is a notably disjointed conglomeration of a wide variety of sources held together by little more than an enduring title and textual transmission.121 Various “sources” can be identified—especially prominent Christian writers of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries—but my interest here is not source criticism. Rather I seek to gain insight into the ways ancient and early medieval Christians created a space for the dialogic cacophony of different voices even as they were ostensibly refining and narrowing the bounds of “orthodox” identity. Certainly a loud voice in that babel, for the author(s) of the Questions, was the insistent voice of Jewish criticism and the equally pressing call for sharp, diverse responses.122
The question concerning Christ’s circumcision comes among other discussions of ritual correctness, stated here even more baldly than in Ambrosiaster’s Book of Questions: “Why, since Christ was circumcised, are we not also circumcised like him?”123 Here is Athanasius’s answer in full:
Christ, being the Son of God, came to fulfill the Law, so that he would not be considered hostile to God (
The result therefore is that we recognize clearly that all those who have been circumcised are strangers to Christ (
For just like all those who, supposing they can offer sacrifice to God through blood and senseless creatures, nullify and make abominable the bloodless sacrifice of Christ: so all those who have been circumcised in the flesh revile and reject the spiritual circumcision, that is, holy baptism; for the one is like the other.
For not in the Law did Christ render the devil and the demons powerless, nor did he effect salvation through it: but in the cross. So the demons do not look upon the Law with fear and trembling, but rather when they see the cross they tremble and flee, and they are rendered powerless and chased away.125
Several arguments from earlier dialogues and other Christian explications of the circumcision of Christ are expressed here in a variety of “voices.” On the one hand, Christ seems to ameliorate his own baffling circumcision with the Pauline exhortation on the uselessness of the act (recall that Origen similarly juxtaposed Paul’s words with Christ’s actions). For Ps.-Athanasius, these words remind good Christians that circumcision becomes the ultimate mark of non-Christianness, by which both “Jews and gentiles” can be recognized and excluded. Like all other marks of the “Law of Moses,” such as sacrifice, circumcision is rendered ineffective by the world-transforming act of Christ’s salvation in which all Christians should hope to participate. Do demons quake at the sight of sacrifice or (we are led to imagine) circumcision? No, it is the sign of the cross that drives away evil.
Such an answer is, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation for Christian noncircumcision, ultimately reaching back to interpretations of Paul himself: to trust in the Law is to doubt in the cross, and lose salvation. This answer does little, however, to explain Christ’s own circumcision. Surely it was not to mark him as outside the community of the faithful? Surely good Christians posing the query are not to understand by this response that Christ himself misplaced his trust in the Law? No, the beginning of the response clarifies this for us—in some ways. For, as we can see, Christ’s circumcision was at once a scrupulous adherence to the Law and a total obliteration of that Law.
First there is the idea of Christ’s ministerial condescension, which we saw Theophilus invoke in the Altercation. For Jews—both in the period of the New Testament and, we learn, even unto the (nebulous) time of the questioner—“have accused” Christ of being “hostile to God” (
Although the responder goes on to trace out the implications of this fulfillment (specifically, the fact that circumcision now serves only and entirely as a negative marker of “outsider” status for Christians), it is worth lingering over this creatively reimagined moment of Jesus’ circumcision. At this moment, gesturing ritually to his Jewish contemporaries and future Jewish critics, Jesus is at once embodying and emptying out the content of the Law. He is, at this one charged instant, completely filling and completely full of the Jewish Law, so completely full of Jewishness that he uses up all of the positive Jewishness in the cosmos. This Christian internalization of Jewish otherness, otherwise feared and derided in this short chapter and throughout the rest of the Questions, is compelling, to say the least. The reader must imagine Jesus at one and the same moment as intensely, overwhelmingly Jewish in his fulfillment of the Law (otherwise, some trace of obligation might remain) even as he de-Judaizes salvation for all time. The potentially threatening identification with a Jewish Jesus with which the question began has been only partly allayed: Jesus’ Jewishness lingers, potently, at this originary moment of Christian salvation. Any boundary making effected later in the response can therefore only be partial and incomplete. The other voice of the Jewish Law, “senseless” and “bloody,” echoes still.
Other Voices
Historians of early Jewish-Christian relations have, understandably, attended with some eagerness to the echoes of other voices embedded in ancient Christian dialogue texts. The temptation to recover the elusive voice of Jewish resistance as a counterpoint to the sheer volume of Christian polemic and apology is a worthy project. My goal in this chapter has not been to undermine such a task, but rather to nuance it. For the Christian act of appropriating and speaking in a Jewish voice conveys more than inadvertent historical data; it provides insight into the convoluted and contradictory processes by which ancient Christians formed their collective religious identities. The literary staging of a dialogue might preserve some authentic Jewish point of critique or belief; it also subsumes and internalizes that critique into the lines of a Christian text and transforms that Jewish voice into one carefully managed strain in the chorus of Christian culture.128
The circumcision of Christ, appearing occasionally in these dialogue texts, provides one tool for untangling this staged antiphony of Christian and Jewish voices. The freighted symbol of Jewish identity in the ancient Roman world could not but disrupt any sense of secure religious boundaries when imagined on the body of the Christian savior. Like the remainder of Jewishness on Christ’s body,
