but took it upon himself so that Jews would willingly receive his message of salvation. He condescended to the Jews by taking on their “racial” sign; although, tellingly, Theophilus does not explicitly state whether this condescension actually makes Christ Jewish, or functions merely as a strategic disguise (I return to this question in my concluding chapter). Indeed, we are led to believe that Christ is an antitype of Abraham, who is both “uncircumcised” and “circumcised,” the father of Jews and gentiles alike.
For Theophilus, circumcision—even (and especially) the circumcision of Christ—is the Jewish sign of the former covenant that, ultimately and paradoxically, leads Jews away from that former covenant. The “Law” both makes and unmakes the Jew. As if to drive home the doubled nature of circumcision, as the mark of Jewish “race” and the sign of that race’s absorption into a universal salvation, the Altercation then introduces the example of the Lawgiver himself: Moses. Simon asks about the salvific circumcision of Exodus 4:25, prompted perhaps by Theophilus’s claim that circumcision does not bring “salvation” (salus).77 Although no avenging angels appear in the Altercation, we should recall Origen’s similar association of Exodus 4:25 with the circumcision of Christ. Theophilus’s interpretation is even more straightforwardly christological: “All things, whatever [Moses] did, he was anticipating them
