cease,’ means that at the time of Christ’s advent the circumcision of boys stopped. And so God says the following to Moses: ‘Build for me an altar of uncut stones (lapidis non circumcisis), as also you will not bring an iron tool on them’ [Deut 27:5], because certainly in his coming Christ was to build a church of uncircumcised people (de populo incircumciso).”78 In the case of Abraham, the sign of circumcision had signaled the coming church comprising both Jews and gentiles. Christ’s circumcision is “racially” more ambivalent (does assuming the Jewish “sign of race” make Christ himself a Jew, or is he just passing?), but also is effected in order to bring Jews out of their former covenant into his saving church. Finally, in this strange story from the life of Moses—who does everything as an “image of Christ”—the advent of Christ (and, we should understand, his own circumcision) answers the prayers of “the synagogue” that infant male circumcision “should cease” and to construct a church built of “uncut” (non circumcisi) gentiles. All circumcising roads, including Jesus’ own, lead Jews out of their own circumcising covenant. In the subsequent sections of the Altercation, Theophilus explains to Simon the true circumcision “of the heart,” and continues leading him down the path to conversion and baptism.
On first blush, the Altercation presents a typical, de-Judaizing Christian interpretation of circumcision: the faithfulness of Abraham before circumcision, the temporary nature of the Law of Moses, the transformation of incomplete and prefigurative “signs” into full salvation at the coming of Christ. But the dialogic format of the Altercation, the back-and-forth between suggestible Jew and authoritarian Christian, injects a subtle nuance of re-Judaizing into the discussion, only heightened by the prominence of Christ’s own circumcision. For while the truth of circumcision remains ineluctably Christian, it is also persistently Jewish: this “sign” creates the genus Iudaïcum, the “Jewish race,” even as it instructs them on how to give up their “genus” for Christian salvation. Circumcision, the ambivalent circumcision of Christ in particular, functions as a shorthand not for the eradication of Judaism in favor of Christianity, but for the transformation of Judaism into Christianity. Furthermore, it is a transformation that remains conspicuously visible, on the surface, apparent to the triumphant, spiritual church of the gentiles. Even at the climax of the Altercation, when Simon pleads to progress (like a catechumen) from instruction to the baptismal font, Theophilus’s response invokes not the new covenant, but the old: “A blessing indeed! So Isaac blessed Jacob, and through his hand received blessing, so that the greater might proceed from the lesser, so also Ephraim and Manasseh were exchanged by the imposition of hands.”79 Again, Christian triumph echoes in the voice of the “old covenant” (the blessings of the patriarchs, here read as an allegory for the choosing of the “younger son” over the elder). The appropriation of the Jewish voice, almost comically subservient in the Altercation, remains audible and essential to the spiritual victory of Christianity.
Justin’s Dialogue and Origen’s apology Against Celsus ventriloquize the voice of Jewish others, and are two of our earliest Christian writings to hint at the complex, and unresolved, boundaries with Jews and Judaism through Christ’s circumcision. Scholars of Christian difference in antiquity have often been tempted to seize upon this presentation of “the other’s voice” in such texts to reconstruct some historical account of Jewish and pagan opposition to Christianity (the Quest for the Historical Trypho or Celsus, perhaps). Yet the circumcision of Christ, whose unavoidable difference destabilizes Jewish-Christian boundaries, suggests that something more intricate is taking place within early Christian dialogues with Jewish others. The entirely schematic format of the Altercation of Simon and Theophilus, in which a two-dimensional Jewish character is led like a marionette to the baptismal font, makes this point even more clearly: in tracing the interaction of Jewish and Christian voices in late antiquity, we may do better to attend to the dialogic genre rather than to the historicity of characters and events.
It is important to recognize that the format of these texts conveys as much ideological meaning as the content. By producing dialogues, these three authors conveyed the Christian desire to speak, at times, in the voice of the other: to sound like “the Jew” or “the pagan” (or, in Origen’s case, both). We need not read the attempt to erect a firm boundary against Judaism as merely reactive (“they’re just responding to criticism from Jews”), nor explain the tenuous and often contradictory nature of those boundaries as a result of the primitive level of religious development (“they’re still figuring out what they believe”).80 These externalized dialogues of difference that draw on the irresoluble multivalence of the divine circumcision, in my reading, are deliberately and productively heteroglossic in their articulation of Christian identity vis-à-vis Judaism.
Especially the Altercation, from a later period than Justin’s or Origen’s texts, on the other side of the Constantinian divide, illuminates the hybrid character of the early Christian dialogic imagination. That is, beyond the debates about the historicity of Trypho, Celsus, or even Celsus’s prosopopoeial Jew,81 the Altercation underscores the degree to which Christians conjured a Jewish voice to serve their own needs. Simon, the weakest member of the chorus of Jewish voices surveyed here, makes all too clear the Christian desire to exert control over “the Jew” on the written page. Even if we can convince ourselves that we hear traces of a “real Jew” somewhere in Simon’s obsequious interlocution,82 we must confront him as a creature of Christian literary projection. In fact, Simon’s character rang so false for Adolf von Harnack that he served as a centerpiece for the German church historian’s argument about the fictitiousness of all such “Jewish-Christian dialogues.”83 For Harnack, unable to believe that Simon was anything more than a cipher, the actual target of such texts, from Justin’s Dialogue onward, were heretics and pagans, not the moribund Jews who had slinked off after their rejection of Christ and their failed rebellions.84
But if Simon’s flatness makes us recognize the artifice involved in the Christian production of these ancient Jewish voices, the robustness of Justin’s Trypho and even Origen’s own ambivalence in the face of a rhetorical Jewish opponent lead us to acknowledge the flip side: that, for all of this literary invention and artifice, Christians were drawn to elaborate the image of the Jew as their troubling interlocutor. The dialogic imagination of early Christians did not erase and silence those Jewish voices, but preserved them. The fact that Simon turned so easily to the baptismal font may lead us to question the “historical Simon,” or even his authentic Jewish credentials; it should not, however, lead us to ignore his necessary Jewishness, the framing of Christian mastery as an encounter with a Jew, the transformation of a Jew, and a desire to confront and domesticate Jewishness within Christianity.
The circumcision of Christ encapsulates this hybridizing impulse: the Jewish remainder that completes Christian identity (and yet, at heart, potentially disrupts it—for what is to stop suggestible Simon from turning into troublesome Trypho?). Just as Christ’s circumcision for these authors leaves the indelible trace of the Jew on the savior’s body, the trace that somehow speaks against the totality of Judaism, so too the careful retention of a Jewish voice in the service of a refutation of Judaism instructs us on the ways in which Christians blurred their own literatures of difference. This blurring is neither a sign of confusion or hesitation on the part of the dialogue writers nor a sign of religious immaturity, but—like the divine circumcision itself—a discourse of dialogic multivocality that makes Christian culture “work.”
Posing the Question: “If the Savior Was Circumcised …”
As I suggested above, the Jewish interlocutor in the Altercation of Simon and Theophilus often sounds more like an unformed catechumen, eager to be brought into the Christian mysteries, than a resistant and recalcitrant religious outsider. In the dialogic space of the Altercation, this confusion of self and other strikes me as intentional: a way of more fully assimilating that otherness into the orbit of Christian control, of taming and yet retaining the heteroglossia of religious identities. The suggestive overlap of Jewish resistance and neophyte ignorance leads me to introduce a second set of texts into my
