“other voice” of Christian identity, texts that scholars have dubbed erotapokriseis (following a middle Byzantine neologism) or “question-and-answer texts.”
As a genre, the erotapokriseis emerge out of the literary flotsam and jetsam of classical paideia, perhaps like the novel or the gospel.85 Various pre- and para-Christian authors made use of the “question-and-answer” format (known classically as
My exploration of the dialogic imagination of Christ’s circumcision provides, perhaps, a further context for the rise of this variegated genre in Christian literary circles in the early period of the Christian Roman Empire: the cultural hybridity and heteroglossia that characterizes Roman political power and Christian religious culture. Just as the production of external dialogic texts—Justin’s anti-Jewish Dialogue or Origen’s anti-pagan treatise Against Celsus—might allow for uncomfortable otherness to be confronted, controlled, domesticated (and yet, importantly, never eradicated), so the erotapokriseis could take this effort at internalizing otherness one step further by substituting Christian naïveté for external criticism.90 Questions that in other contexts seem shocking or challenging coming from a non-Christian (on scriptural inconsistencies, or the impossibility of Christ’s incarnation or resurrection)91 are softened by being reframed as innocent Christian queries. Whereas a pagan or Jew might aggressively challenge Christian theology or exegesis, a Christian neophyte transforms incisive critique into simple curiosity.92
For this reason, perhaps, the challenge of Christ’s circumcision to Christian identity emerges in its most direct form in the erotapokriseis. In the external dialogues—Justin, Origen, the Altercation—an unspoken anxiety of otherness lurked beneath the de-Judaizing, and re-Judaizing, efforts of our authors. These dialogues framed Jewish challenges to Christianity in a variety of ways: Christians selectively appropriated scriptural Law, they were inconsistent in their veneration of God’s covenant, and so forth. While Christ’s circumcision partially, and variably, might answer these charges, it was never allowed to raise the explicit question: “But doesn’t Christ’s circumcision somehow make Christians Jewish?” Yet it is, in some respect, this unarticulated anxiety that necessitates meeting and domesticating the otherness of Judaism through Christ’s circumcision: the fear (or, perhaps, desire?) that the original Jewishness of Christ, the apostles, the Scriptures, might unwittingly infect Christians. We find the direct formulation of this potential effect of Christ’s circumcision in one of the earliest fulsome question-and-answer texts, that of Ambrosiaster.
Ambrosiaster
The shadowy figure dubbed “Ambrosiaster”93 organized his late fourth-century Liber quaestionum as a series of scripturally ordered queries.94 Yet this scriptural arrangement, upon closer examination, contains and reframes larger, and perhaps more troubling, questions of Christian faith and knowledge. Using this organizing rubric, Ambrosiaster can subsume monotheism under the “Old Testament” (Quid est deus?) and Trinitarianism under the “New Testament” (Si unus est deus, cur in tribus spes salutatis est?). The “questioner” throughout is invisible and, in fact, exists only as a series of tabular questions appended to the beginning of the text:95 he is the disembodied voice of Christian inquiry, whose interrogational bona fides is evident in the instructional (if, occasionally, confrontational) tone Ambrosiaster takes in his answers. There is likewise no preface, leaving us to imagine a context for the Liber quaestionum. Given the context of other contemporary Latin erotapokriseis—found in letters and treatises of Jerome and Augustine, for instance96—we can most easily envision Ambrosiaster acting as the ecclesiastical authority setting out to correct the average Christian reader and direct her or him away from possible error. That is, much like the external dialogues examined above, Ambrosiaster’s Liber quaestionum is concerned with boundaries. The desire to keep the putative questioner on the right theological track lends a distinctly polemical and, at times, apologetic edge to Ambrosiaster’s “answers.” His particular attention to Jews and Judaism has even led some scholars to posit that Ambrosiaster was a former Jew, on the theory that no zeal matches that of the convert.97 But as we have already seen in the externalized dialogues of Justin, Origen, and the Altercation, more compelling concerns about identity and otherness might lead a Christian to appropriate and repudiate the voice of the Jewish other.
While Ambrosiaster’s chapter traditionally titled “Adversus Iudaeos” might seem a logical place to investigate his attitude toward the Jewish heritage of Christianity,98 more telling are those briefer quaestiones that approach Christianity’s latent Jewishness obliquely. In the obscure chapter “De lingua Hebraea” (Liber quaestionum 108), Ambrosiaster uses philology to engage the ongoing polemical debate between Jews and Christians over the legacy of Abraham, a debate ostensibly stretching all the way back to the time of Jesus and Paul.99 Ambrosiaster begins by addressing the assumption (shared by his contemporaries and, it should be noted, by modern biblical scholars) that “Hebrew” derives from “Heber” (Gen 10:24–25, 11:14–17), a patronymic that would have associated the Hebrews (and their Jewish descendants) more specifically with the “family of Shem, by family, language, land, and nation” (see Gen 10:31).100 Nothing could be further from the truth, Ambrosiaster asserts: Hebraeus actually comes from (H)Abraham.101 The Hebrew language, Ambrosiaster goes on to explain, is the divine tongue of creation, spoken by Adam in Eden and extinct after the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel.102 Later this language—which, Ambrosiaster points out, no longer has “any land or any people” (neque terram … neque gentem)103—was restored by God’s chosen ones, Abraham (from whom the language now took its name, Hebraeus) and Moses.104
That Ambrosiaster intended this somewhat esoteric discussion of languages and names to reverberate in Jewish-Christian debates over Abraham’s spiritual patrimony seems clear from one trenchant New Testament example of a “Hebrew” invoked in the course of his answer: the apostle Paul. Paul famously referred to himself as a “Hebrew born of Hebrews” (Hebraeus ex Hebraeis; Phil. 3.5). For Ambrosiaster, however, Paul’s boasting of his “Hebrewness” was due to his likeness in piety to Abraham, not his ethnic or linguistic origins among the Jews.105 In a few dense paragraphs on a seemingly esoteric topic, Ambrosiaster takes the ethnic and linguistic core of “Jewishness” as it was understood in his day, and thoroughly de-Judaizes it: Hebrew means Abrahamic, Abrahamic refers to piety, and even the apostle Paul, whose ambiguous Jewishness might trouble early Christians, is rendered safely, and unequivocally, non-Jewish.
The question of Christ’s circumcision—another moment at which Christianity might seem perilously Jewish—receives a similarly fine treatment. The question arises early in the section reserved for quaestiones novi testamenti, immediately following a question on the baptism of Jesus: “Why was the Savior—even though he was born holy (sanctus) and was called Christ the Lord at his very birth—baptized, even though baptism takes place on account of purification and sin?”106 Assuring the questioner that Christ was, indeed, born without sin and therefore had no need of baptism (indeed, this is why John hesitated:
