be made sons of God through baptism.”107 The very next question pursues this idea of Christ’s exemplary activity on earth: “But if the Savior was baptized so that he would be as an example, why did he, having been circumcised, forbid others from being circumcised?”108 Ambrosiaster begins his response in a manner befitting a treatise structured according to New and Old Testaments: “The circumcision of the foreskin (circumcisio praeteriti) was a dated commandment (temporis mandatum), which rightfully possessed authority until Christ; so that it remained in force until such time as Christ was born, who was promised to Abraham, so that, as for the rest, circumcision has ceased since the promise has been fulfilled.”109 Ambrosiaster invokes a familiar patristic strategy for explaining the difference between Old and New Testament obligations, used also in the Altercation: a “difference in times” by which Christ’s advent created a cosmic rupture between then and now, a Jewish past and a Christian present.110 Of course, this has the effect of relegating Ambrosiaster’s Jewish contemporaries to a state of hopeless anachronism, but at least provides an opportunity for understanding their willful blindness to New Testament truth. Ambrosiaster also creates a space within his own orthodox religion for an account of the Jewish past: it is the prehistory of salvation, a time of commandments once honored but now “fulfilled.”111
As Ambrosiaster continues, however, we see that his Christian appropriation of the Old Testament promise is not quite so gracious. After affirming Abraham’s covenant in Genesis 17, Ambrosiaster proceeds to transform it entirely. I cite the rest of his “answer” in full, continuing directly from the quotation above:
Now, Isaac was promised as a type of Christ (figura Christi). For God said to him: “in your seed all nations will be blessed (in semine tuo benedicentur omnes gentes)” (Gen 22:18); this is Christ. Indeed that faith which Abraham received was restored by Christ, with the result that “in the seed of Abraham” (which is Christ) “all nations will be blessed.” Such was Abraham’s promise.
Therefore circumcision was the sign of the promised son—that is, Christ. At his birth it was fitting for the sign of the promise (signum promissionis) to cease; nevertheless also that the one who was promised should himself receive the sign of his father (signum patris) when he came, so that he would be known as the one who was promised to justify all the nations (gentes) through faith in the circumcision of the heart. Now since bodily circumcision (circumcisionis corporale) was a seal (signaculum) of the son born according to the flesh to the father, Abraham, so too for those born according to the spirit the circumcision of the heart is a spiritual sign; therefore it is more correct, after Christ, no longer to require circumcision according to the flesh.112
Ambrosiaster’s exegetical logic is typically dense, and begins by reframing the “promise” invoked earlier in his answer. We learn, immediately, that Christ was the promised “child according to the flesh” of Genesis 17, while Isaac was merely a “type” (figura). Therefore, as the fruit of the promise, it was fitting for Christ to receive the “sign of the promise,” that is, circumcision. Already the voice of Christian identity is shaded by Jewish undertones. Christ’s circumcision—as the child of Abraham’s flesh, as part of the “promise” made in Genesis 17—might appear no different in kind from the circumcision of any Jew, past or present: also performed on children of Abraham’s flesh, also in memory of the “promise” made in Genesis 17. This interplay of carnalis and spiritualis then becomes a lynchpin in the rest of Ambrosiaster’s answer.
For if the “promised son” explains why Christ was circumcised, it does not yet answer the question as it was posed: why should not every Christian take this physical circumcision as a literal example and follow suit? (Especially considering the immediately preceding quaestio, in which Christ’s baptism served exactly this exemplary purpose.) Ambrosiaster explains that precisely because Christ, and not Isaac, fulfilled the ancient promise to his “father” Abraham, it was fitting and necessary that the seal of that promise should no longer be necessary. Instead, a “spiritual circumcision of the heart” must take its place for those children born according to the “spirit.”113 In fact, we learn, this was the entire purpose of the promise, its sign, and its fulfillment, for the key passage in the Genesis covenant for Ambrosiaster is Genesis 22:18, “in your seed shall be blessed all the nations,” that is, all of the gentile Christians, the spiritual “children of Abraham.” Despite its carnality, embedded in the logic of the Abrahamic covenant, Christ’s circumcision reveals the truth about circumcision in general: that this Jewish sign was, in truth, a sign to the gentiles, and always had been. Ambrosiaster’s answer doubly inscribes the (seeming) Jewishness of Jesus and the absolute non-Jewishness of Christianity in the same stroke.
In this one condensed dialogic moment, we glimpse both the desired “horizon” between Christianity and Judaism and its determined lack of definition. Christ, in his circumcision, embodies this moment of heteroglossia, particularly through his representation of both “carnal” and “spiritual” truths. On the one hand in this passage, as elsewhere in the Liber quaestionum (and throughout early Christian writings) the categories of carnalis and spiritualis function as a shorthand for the qualitative difference between Jews, mired in the blindness of the fleshly Law, and Christians, liberated by spiritual grace.114 So the Christian questioner can rest assured that he need not fear finding himself on the wrong side of that divide: he is a spiritual “son,” like all faithful believers, part of the blessed “nations.” Christ’s revelation of the truth of circumcision thus affirms the Christian’s spiritual superiority.
Yet we note that this spiritual surety is guaranteed by the son “according to the flesh,” whose literal, physical descent from Abraham—as well as his submission to the literal, physical seal of circumcision—will always, of necessity, create a kind of kinship with “real” Jews. Christ’s circumcision is effective in its revelation and fulfillment because it is carnalis, in exactly the fashion that the Jews persist in their circumcisio carnalis. We have already seen how the Jewishness of Christ’s circumcision remains visible in the external dialogues, affirmed by the literal voice of Jewish interlocutors. Although here the Jewish interlocutor has been replaced with a faceless Christian, the visibility of the Jewish other remains, on the surface of Christ’s body and in the theological logic of his actions. It is not enough for the Christian to claim spiritual truth, he must also acknowledge its fleshly basis. In Ambrosiaster’s terse reply we hear the doubled voice of Christian dialogic: the utter rejection, and appropriation, of Jewish otherness.
Ps.-Athanasius and “Duke Antiochus”
By nature, the erotapokriseis is a flexible form—much like biblical commentary, which I discuss further in Chapter 5—ever expanding to include more questions, different answers, and varying voices of Christian inquiry. The relatively well-known Liber quaestionum of Ambrosiaster itself comes down to us in multiple textual traditions, with contents ranging from 115 to 151 questions and answers.115 Pseudonymous sets of questions in the later Latin West and Greek East provided a similarly flexible format, not only for containing the anxiety of theological uncertainties but for safely expanding the subtextual chorus of voices in this Christian heteroglossia.116 The internalized anxiety over the circumcision of Christ, we should not be surprised to learn, receives ongoing attention in this format.
The question-and-answer text known as the Quaestiones ad ducem Antiochum was, by the seventh century or so, ascribed to Athanasius of Alexandria. While Athanasius’s writings provide one of the many sources for the compilation of this erotapokriseis text, its authorship and provenance are otherwise unknown.117 The most common surviving Greek version probably dates from the seventh or eighth century,118 and possibly betrays the influence of the rise of Islam;119 these Questions to Duke Antiochus may even have been edited and adapted until the time of the Crusades.120 While most erotapokriseis can be considered something of a hodgepodge, bringing
