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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 power. The circumcised genitals of the tax-dodging Jew are part of the juridical processes that make the empire function.

In this first, preliminary chapter I ask what kinds of meanings Jewish circumcision carried in the Roman context, and how those meanings were both appropriated and contested: first, by the Jews themselves; second, by the earliest texts of the Jesus movement (the writings of Paul and his followers, including the Gospel of Luke); and, third, by early gentile Christians seeking to grapple with the overdetermined Jewishness of their religious past. My basic argument, throughout this chapter, is that Jewish circumcision circulated as part of a cultural economy of signs in the early Roman Empire: the stereotypical function of circumcision supported, but also destabilized, Roman control and management of Jewish otherness. The cultural force of circumcision, and its ability to resignify in multiple contradictory ways among ancient Jews and Christians, must be understood in this Roman imperial context. Only by considering the cultural and political implications of Jewish circumcision can we begin to understand the implications of imagining this overcharged sign on the body of Jesus.

The increasing significance of Jewish circumcision among Roman authors as “the mark of Judaism” has been well documented in modern scholarship.³ Indeed, by the early empire, Jewish circumcision was already something of an overdetermined symbol in Roman literature, as a mark of cultural difference and general ridicule among Roman literate elites.⁴ For Horace and Persius, the superstition of the “clipped Jews” (Iudaei curti) is a social nuisance (Hor. Sat. 1.9.69–70; Pers. Sat. 5.185).⁵ Martial jealously contemplates the sexual prowess of foreskinless Jewish men (Epig. 7.30.5), while Juvenal bemoans the weird Jews who “worship the sky” and “by and by, shed their foreskins” (Sat. 14.99).⁶ The valences of circumcision in these writings varies considerably, from a sign of hypersexuality to cloistered superstition. The one commonality is that it signifies Jewish: “Jews did constitute an identifiable ethnic group in the varied social mosaic of the Roman Empire, and circumcision did serve as the chief mark of their distinctive way of life.”⁷ In fact, over the centuries spanning the rise of the Roman Empire—and the early spread of Christianity—Jewish circumcision became a part of a complex and labile cultural economy of signs: a system of symbols that made the otherness of provincial peoples at once distinct from yet legible to the controlling eyes of empire.⁸

I have already discussed, briefly in the Introduction, the particular mode of Roman imperial power: unlike that of “Hellenism,” the founding power of Romanitas was the containment and appropriation—but never erasure—of “other” cultures.⁹ A crucial component of this form of imperial control was a political culture based on knowledge of these others in Rome’s midst. Clifford Ando, in his recent work on Roman religion, has brilliantly inspected one sphere of Roman life in which such epistemological discourse functioned: when Romans courted the gods of their enemies (evocatio) or “translated” the religious beliefs and practices of other peoples (interpretatio), they were expanding the “empiricist” bases of their own imperial religion.¹⁰ Ando’s study, which stretches from Cicero to Augustine, suggests that the epistemological foundations of Roman society extended beyond what we might define as the narrowly religious: in war, politics, literature—“culture,” writ large—Romans prided themselves on their ability to incorporate others into a distinctly Roman body of knowledge.¹¹

In order to be effectively incorporated into Rome’s epistemological structures, these other cultures could not be conglomerated into an amorphous “other,” but must remain distinctive and distinguishable.¹² Roman imperial power, in part, operated through stereotype, “the primary form of objectification in colonial discourse.”¹³ The “effete Persian,” the “educated Greek,” the “painted Gaul,” and, indeed, the “circumcised Jew” all functioned to render legible, and therefore knowable and containable, the variegated other populations that made up the Roman Empire.¹⁴ Petronius, in the first century, casually and effectively deploys a host of such distinctive marks (as two of his characters argue about possible disguises to escape a sticky situation): “why not circumcise us,” sneers one character, “so we look like Jews? And pierce our ears, so we can imitate Arabs; and whiten our faces with chalk, so Gaul thinks we’re her citizens” (Petr. Sat. 102.14).¹⁵ The comical list of specific traits (and others in the novel’s scene) underscores the mastery implicit in Roman specular identification.

Stereotyping, like so many forms of epistemological colonial control, is simultaneously effective and unstable, the conveyer of ambivalent knowledge that makes empires work even as it undermines them.¹⁶ On the one hand, stereotypes operate through repeated assertions of optical dominance. Yet at the same time these various signs may not be obviously “visible” to the Roman charged with decoding and categorizing the provincial others under his gaze, or may be misleading. Suetonius’s tax-dodging Jew’s circumcision was not visible; the magistrate, relying on the word of (it seems) a snitch (delator), removed the old man’s clothes in order to prove what was otherwise not manifest to his juridical sight. Indeed, as Shaye Cohen has astutely observed, the stereotype of “the circumcised Jew” would routinely fail to mark out Jews in the ancient Roman city: first, because Jews were not unique in their circumcision; second, because clothing conventions dictated that male genitals were not routinely open to inspection.¹⁷ Stereotypes are inherently unreliable, Jewish circumcision included.

Circumcision fails in another sense, of course, in that it (ostensibly) only marks out male Jews: what would Suetonius’s judge open to inspection if the accused Jew before him were a woman? Later (as we shall see) Christians would seize upon this gender inequity to argue the essential incompleteness of the Jewish covenant.¹⁸ But in the Roman system of signs the strangely gendered nature of Jewish recognizability reveals not only the gaps in Roman specular authority but also the ways in which Rome’s cultural economy was itself deeply gendered, as are all colonial systems of stereotypes.¹⁹ By this I do not simply mean that imperial powers dictate the visible markers for “male” and “female,” although this is, to some extent, true in cultures that legislate codes of dress and comportment.²⁰ I mean that stereotyping regimes mark cultural actors as either viewers or viewed, and draw on common tropes of “male” and “female” to encode those roles.

We should recall Joan Wallach Scott’s fundamental insight about gender systems: “gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power.”²¹ When the Roman Empire constructs a relationship of power based on specular prowess, it is creating a fundamentally gendered relationship with the provincials: the (male) Roman exerts his power over the (female) provincial through his masterful gaze, replicating the social norms of dominating male and dominated female as a basic unit of asymmetrical social interaction.²² The indisputable maleness of the Jewish sign of circumcision is, therefore, ironic and even paradoxical: by submitting to a sign on his male sex, the Jew becomes the feminized subject of the Roman Empire.²³ The sign of maleness becomes a sign of feminine submission. In this gender reversal, circumcision signifies more, and less, than it is.

As a queered sign, therefore, circumcision (like all colonial stereotypes) is never accurate or straightforward. Stereotypes, however, do not need to be “right” to be culturally authoritative and do important political and social work. Suetonius’s story suggests the confidence that imperial Rome had in its specular authority: the man who, presumably, was otherwise unclassifiable is certified as “Jewish” and levied the appropriate tax. Of course, as historians, we have no way of knowing whether this man was really Jewish, or simply appeared so (or even if he was “really” circumcised, or those viewing his naked body merely agreed that he was so). We can’t even know if Suetonius really witnessed this scene, heard about it, invented it, or misremembered it. All we know is that this man’s body, at least as reconstructed by Suetonius, represented to an audience (of onlookers, or readers) the economic circulation of signs in the Roman Empire. Stereotypes become true because they work.

Significant in the promulgation of the power of stereotypes is the moment just before the man’s clothes are removed, his genitals exposed, his Jewishness confirmed. It is at this moment that the anxieties of imperial identity are made most evident: as Homi Bhabha writes, the stereotype “gives access to an ‘identity’ which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it.”²⁴ This anxiety makes real the sensation of mastery and pleasure that follows immediately. That moment of uncertainty also creates the opening by which colonial power becomes dynamic, fluid, and contestable. Stereotypes demand a “fixity” that is, of course, impossible. I will return, in the final chapter of this book, to the problem of “passing” that is the flip side of imperial specular certainty. Here I simply note that the truth-making quality of colonial stereotyping relies on, and is undermined by, the very ambiguity of specular identification: Rome shows her power by forcefully removing an old man’s clothes, but in that same gesture shows the limits of her optical acumen. Circumcision, in this optical cultural economy, therefore signifies doubly: as the sign of the Jew and as the sign of that economy’s own potential failures.²⁵

Claiming the Difference: Jews on Circumcision

At the same time that this Roman cultural economy of signs incorporated the circumcised bodies of Jews into the mosaic of imperial life, we see a shift in the way that Jews envisioned circumcision, as well. Certainly circumcision as a paradigmatic sign of Jewishness predates Roman attention to the sign. It is the mark of the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 17) designed, according to tradition, to “mark out” God’s chosen people from among “the nations.”²⁶ In the encounter with Hellenism, the mark of circumcision became a sign of provincial barbarism and some enthusiasts of Greek culture, we read in a late second-century BCE text, “removed the marks of circumcision and abandoned the holy covenant” (1 Macc 1:15).²⁷ During Judea’s brief imperial period under the Hasmoneans, forcible circumcision was used to bring conquered peoples into the religio-political fold,²⁸ but by the period of Roman rule its Judaizing force was contested: Herod, descended from one of those forcibly circumcised Idumeans and chosen as Rome’s client king, was ridiculed by his Judean subjects as hēmiïoudaios—a “half-Jew.”²⁹ Even as Rome came to recognize and privilege the sign of the Jewish covenant, the Jews themselves were revisiting this doubled mark of covenant loyalty and imperial stereotype. As Shaye Cohen notes, “In the first century of our era, the practice of circumcision seems to have been widely debated by Greek-speaking Jews.”³⁰

Indeed in the first century, allegorically minded Jews in Alexandria—according to Philo—were spiritualizing the mark of Abraham, claiming that its symbolism trumped actual performance of the ritual.³¹ Philo defended the literal practice of circumcision while trying to recoup its philosophical and symbolic value, although he himself displays little enthusiasm for the physical rite.³² Often Philo and his nameless opponents are read on a sliding scale of traditionalism and assimilation. The so-called antinomians are eager to assimilate into Greco-Roman culture, while Philo—despite his own “disquietude” over circumcision³³—is understood as holding the literal line of the Law regardless of his allegorical proclivities. Yet if we cast the terms of debate along political lines, the polarities might reverse. By turning away from physical circumcision, the antinomians are radically disengaging their Jewish identity from the Roman cultural economy of signs—refusing Rome’s specular domination, camouflaged by philosophical generality; by contrast Philo, a member (after all) of a respectful legation of provincials to the imperial court,³⁴ preserves the physical sign of Jewish stereotype clearly distinguishable beneath the glossy sheen of hellenistic philosophical sophistication. At issue then is the external legibility of Jewish identity, condensed in the sign of circumcision.

For this reason, perhaps, we see increased attention to the particulars of circumcision among the burgeoning class of rabbinic sages. Cohen details a shift from the last centuries BCE, when “circumcision was deemed efficacious no matter how, under what circumstances, or by whom it was performed,” and the “mid-second century [CE],” when some rabbis “distinguished noncovenantal circumcision, the removal of a piece of skin, from covenantal circumcision, or berit.”³⁵ The mark became ritualized, part of a more elaborate process of entering into the covenant community. The surgical details of Jewish circumcision became more complex, as the rabbis insisted that Jewish circumcision, in distinction from other circumcisions, must not only remove the foreskin (milah) but the membrane attaching the foreskin to the glans (periʿah).³⁶ Even the significance of circumcision for the rabbis seems more profound and cosmic: “the praise that circumcision received in rabbinic literature is entirely unprecedented and extraordinary.”³⁷ Some scholars posit that this intensified attention to the particulars and glories of circumcision emerges from a tacit resistance to the rising tide of Christianity, which elevated Pauline discouragement of circumcision to an art form. Cohen, by contrast, wonders if this rabbinic mania for circumcision might bespeak an internal Jewish conflict, stretching back to the Maccabean conflict between “hellenizers” and traditionalists.³⁸

Without setting aside these important and overlapping contexts, I suggest we might also read the rabbinic elevation of circumcision as a means of appropriating, and resisting, the stereotyping functions of Roman culture. Much in the same way that Greeks under the Roman Empire continued to produce paideia, consumable but never digestible by their Roman rulers,³⁹ so too some classes of Jews produced an elaborated and utterly distinct form of circumcision that was visible to—but never totally comprehensible by—Roman authority. By assuming control over the mark of circumcision, and therefore their own Jewishness, the sages were also exerting paradoxical control over “the nations,” now configured as “the uncircumcised.”⁴⁰ Romans might think they were demanding a sign of provincial legibility, but the Jews were taking back control of that sign and the manner in which it might be apprehended.

If Cohen is right, and the surviving instructions for rabbinic conversion to Judaism in the Babylonian Talmud are of earlier, Palestinian origin,⁴¹ then the framing of the ceremony—with circumcision at its heart—also tells us something about the configuration of circumcision at the heart of the Roman Empire of cultural signs.⁴² The conversion begins with the approach of the proselyte, who must accept the role of Israel as “pained, oppressed, harassed, and torn.” While some interpreters have tried to locate this fragmented sense of “oppression” in a particular moment of Jewish-Roman relations,⁴³ the ritualization of this sense of objectification surely speaks to a general sense of provincial marginality. The proselyte is then given both heavy and “light” instruction in the Law; specific mention is made of dietary restrictions and Sabbath observance, two common stereotypes about Jews in the Roman world.⁴⁴ After being warned again about the marginality of Israel and its promise of a place in the world-to-come, the proselyte is circumcised. Sometimes he is even circumcised a second time if the first circumcision is deemed physically insufficient (i.e., the surgery has not removed enough of the foreskin): an assertion of control that borders on the excessive. Finally the healed proselyte is immersed in a ritual bath, given more (and less specific) instruction, and “Voilà, he is like Israel.”⁴⁵ At every step the difference of Jews can be read in particularly Roman terms: from the acknowledgment of political subordination to accepting the sign (circumcision) by which the Romans “read” Jewish difference. Yet in that very act of assuming the stereotypes of Judaism those terms are being reworked and recuperated, even resisted. The Jewish sign is Judaized.

Jews who insisted on the significance of circumcision, yet struggle to control and redirect that signification, are like Homi Bhabha’s “mimic men,” who take on with necessary imperfection the constructed image of the colonizers.⁴⁶ Bhabha attended to the Indian colonial scene, and the crucial slippage between English and Anglicized; in the Roman context, in which power derives from the (impossible) mastery of stereotypes, the difference between Roman and Romanized consists precisely in the cues and signs of difference and distinction. The Romanized Jew accepts the marks of colonial difference (circumcision) but in taking up this mark with fervor and a newfound attention to arcane, ritualized detail simultaneously slips beyond the Romanizing gasp. Jewish circumcision, like all stereotypical signs of imperial power, becomes “an ambivalent mode of knowledge and power.”⁴⁷

Old Covenant in the New: Resignifying Circumcision

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 (), you cannot be saved.’ And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to discuss this question with the apostles and the elders” (Acts 15:1–2). Paul himself frames this “dissension and debate” over circumcision in slightly more dramatic fashion: “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? … I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!” (Gal 3:1, 5:12) Often this conflict over circumcision has been read as a theological struggle over the mechanics of salvation: what role should the “Law” (Torah) play in the new dispensation of Jesus the messiah?⁴⁹ We are to imagine conservative Jewish followers (the “party of James” [Gal 2:12]) resisting Paul’s innovative preaching of a new, universal covenant outside the Law: salvation by faith, not works.⁵⁰

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 ( )” (Rom 3:1–2), we need not see this as a rhetorical concession. Rather we might sense the same admiration for and anxiety surrounding the cultural function of circumcision as we find later in the sages, who similarly proclaim, “Great is circumcision!” (b. Ned. 31a–32b). The value of circumcision lies in its appropriate application by Jews alone: in Roman hands, it is a tool of power and control over Jews.

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 ( )” (1 Cor 7:19; cf. Gal 5:6, 6:15). Paul values circumcision at nothing, even though elsewhere it was “of use in every way.” Paul is not simply denying the value of circumcision or the Jewish Law: he is denying value to circumcision and uncircumcision, that is, to the distinction between the two.⁵⁶ They cannot be used to segregate populations in the fashion that the Roman Empire insisted.⁵⁷ So too Paul tells the church in Rome: “circumcision is not in the visible flesh () … but rather a matter of the heart ()” (Rom 2:28–29).⁵⁸ Located now in the heart, circumcision remains invisible to the powers of Rome that Paul, elsewhere, is careful not to oppose (Rom 13:1–7). The followers of Jesus who internalize the mark of Judaism are thereby made invisible to the powers of this world, stripped of the stereotypical signs that would allow them to circulate in the Roman imperial system. Circumcision remains the secret, hidden treasure of Israel.⁵⁹

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 the old covenant to a new covenant. The person of Jesus was imagined to have transformed the covenant, and its sign: circumcision.

The Letter to the Colossians is considered by many scholars to be pseudonymous, possibly written soon after Paul’s death in his name.⁶⁵ Even those who defend Pauline authorship admit that “Colossians does not manifest the urgency about the timing of the Parousia [Second Coming] that 1 Thessalonians, for example, has.”⁶⁶ With this dampened eschatological heat comes a comparative warmth toward the hierarchical structures of the Roman Empire: the notorious “household code” (Col 3:18–4:1) that ties the domestic theology of Colossians much more clearly to the later, pseudonymous “Pastoral” Epistles 1 Timothy and Titus.⁶⁷

It is also in the Letter to the Colossians that we find our earliest possible reference to Christ’s own circumcision, a notably positive use of “circumcision.”⁶⁸ The language is dense, and the Greek grammar multivalent.⁶⁹ In the midst of a warning against “philosophy and empty deceit,” the author reminds the Colossians of the celestial and divine fullness of Christ in which they now participate: “For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily ( ), and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision not made by hands ( ), by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ (), when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col 2:9–13; NRSV modified). The letter continues to extol the life-giving virtues of the crucifixion, which abnegates the need to follow the Jewish Law (Col 2:14)—here specified not as circumcision, but rather “matters of food and drink … observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths” (Col 2:16). Circumcision does appear once more in the letter, as a gloss on a Pauline slogan from Galatians 3:28: “there is no more Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free-person, but Christ is all in all” (Col 3:11). As Harry Maier has pointed out, the particular resonances of the letter as a whole set this later reference to circumcised peoples firmly in the world of imperial triumph, not resistance to empire: the “circumcised and uncircumcised” march alongside the barbarian, Scythian, slaves, and free persons in organized unison.⁷⁰ A letter that contains both positively valued circumcision and Roman triumphal language (see Col 2:15) locates us in a rhetorical context far from Paul’s earlier letters.

If circumcision is not a problem, as in Paul’s earlier letters, what is it doing in this passage? The interpretation of Colossians 2:9–13 is made difficult by its abstruseness, particularly its use of terms in simultaneously literal and figurative fashion: Christ’s “body” in the beginning of the passage is presumably real (a reference to the incarnation), but the body that is “put off” by followers later on would seem to be figurative (symbolizing their old lives). Likewise, Christ’s burial is literal (he really died, and was really buried) but that of his followers is metaphorical: they “rise” from the baptismal font as if they have also been buried and resurrected. Then, finally, there is circumcision: it appears to be associated here, for the first time, with baptism (an analogy to which I return below), making it a circumcision “without hands” (sometimes translated as “spiritual” or “invisible”).⁷¹ But this analogy also confuses the literal and figurative: baptism itself is a material event—there is a body, and water, and space, and hands—yet its spiritual efficacy happens invisibly, apart from manual operation.

In this amalgamation of the material and spiritual, what are we to make of “the circumcision of Christ”? Is it figurative or literal, like his body and his burial? Greek, as English, allows for two grammatical ways to construe this possessive phrase. As a subjective genitive, it is the circumcision that Christ performs (presumably, on the letter’s recipients). As an objective genitive, it is the circumcision performed on Christ. The phrase has been interpreted both ways, but never strictly literally: like the rest of the passage, “Christ’s circumcision” enjoys dual signification, at once literal and figurative, subjective and objective. When the phrase is read as a subjective genitive, it is a figure for Christian ritual: Christ performs this “circumcision” on the recipients of the letter “without hands” (Col 2:11) in “baptism” (Col 2:12).⁷² This typological “circumcision”/baptism allows a reconfiguration of language that, elsewhere in the Pauline corpus, we would read more literally: by partaking in “Christ’s circumcision” (baptism), the recipients of the letter redeem their previous state of “uncircumcision” (Col 2:13: “you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh” []). Here, “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” (or, as in Paul’s other letters, literal “foreskin”) are figurative states of membership in the Christian community, not literal signs of participation in the Jewish covenant or Law.⁷³ Circumcision is, in this sense, radically resignified through Christ: no longer a literal “stripping of flesh” (Col 2:11) that marks out God’s people, but a figurative “circumcision.” At the same time, however, we should note the relative conservatism of this resignification in political terms: where Paul might seek to liberate his gentile followers from the political signs of status and domination (among which Jewish circumcision numbered), here the value of status, sign, and identification is restored, albeit in a doubly symbolic manner.

What about the objective genitive reading of “the circumcision of Christ”—that is, how do we read this verse if it refers to the circumcision performed on Jesus? Here, too, the literal and figurative shade into each other. Notably, however, even when modern interpreters read this phrase objectively—the circumcision performed on Christ—they resist reading it as his literal, infant circumcision: “Some have taken the phrase to refer specifically to Christ’s physical nature—not to his literal circumcision (Luke 2:21), but to his death (cf. Rom 7:4)” (emphasis added).⁷⁴ The path of this semantic redirection is not immediately obvious, since the crucifixion is not explicitly mentioned here. It is mentioned literally in Col 1:20 (“peace through the blood of the cross”); in this chapter, however, it is one more in a series of visceral metaphors: “He set this [the ‘record against us’] aside, nailing it to the cross” (Col 2:14). Curiously, we have an instance here of an objective genitive (“the crucifixion performed on Jesus”) being transformed into a subjective genitive (“the crucifixion performed by Jesus, on the Jewish Law”).

Even assuming that enough connotations of baptism-as-death-as-crucifixion seep into the text to allow a reader to understand Col 2:12 in this way, we must still marvel a bit at the ingenuity of this reading. This interpretation is remarkable for the degree to which it maintains both the literality of Christ’s circumcision (“flesh stripped away,” here by crucifixion) and its figurality (it is still not circumcision, but “circumcision”). When James Dunn argues that the “circumcision of Christ” should be taken objectively (that is, a circumcision performed on Christ), he writes: “The final phrase, ‘in the circumcision of Christ,’ is best seen, then, simply as a summary expression of the larger imagery of the preceding phrases. This is, what is in view is not primarily a circumcision effected by Christ … but a concise description of the death of Christ under the metaphor of circumcision.”⁷⁵ On Christ’s body, the “circumcision of Christ” is simultaneously circumcision and “circumcision,” crucifixion and “crucifixion,” death and “death.” Still, it is difficult to understand why modern interpreters insist that the “physical” circumcision is somehow not also his literal, infant circumcision.⁷⁶ The reference to “stripping of flesh” (Col 2:11) at the very least gestures toward literal, physical male circumcision; so too, beneath and within the chain of metaphors, of literal and figurative language intertwined, might we envision Christ’s circumcision, as well. If this is the case, then Colossians 2:11 is the earliest surviving mention of Jesus’ circumcision.

It is, of course, impossible to distinguish between the objective and subjective genitive here, and we must assume the writer of Colossians knew what he was doing when he structured the sentence with this ambiguity in place. Circumcision (which, elsewhere in the letter, rather neutrally equates to “Judaism”) juxtaposed with Christ’s body becomes a radical resignifier. It can emanate from Christ or remain on his skin’s surface; in either case, it cannot help but be swept up in the cascade of literal and figurative corporeal moments of Christ’s life that structure the entire passage. It may very well refer to Christ’s crucifixion, because this section of the letter has so disembedded “circumcision” from its normal religious, political, and cultural significations. By bringing the circumcision into contact with Christ—wielded by him or against him—the author of Colossians has succeeded in prising it free not only of Roman control, as in Paul’s letters, but of Jewish control as well. Whether Christ’s circumcision is baptism or crucifixion or both, it is no longer a sign of the covenant of Abraham or the legible symbol of Roman imperial subjection. It is Christianized, and totally open to multiple new meanings.

Luke’s Jewish Messiah for Gentiles

The author of the Gospel of Luke is slightly more willing to imagine the messianic circumcision. A set of parallel passages recounts the nativities of John the Baptist and (in Luke’s account) his cousin Jesus. At the climax of both come their circumcision and naming: “And it was the eighth day, and they came to circumcise the child, and they called him by the name of his father, Zechariah” (Luke 1:59; NRSV modified); “And the eight days were fulfilled to circumcise him, and he was called by the name Jesus, which he was called by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21). Multiple parallelisms link these nativities:⁷⁷ both infants are announced by angelic visitors (Luke 1:11–20, 26–38); both infants have special names, divinely preordained (Luke 1:13, 60–63; Luke 1:31, 2:21); both births are bracketed by Temple worship (Zechariah does Temple service before John’s birth [Luke 1:8–9], Mary and Joseph go to the Temple for purification after Jesus’ [Luke 2:22–24]); and both children are the occasion for songs of praise from their parents (Zechariah [Luke 1:67–79] and Mary [Luke 1:46–55], respectively).

Both passages are also grammatically evasive on the moment of circumcision itself, as no finite verb (“he was circumcised”) describes the act of circumcision. In John’s case “they came to circumcise him” (); in Jesus’ case “the eight days of his circumcising were fulfilled” ( ). The finite action in both instances is the “naming,” not the circumcising. Despite this grammatical imprecision, these passages are almost always understood as narrating the circumcisions of John and Jesus.⁷⁸

Nonetheless modern commentators have little to say specifically about Luke’s circumcised messiah,⁷⁹ other than to note that this event combines with the rest of the “prologue” of the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1–2) to create a deeply Jewish point of departure for a messiah who will, ultimately, deliver salvation to gentiles.⁸⁰ Indeed, for most modern scholars Jesus’ circumcision is absorbed into the larger question of Luke’s (seemingly) incongruous emphasis on the particularities of Law and Temple in his universalizing gospel.⁸¹ Of the four canonical gospels, Luke’s is typically considered the most gentile in its orientation;⁸² the author crafts a “gospel for the gentiles” both theologically (a “universal” salvation that supplants the old covenant [see Luke 16:16]) and stylistically (a more urbane, sophisticated literary presentation).⁸³

Luke’s incongruously Jewish opening chapters have vexed New Testament scholars for centuries. Early source critics explained these early, more Jewish passages as the calcified remains of an older gospel source preserved—like an extinct theological fly in more precious amber—in the layers of Luke’s gospel.⁸⁴ This early stratum may retain early traditions about Jesus the Jew, but those early traditions are effectively neutralized by being preserved in a more evolved text. Later redaction criticism focused on Luke’s authorial motives in combining stories of Jesus’ Jewishness with theological messages of universal salvation.⁸⁵ François Bovon imagines the evangelist as a gentile who, once drawn to Judaism as a “god-fearer,” now sees the value in leaving Judaism behind. So the narrative of Jesus’ Jewish childhood becomes something like a fond memory that carries nostalgic value, but little theological significance.⁸⁶ Raymond Brown likewise understands “a Lucan view of the Jewish Temple and its ritual more in terms of nostalgia for things past, rather than of hostility for an active and seductive enemy.”⁸⁷ Such commentary frames the first chapters of Luke, including the passage on Jesus’ circumcision, as splashes of theological color: an acknowledgment of the resolutely past-tense significance of Israel, a kinder and gentler mode of theological supersessionism.⁸⁸

A more creative redaction-critical explanation for the early emphasis on Law and Temple in Luke’s work was raised by John Knox, and recently defended by his student Joseph Tyson.⁸⁹ For these scholars, the redacted fragments of Luke-Acts, replete with Jewish color, do not look back (in triumph or nostalgia) to a primitive moment of the Jesus Movement; rather, they bear witness to a later debate among gentile Christian groups in the mid-second century: the rise of Marcionite Christianity. In the early second century, Marcion preached a popular form of Christianity that sharply distinguished Christian salvation from the prior—material, legalistic, judgmental, and Jewish—covenant. Christianity, and Jesus, had nothing to do with the Creator God of the Old Testament and his Jewish worshipers, Marcion taught. His later detractors accused him of producing a corrupt and truncated New Testament, purged of Jewish elements, in order to spread his heresy.⁹⁰

Knox and Tyson have argued that the reverse might be true: perhaps Marcion’s shorter, less Jewish gospel preceded the canonical Gospel of Luke, indeed, prompted the fuller, Judaized nativity.⁹¹ Speaking specifically of Luke 1–2, Knox writes: “Marcion would surely not have tolerated this highly ‘Jewish’ section; but how wonderfully adapted it is to show the nature of Christianity as the true Judaism and thus to answer one of the major contentions of the Marcionites! And one cannot overlook the difficulty involved in the common supposition that Marcion deliberately selected a Gospel which began in so false and obnoxious a way.”⁹² Although this last point may be somewhat unfair—no one has argued that Marcion had multiple narratives of Jesus’ life at his disposal and quirkily chose the one least suited to his theological agenda⁹³—the overall idea that proto-orthodox expansion can explain the textual and canonical history of Luke as well as Marcionite truncation has found some traction in recent years. Tyson concludes that “[the] work as a whole, Luke-Acts as we know it, surely served as a formidable anti-Marcionite text.”⁹⁴ Central to Tyson’s argument are the highly “Jewish” chapters of Luke 1–2,⁹⁵ particularly the account of the circumcision: “it is important to observe that the vital link with Judaism signified by Jesus’ circumcision would have been highly offensive to Marcion and his followers.”⁹⁶ Although creative in its canonical revision, the “Knox-Tyson theory” participates in a well-established scholarly attempt to explain—and explain away—the presence of such an anomalous feature as Jesus’ circumcision in the gentile gospel. The time frame has simply been moved up several decades, and the target of Luke’s anomalous narrative (Jews, gentiles, or Marcionites) shifted to suit. Redaction criticism, early and late, rhetorically isolates and, in a sense, evacuates the Jewishness of the circumcision of Jesus. It is not “really” a part of Luke’s gospel, and therefore easy to read right past.

Two twentieth-century commentators have attempted to explain the Jewishness of Luke’s first chapters, and the circumcision specifically, in a way that does not view these passages as anomalous to Luke’s “real” theological perspective. Jacob Jervell sees no incongruity between the Law-fulfilling Jesus of Luke 1–2 and the messianic community envisioned generally by Luke-Acts.⁹⁷ For Jervell, the circumcised messiah fits neatly into what was, at its origins, a fundamentally Jewish-Christian messianic movement: “Luke must indicate that the Messiah Jesus is the genuine and true Messiah. Among other things, this is evidenced by the fact that he was circumcised according to the law.”⁹⁸ Instead of the theological friction that most modern readers of Luke’s nativity encounter, Jervell finds harmony, a gesture of inclusion rather than supersession.⁹⁹ Ultimately, Jervell does concede that the Jewish-Christian perspective of Luke, according to which a circumcised messiah makes sense, opens up to a more universal, gentile movement so that, in the end, the passage still derives from and speaks to a past-tense Jewish experience.

The most recent treatment of the circumcision of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke comes from theologian Graham Ward, who considers multiple reasons why the evangelist might have included an account of Jesus’ circumcision.¹⁰⁰ Like Jervell, he resists redactional arguments that reduce the significance of the passage to a mere “remnant” embedded in a fundamentally gentile account of salvation. Ward also wants to find something organic in Luke’s unique inclusion of this scene. Ward suggests: “To speak of the circumcision was making a cultural and political statement …. I suggest, whatever the implied readership of the text, a statement is being made here about embodiment (as early Christian exegetes understood) and about Jewish masculinity (and by implication femininity). It is a statement not just about religious and ethnic self-identity (as Jervell argued) but about the way certain figurations of the body are invested with cultural status. It says something, then, about the politics of embodiment.”¹⁰¹ Ward’s insistence on the “politics of embodiment” is intriguing; unfortunately, he does not then specify what that “something” might be that Luke is saying, other than that “Luke appears to be making a gesture of resistance to a cultural hegemony.”¹⁰² I am nonetheless sympathetic to his desire to move beyond the redaction-critical explanations of previous scholarship, away from interpretations that make the scene of the circumcision either ironic or nostalgic, and ask the question from a different angle: why is the gentiles’ messiah circumcised?

Here we need to return to the political and cultural contexts of circumcision, and to the power of the stereotype in the Roman world. There is no doubt that the Gospel of Luke is a document highly sensitive to empire: the very chapter that mentions the circumcision is framed by “Caesar Augustus” (Luke 2:1) and “Tiberius Caesar” (Luke 3:1).¹⁰³ Moreover, Roman power is made to interact discursively with distinctive Jewish identity: the power of the imperial city intersects with the bygone Jewish autonomy of the “city of David” in Luke 2 just as the circumscribed power of the tetrarchs is subordinated to “Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea” in Luke 3. Finally, the Temple itself symbolizes acutely the domination of Rome over the province of Judea in the late first century and early second century. Certainly the destruction of that Temple in 70 CE would haunt those passages that portray Jesus and his relatives moving through the sacred precincts.¹⁰⁴ Therefore I would heartily agree with Ward that Luke is engaged with “cultural hegemony,” more specifically, with the cultural economy of signs and stereotypes in which circumcision circulated.¹⁰⁵

If Luke is not preserving a bygone sense of Jewish “self-identity” (his own or another’s), how might we interpret his intervention into the Roman cultural economy of stereotypes? Several alternatives are possible (and I think any or all of them may be present to a certain degree: cultural discourse is necessarily heterogeneous). Scholars have often read Luke-Acts as politically conciliatory, portraying sympathy to the Roman Empire.¹⁰⁶ Paul Walaskay’s formulation is even stronger, claiming that Luke-Acts functions not only as an apologia pro ecclesia to the Empire, but as an apologia pro imperio to the church: “Luke … has high regard for the imperial government and for those who administer it.”¹⁰⁷ If Luke is theologically structured, in part, as a positive response to the Roman Empire, we might read Jesus’ circumcision as a concession to the cultural economy of symbols that permeated the empire. Where Paul resisted the legibility of circumcision as a sign of Judaism to the Romans, Luke embraces it: the circumcised messiah is “Jewish,” therefore, only insofar as he is also Romanized, visible and comprehensible to the knowing eye of Rome. If the founder of the Way can be comprehended by the imperial gaze, so can his followers. The participation of the messianic and divine figure in the cultural economy of Rome paves the way for an entirely conciliatory discourse of Christian identity.

But the discourse of stereotype, “as anxious as it is assertive,”¹⁰⁸ is rarely so straightforward; even if Luke is seeking, on some level, to acknowledge and defer to the authority of Roman signs, he is also taking it upon himself to manipulate and reinterpret those signs. This paradox informs Homi Bhabha’s understanding of the function of stereotype in the colonial encounter: the good colonial subject takes on the legible signs of identity expected by the colonizer, but in that gesture makes those signs her or his own. Roman stereotypes in the hands of an outsider—the provincial, the object of the gaze, not its master—are always potentially subversive.

Like the later sages, who would attempt to reclaim control over their sign from Rome through ritualization, Luke’s circumcised messiah may be read through the lens of mimicry. By placing Jesus squarely within the cultural economy of Roman signs, by signifying him as Jew in the opening chapters, Luke can subvert both the sign Jew and the Roman system of signification that encodes it.¹⁰⁹ Gary Gilbert has pointed out the ways in which Luke’s Pentecost narrative in Acts 2 adapts a “well-established method of political propaganda” and “presents an alternative to Roman ideology and challenges Rome’s position as ruler of the inhabited world.”¹¹⁰ In a similar geographic vein, Laura Nasrallah explores how the journeys of Paul in Acts effectively “mimic the logic of empire without shading into mockery.”¹¹¹ Both of these studies point out the ways that Luke mimes and appropriates Roman culture for theological (and political) purposes.

So too may we read the body of Jesus, appropriately—but a bit oddly—signified as that of a Jewish male. It is no stretch to read this sign, crafted in the shadow of an imperial census conducted at the city of David, as deliberately engaging Roman cultural power in the provinces. Its value, however, is destabilized in Luke’s hands, rendered opaque by the ambiguity of circumcision, Law, and Temple throughout Luke-Acts. By only partially acknowledging the power of Rome to assort and categorize its other subjects, Luke destabilizes that power, makes it his own. At the same time, the desire of (some) Jews to slip beyond the bounds of Roman specular authority is also thwarted and undermined: Jesus is irrevocably (but still a bit ambiguously) marked by the preeminent sign of Judaism at the same time he is inscribed (but also a bit ambiguously) into the imperial Roman census. Just as the name given by God’s angel is also the name registered by Roman power, so too the covenantal sign ordained by God is also the sign sought by Roman authority (as Suetonius’s old man attests). On the person of Jesus, both those systems of power and identity are disrupted and reorganized. Jesus is Judaized, and thereby Romanized, but in both senses he is not quite a Jew and not quite a Roman. It makes a kind of sense that the sign unproblematically taken up by the messiah in the Gospel of Luke should be cleanly demoted and minimized in the Acts of the Apostles.

In many ways Luke is Paul’s intellectual and theological descendant, organizing what he perceived as Pauline principles (especially the mission to gentiles) in a nonapocalyptic register. But it is not quite accurate to say that Luke and Paul agree on the role of “Law,” or circumcision, in the new covenant.¹¹² As I have suggested, for Paul circumcision was a dangerous sign at least partly because it rendered the people of God legible and apprehensible to Roman, worldly power. His successor in the letter to the Colossians first attempted to resignify that sign, make it less dangerous, by bringing it into contact with the body of Christ: there, circumcision was drawn into an opaque swirl of literal and figurative signs of salvation. The author of the Gospel of Luke takes us further, placing that sign directly on Jesus’ infant body; there it acts not merely as a sign of capitulation to Roman power, but as a mimicry of that power. Jesus circumcised sets his followers on the path to the annulment of this doubly Jewish-Roman system of signification.

Christian Circumcision

By the second century—around the time, possibly, that Luke’s ambivalent verses on Christ’s circumcision began to circulate—gentile Christian authors had begun contending with circumcision as a distinctly Christian sign. For these Christians, circumcision condensed and refracted broader discourses of stereotype, identity, and ambivalence. On the one hand, they intensified and amplified the Roman stereotype of circumcision as the paradigmatic, and ignominious, sign of “the Jew.” That is, the sign that distinguished Jews from—and made Jews comprehensible to—Romans now performed the same functions in a new, gentile, Christian idiom. At the same time, however, non-Jewish Christians also arrogated positive Christian meaning to this sign, as they claimed for themselves the title of Israel.¹¹³

The doubled view of circumcision finds its way into anti-Jewish literature early on:¹¹⁴ the Epistle of Barnabas, which probably dates from the mid-second century,¹¹⁵ sounds the twin notes of repudiation and appropriation that will become standard in the stereotypical discourses of early Christianity. The letter as a whole interweaves a defense of Christian practices (such as baptism) and theologies (such as the passion and the new covenant) with rejections of Jewish customs and practices. The chapter on circumcision opens with a metaphor drawn from the Hebrew Bible that would become a favorite of early Christians, the “circumcised” hearts and ears (Deut 10:16, 30:6; Jer 4:4, 6:10).¹¹⁶ The author goes further than this metaphorical, biblical language, however, and declares that God had never ordained fleshly circumcision for the Jews: “But even the circumcision in which they trusted has been nullified. For he has said that circumcision is not a matter of the flesh. But they transgressed because an evil angel instructed them.”¹¹⁷ This ascription of the rite of circumcision—alone among the Jewish covenant laws discussed in Barnabas—to an “evil angel” is an extraordinary step: “B. was not willing simply to argue for the truth of the purely symbolic interpretation of the rite (as he had for sacrifice, the temple, and the dietary laws), but to demonise it.”¹¹⁸ Even as this sign is plotted in a distinctly religious register (the domain of angels and demons), it is simultaneously removed from the Roman economy of signs: “But you will say: Surely the people were circumcised as a seal. So is every Syrian and Arab and all the priests of the idols: so are they also part of their covenant? Even the Egyptians have circumcision!”¹¹⁹ Circumcision no longer retains its particular stereotypical signification in the Roman symbolic order, setting Jews apart from other provincial populations. A new system of stereotypes has taken its place; although circumcision still indicates the peculiar (demonic) quality of the Jews, Christians have seized that system of signs from Roman hands.

Yet as strong as Barnabas’s “demonization” of Jewish circumcision seems, his recuperation of the Christian meaning of this rite is equally remarkable. This chapter of the Epistle of Barnabas may contains the earliest example of Christian gematria, the symbolic interpretation of letters through their numeric equivalents (possible since ancient languages used the same symbols for letters and numbers).¹²⁰ Here, the author draws on the circumcision of Abraham’s household in the Hebrew Bible:¹²¹

Abraham, who first made a circumcision, looked forward in the spirit to Jesus when he was circumcising, receiving the teaching of the three letters. For it says: “And Abraham circumcised from his household eighteen men and three hundred.” What knowledge, then, was given to him? Learn that first there are the eighteen and then, after a pause, he says “three hundred.” For “eighteen”: iota is ten and ēta is eight: you have [the first two letters of] Jesus (). And because the cross was going to possess grace in the tau he also says “three hundred.” So he shows “Jesus” in the first two letters and in the other one “the cross.”¹²²

Circumcision here is not just reinterpreted through Jesus, it is actually equated with Jesus, and the crucifixion, and the entire scheme of Christian messianic redemption. This remarkable act of resignification allows the author at once to repudiate Jewish circumcision (as it exists among actual Jews) and reappropriate it as a mark of distinction through (as) Jesus.

Other early Christians attempted to maintain this doubled view of Jewish circumcision, often through the prophetic metaphor of “circumcision of the heart.” Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew begins by locating his interlocutor, the Jew Trypho, squarely in the realm of the Roman political and cultural economy: “I am a Hebrew of the circumcision,” Trypho supposedly tells Justin upon meeting him, “fleeing the war just now taking place, sojourning in Greece, mainly in Corinth.”¹²³ “The war” refers to the so-called Bar Kokhba revolt—prompted, some scholars have posited, by a Hadrianic ban on circumcision¹²⁴—which had left Jerusalem devastated and the very province of Judea absorbed and renamed. Trypho’s situation, like that of Suetonius’s old Jewish tax dodger, registers both the anomaly of the “other” in Roman society as well as his legibility to the imperial gaze.

Justin affirms the designating function of Trypho’s circumcision: “For the circumcision from Abraham according to the flesh was given as a sign, so that you may be separated from other nations and from us; and so that you alone may suffer that which now you now justly suffer; and so that your lands may become deserted, and your cities burned up; and so that foreigners may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem. For not by anything else are you recognized among the other people than from the circumcision of your flesh.”¹²⁵ The function of circumcision for Justin extends far beyond tax collection, however. The “just punishments” executed by the Roman army have a distinctly Christian logic: “Now these things have happened to you well and justly. For you have slain the Just One, and his prophets before him. And now you reject those who have hope in him and in him who sent him, the Almighty and the Creator of all things, God, and as much as you can you dishonor him, cursing in your synagogues those who believe in Christ.¹²⁶ For you do not have the authority to become murderous against us, on account of those who now are in charge.”¹²⁷ “Those who are now in charge” are the Romans, but the real power at work is “the Almighty,” who has devised a punishment for the blasphemous Jews as well as a sign to distinguish those who are to be punished. Circumcision is a Roman marker deployed by a Christian God. Once more the figure of Jesus—here crucified and daily avenged—intervenes to rewrite the script of Roman-provincial relations.

The figure of Jesus also reinscribes the sign of circumcision as a positive Christian marker, the “second circumcision” (, drawing on the language of Joshua 5, wherein Joshua must circumcise the Israelites before they enter into the Land). In discussing the typological relationship of Joshua, son of Nun, with Jesus Christ (whose names are identical in Greek) Justin proclaims: “That one [Joshua] is said to have circumcised the people a second time with knives of stone, which was the pronouncement of that circumcision with which Jesus Christ himself has circumcised us from the stone and other idols.”¹²⁸ This metaphorical “stripping away” of the religious life of pagan gentiles, prefigured in Joshua’s circumcision of the Israelites entering the promised land, constitutes the positive, Christian distinction of Justin’s “second circumcision”: “our circumcision, which is the second (), having been instituted after yours, circumcises us from idolatry and from absolutely every kind of wickedness by sharp stones, that is, by the words of the apostles of the corner-stone cut out without hands [see Dan 2:34].”¹²⁹ Ultimately, this Christian circumcision marks out and distinguishes a new “people” as thoroughly as Jewish circumcision: “Jesus Christ circumcises all who wish—as was proclaimed above—with knives of stone; that they may be a righteous nation, a people keeping faith, holding to the truth, and guarding peace [see Isa 26:2–3].”¹³⁰

As in the Epistle of Barnabas, the moral purification of Christian circumcision is identified with, and performed by, Jesus himself. Justin explains this through a numerical association between the law of circumcision and the resurrection of Jesus:¹³¹ “Now the command of circumcision, ordering that these always take place on the eighth day, was an image (τύπος) of the true circumcision, in which we are circumcised from every error and wickedness through the one who rose from the dead on the first day following the Sabbath, Jesus Christ our Lord: for the first day following the Sabbath is also the first day of all the days, but according again to the count of the cycle of all the days is called the eighth, while it remains the first.”¹³² Resurrected on the eighth day of the week, Jesus both embodies and performs a “true circumcision,” a moral purgation of the community formed in him. Christians are constituted (in Pauline language) as the body of Christ, and that body has been circumcised.

The association between resurrection and circumcision recalls the connection between circumcision and baptism that some scholars, as we have seen, find in Colossians 2:12. It is debatable whether Justin himself makes this connection, although twice in the Dialogue he seems to come close.¹³³ Early in the Dialogue, he exhorts Trypho and his companions to abandon Jewish “foolishness” and embrace true religion: “Wash therefore, and make yourselves clean, and remove the wickedness from your souls [Isa 1:16], as God orders you to be washed in this bath, and be circumcised in the true circumcision.”¹³⁴ Later, speaking once more of “spiritual () circumcision,” Justin remarks: “And we, who have approached God through him [Christ, the son of God], have received that circumcision not according to the flesh, but spiritually, which Enoch and those like him kept. And we have received it through baptism, although we were sinners, through the mercy of God, and it is allowed to all to receive it in the same manner.”¹³⁵ Whether Justin has developed a specific theology of baptism as Christian circumcision is unclear; more clear, however, is the cluster of associations Justin has made between Christian morality, distinction, and superiority, all effected through circumcision and the resignifying person of Jesus.¹³⁶ By the third century, the Christian sign of circumcision was much more routinely identified with baptism.¹³⁷ Origen can speak of “the second circumcision of baptism” in interpreting the story of Joshua son of Nun,¹³⁸ even as he retains Justin’s more general formulation of the “second circumcision of the vices.”¹³⁹

But just as Roman stereotypes simultaneously affirmed the totality of Rome while dangerously embedding the non-Roman other within, Christian circumcision likewise created and disrupted religious boundaries. In the mid-third century, Cyprian of Carthage was surprised to learn that at least one North African bishop was adapting the “law of ancient circumcision” to regulate infant baptisms in his church. Specifically, this bishop, Fidus, was taking up wholesale the “eight-day” standard of infant circumcision and using it to argue that no infant should be baptized before its eighth day.¹⁴⁰ This literal transference of circumcision law to baptismal regulation troubled Cyprian and his fellow bishops, precisely because it blurred the boundary between “old” and “new” Israel that circumcision normally articulated. They reiterated to the bishop that literal, Jewish, carnal circumcision had been but a “type” (imago) which had “ceased with the supervention of truth.”¹⁴¹ Cyprian and his episcopal colleagues find that they must insist on circumcision as an institution of distinction and boundary: “we think that no one should be kept from obtaining grace because of a law which was previously instituted, nor that spiritual circumcision should be impeded by fleshly circumcision, but that any person at any time should be admitted to the grace of Christ.”¹⁴² The problem is that the Christian signification of circumcision has become lost in a prior, Jewish signifying system. In order to correct this, Cyprian reintroduces the mediating sign of Jesus’ body: “For the eighth day—that is, the first day after the Sabbath—would become the day on which the Lord rose up, and would make us live and would give us the spiritual circumcision: this eighth day, that is, the first day after the Sabbath, the Lord’s Day, went before in an image. But this image has ceased now that the truth has supervened and spiritual circumcision has been given to us.”¹⁴³ Through Jesus, Fidus must come to understand eight as “eight,” and circumcision as “circumcision.”¹⁴⁴ Otherwise, the distinction between Judaism and Christianity is lost.

Fidus’s attempt to control the signifying power of circumcision may strike the bishops of third-century North Africa as overly “Judaizing” (although it seems Fidus was just as concerned with ancient concepts of hygiene), but in one sense it was entirely Christianizing. By seeking to institute and control a system of distinguishing signs—and by privileging circumcision in that system of signs—Fidus was following in the footsteps of Jesus followers from Paul onward. Christians, drawing on the stereotyping gaze of Roman imperialism (as did non-Christian Jews), were teaching themselves to view the world in a new way. The metaphorical, typological, and allegorical implications of circumcision as a sign of Christian distinction would continue to proliferate through late antiquity.¹⁴⁵ The person of Jesus—in direct and indirect ways—played a central role in this symbolic proliferation.

That the person of Christ, in his earthly incarnation, should function as a destabilizer and resignifier of cultural symbols reminds of us the great distance between early Christian concepts of divinity and history and our own. In the twenty-first century, it is commonplace to see Jesus as distinctly embedded in and defined by the world of signs, symbols, and values we imagine he inhabited. Christians and non-Christians alike assert, “Jesus was a Jew.” Such a statement makes sense to modern readers: Jesus is explained by his symbolic world. Circumcision signifies Judaism, Jesus circumcised is Jewish. But early Christians, as we have seen in this chapter, did not engage so straightforwardly with their universe of cultural signs. The Roman economy of identity was charged with power, knowledge, and resistance, and to engage in that circulation of signs was to open up the possibility of resignification. Jesus Christ, incarnate among Jews, was precisely resistant to the signifying power of cultural signs. On his person, they could mean anew.

Circumcision, already an overburdened and contested sign before the spread of Christianity, acted as a kaleidoscope in which gentile Christians saw themselves reflected and refracted, and through which they also gazed upon their despised “other,” the Jews. As we have seen, this simultaneous appropriation of and fear of the sign of circumcision amplifies and twists discourses of identity and stereotype already at work at the fractious contact zone of Jews and Romans. In the nascent literature of Christian difference—apologies, treatises, texts adversus Iudaeos—these contact zones are reconfigured and reimagined. In the texts that will become embedded in the New Testament, we see the first hints of this discourse of identity and difference through circumcision pushed onto the incongruous and unique body of Christ.