creating a site for the articulation of Christian paradox. When I first began this project, I assumed that the contradictions embodied and enacted by discussions of Christ’s circumcision would center on the fraught Jewish origins of an increasingly non- and anti-Jewish movement. I found, however, that this was only one level on which the circumcision of Jesus embodies “the failure of resolution” in early Christianity. All manner of paradox and contradiction—of impossible, desirable otherness at the heart of the Christian self—are articulated in this sign, made visible and never fully resolved.
My contention throughout this book is that an exploration of the diverse and often unexpected ways that this curious mark on the body of Christ pops up in ancient Christian discourse reveals a great deal about the making of Christian culture and identity. Like late ancient Christianity itself (as I shall argue), Christ’s circumcision is an ultimately unbounded and confounding object of speculation in late antiquity. I do not examine here discrete treatises or homilies “on the circumcision of Christ” (until the last chapter, which seeks out the first examples of such writings), but find my subject weaving in and out of a variety of other discourses: anti-Jewish apology, heresiology, theological essays, ascetic treatises, homilies, and biblical commentaries. Like Judaism itself—the “signified” to which circumcision metonymically pointed in the ancient world—Jesus’ circumcision is found throughout these early Christian discourses, difficult to “pin down” precisely for its perfusion throughout the early Christian imaginary. The remarkable ubiquity of Christ’s circumcision in so many diverse areas of Christian thought is our first hint that this small, diffuse mark might possess a larger significance for the study of early Christianity.
Our second hint comes in the paradoxical nature of this mark: circumcision, the mark of Judaism, commemorated and delineated on the body of the Christian savior. It confounds some of our basic assumptions about normative Christianity: the blemish of multiple particularities (Jewish, male) on a universal messiah. What’s more, there is a curious insistence on this confounding mark in our early Christian sources: from the first century onward (when Christ’s circumcision perhaps makes its first appearance), Christians find it useful in some way to embrace the paradox of the circumcised messiah.
In the following chapters I explore the specific instances of these paradoxical uses of the divine circumcision, from the Gospel of Luke to the Latin and Byzantine Feasts of the Cirumcision. In Chapter 1, I explore in more detail the concept of a Roman cultural economy of signs that made “otherness” both visible and manageable—and disruptive—as signs of Roman power. In this cultural economy, the stereotypical circumcision—despite its existence in a variety of Near Eastern groups—came to signify “Judaism” in the metaphorical and material Roman economy. Like all stereotypes, however, this signifying circumcision had two effects: it at once supported and undermined Rome’s cultural economy. When the earliest followers of Jesus came to confront this economy of signs, “circumcision” likewise signaled the symbolic freight of Jewishness: rejected by the apostle Paul, it was curiously—and, perhaps, cannily—recouped by the Gospel of Luke, in possibly the earliest reference to Christ’s circumcision.
Chapter 2 treats the attempts by Christians throughout the late antique period to create—and blur—the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism. Through an exploration of dialogue texts (both literary dialogues between Jews and Christians, as well as the internalized dialogue of question-and-answer texts) that feature the circumcision of Christ, we see how Christianity can simultaneous reject and reinscribe its own originary Jewishness. Chapter 3 turns from (anti-) Jewish texts to the welter of Christian heresiological writings: here, too, we see that the attempt to construct boundaries often covers gestures that reabsorb the strangeness of abject theological “others” (heresies) into the heart of orthodoxy.
In Chapter 4, I focus on a single text that incorporates much of the paradoxical productivity enabled by Christ’s circumcision. Epiphanius’s Panarion, or “Medicine Chest for Heresies,” contains a long chapter in refutation of the “Jewish-Christian” sect of the Ebionites. It is Epiphanius, ventriloquizing these Ebionites, who first voices the desire and fear of Christ’s circumcision for “orthodox” Christians: “If Christ was circumcised, so too should we be.” Epiphanius’s response masterfully rewrites Judaism, Christianity, orthodoxy, and heresy in a single stroke; this text, perhaps most forcefully of any in the entire book, shows us how boundary-creating discourse provided early Christians an apt and surprising vehicle for the retention and internalization of difference.
Chapter 5 takes the Bible as an object of centralizing unity among Christians and demonstrates how the very act of constructing a unified scriptural vision could reproduce and recreate fission and faction. Emerging in both literary and ritual circles, biblical commentaries and sermons—both on the Lucan description of Christ’s circumcision and in other passages where Luke 2:21 serves as intertext—wrestle with the multifarious Christ through the encounter with God’s multivalent Word, perhaps nowhere more divided than at Christ’s most Jewish moment. In Chapter 6, we arrive at the formal institutionalization of Christ’s circumcision in mainstream Christian discourse: the commemoration of the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision, emerging in churches across the Mediterranean and the Near East in the pre-Islamic period. Here, the call to Christians “to become circumcised like Christ” places the paradox of difference and identity squarely in the heart of Christian ritual time and space. I conclude with some final thoughts on the question that haunts much of this book: could ancient Christians conceive of Jesus (male and circumcised) as a Jew, or did their conception of Jesus “passing” as Jewish allow them to rewrite notions of religion and identity altogether?
There is no single trajectory or ideological line that Christ’s circumcision allows us to trace throughout the late antique period. Indeed, my argument is precisely that Christ’s circumcision reveals the fiction of lines, the fantasy of boundaries, even as it permeates the diverse discourses of early Christian identity. The accumulated details contribute to a single argument throughout this book: that early Christian discourses of boundaries, differences, and distinctions consistently and paradoxically worked to erases boundaries, confound difference, and problematize distinction. That is, early Christian identity emerged out of the simultaneous making, and unmaking, of difference.
Chapter 1
Circumcision and the Cultural Economy of Difference
The point of new historical investigation is to disrupt the notion of fixity.
—Joan Wallach Scott
Circumcision and the Jews: A Sign to the Gentiles
Stereotype: The Jewish Body in the Roman Empire
In the early second century, the Roman historian Suetonius described an incident from decades earlier under the revenue-hungry emperor Domitian: “Besides the other [taxes], the Jewish tax (Iudaïcus fiscus) was pursued with especial vigor: for which those persons were turned over (deferebantur)1 who either lived a Jewish life undeclared or who, lying about their origins, had not paid the levy imposed on their people. I recall being present, as a teenager, when an old man, of ninety years, was inspected by a procurator (and a crowded court!) to see whether he was circumcised” (Suet. Dom. 12.2).2 This brief, brutal scene condenses for Suetonius’s readers, and for us, the convoluted role of Jewish circumcision in the early Roman Empire: a sign of distinction, strangeness, even shame, that at once sets the Jew apart (here, for special taxation), but also incorporates him into the broader economy of Roman
