New Testament Circumcision: A Sign of Trouble
The increased pressure on the Jewish signification of circumcision from within and without must frame our exploration of the earliest Christian texts on circumcision, and the circumcision of Jesus. That is, we must view attention to circumcision, and Jesus’ circumcision, not just theologically but also politically and culturally. Circumcision appears throughout the Pauline texts that form the core of the New Testament, from the letters of Paul (both authentic and pseudonymous) to the Acts of the Apostles. Almost always circumcision is a sign of trouble and division:48 “Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses (
To read circumcision only soteriologically—from the vantage point of competing theories of salvation—is to sidestep the very political tenor of the earliest decades of the Jesus movement. Likewise, to read Paul’s resistance to circumcision in his letters merely as simply repudiation of Judaism (or Torah or Law or “works”) is to divorce him too quickly from his very Jewish, Roman, first-century context.51 As Paula Fredriksen has pointed out, it was those who insisted on circumcising gentiles who were the innovators, rewriting the standard apocalyptic script. In most of our early Jewish sources, those from “the nations” who were saved would not become Jews at the end of time, but would be included in the apocalyptic kingdom as gentiles: “Eschatological Gentiles … those who would gain admission to the Kingdom once it was established, would enter as Gentiles. They would worship and eat together with Israel, in Jerusalem, at the Temple. The God they worship, the God of Israel, will have redeemed them from the error of idolatry: he will have saved them—to phrase this in slightly different idiom—graciously, apart from the works of the Law.”52 Fredriksen points out that this eschatological adhesion mirrored the situation Paul likely faced on the ground in major cities of the Mediterranean: gentiles (“Godfearers”) who attached themselves to the Jewish God and synagogue without entering into any process of conversion or entry into the Jewish covenant.53 If we consider circumcision not only as a theological seal but also a social and political marker—a sign of participation in the Roman cultural economy—we can view the conflict between Paul and the “circumcisers” from quite a different angle.
Paul, the fairly conservative former Pharisee,54 in resisting the wholesale application of the Jewish sign of circumcision, may be viewed as resisting Roman power in several ways.55 On the one hand, we might imagine him along the lines of the later intellectual heirs of the Pharisees, the sages, who developed tight controls over ritualized circumcision and so partially recuperated their sacred symbol from the clutches of Roman imperialism. When Paul writes, “What is the use of circumcision? Much, in every way (
Paul’s aversion to gentile circumcision might also resist Roman power in more general fashion: by refusing to submit followers of Jesus to the scrutiny of Roman specular authority. Paul opts out of this cultural economy of signs, and so pronounces that “circumcision has no value, and uncircumcision [literally, ‘foreskin’] has no value (
If Paul’s reluctance to incorporate this visible sign of Jewish identity and Roman power into his gospel may be read (at least in part) as a form of cultural resistance,60 then we may also reimagine “the circumcisers” as, in some ways, accommodating the cultural constraints of Roman rule. When “certain individuals from Judea” insisted to Paul’s gentile adherents that they be circumcised to show they belong to the “Law of Moses,” they were preaching gentile incorporation into that same Roman economy of cultural signs. Where Paul would have his followers float invisibly (“neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no male and female” [Gal 3:28]), free radicals in the Roman body politic,61 the circumcising apostles would fix them—like the old Jewish tax dodger of Suetonius’s memory—firmly, and legibly, in that Roman system of stereotypes. If they shared Paul’s apocalyptic worldview, the circumcisers may even have thought that God would himself require a similar system of symbolic legibility during his final judgment.
My intention is not to reduce the role of circumcision in the first generation of the Jesus movement to simply a cipher for politics: clearly, Paul (and his opponents) felt passionately about this particular sign and its role in the apocalyptic scenario they all believed would soon play out across the face of the oikoumenē. The distinct lack of emotion in the same debate, as narrated in Acts of the Apostles, must likewise be read both theologically and politically (Acts 15): the text is notable for its efforts to “make nice” with the power of Rome (a point I address more fully below), and also for its distance from Paul’s fiery apocalyptic abolition of status, sign, stereotype, and hierarchy.62 Once Paul and his circumcising opponents have died, his followers continued to imagine the role of circumcision in culture and salvation: now brought into contact, for the first time, with the person of Jesus.
Colossians: Circumcision Rewritten
Jesus himself seems not to have preached about circumcision (in favor or against), at least as far as we can tell from the gospels;63 nor does Paul speak of Jesus providing any direct or indirect guidance on the question of circumcision.64 Later interpreters of Paul, however, came to imagine the issues of Moses’ Law and Jesus’ messiahship in a more diachronic fashion: not only did old covenant expand into a new, universal relationship between God and humanity but there was also a chronological development from
