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Chapter 2

(De-)Judaizing Christ’s Circumcision The Dialogue of Difference

The I hides in the other and in others, it wants to be only an other for others, to enter completely into the world of others as an other, and to cast from itself the burden of being the only I (I-for-myself) in the world.

—Mikhail Bakhtin

Circumcision and the Dialogic Imagination

Over a quarter century ago, the historian of early Christianity Robert Markus elegantly noted: “The history of Christian self-definition cannot be written in terms of a steady progression from simple to complex. In one sense the whole of the church’s history is a growth in self-awareness; every important encounter with a new society, a new culture, with shifts in men’s assumptions about their world, themselves or God, with upheavals in the values by which they try to live, brings with it new self-discovery. Psychologists have long been telling us that we discover our selves only in encounter: what is self and what is not self are disclosed to us in the same experience.”¹ Markus envisions the early Christian “encounter” as the site of both estrangement and self-discovery, in the same moment recognizing “the other” and (thereby) creating an awareness of “the self.” More recently, in an essay likewise surveying the theoretical developments of the study of early Jewish and Christianity identities, Judith Lieu notes with approval the historian’s focus on the continuous construction of communal “boundaries,” rhetorical and yet effective means of distinguishing “self” from “other”: “While not the only model for understanding the construction of identity, an emphasis on the function of boundaries has proved particularly fruitful in recent analysis of identity.”²

Yet as Lieu goes on to suggest, the repetitious effort to draw boundaries between “Jew” and “Christian” in the ancient world hints at the instability of these same boundaries: “selectivity, fluidity, dynamism, permeability are all intrinsic to the construction of boundaries…. Where rhetoric constructs the boundary as immutable and impenetrable, we may suspect actual invasion and penetration.”³ Like Markus, Lieu focuses on texts in which Christianity and Judaism rhetorically enact their difference with the “other” in order to produce something like a coherent self, an “imagined homogeneity.”⁴ For both scholars, it is the moment of putative boundary making, as the “self” gazes at and engages with the “other,” that fascinates. Our ancient Christian sources abound with such moments of encounter, of back-and-forth between Christian and non-Christian. Indeed, much of our textual resources constitute a cacophonous series of dialogues, a library of discourses fixated on that moment of differentiation: heresiologies, apologies, and texts adversus Iudaeos that place the Christian self in “conversation” with a heretical, pagan, or Jewish other.

Literary theorist Terry Eagleton articulates how identities emerge out of chains of overlapping dialogues: “Like the rough ground of language itself, cultures ‘work’ exactly because they are porous, fuzzy-edged, indeterminate, intrinsically inconsistent, never quite identical with themselves, their boundaries modulating into horizons.”⁵ For Eagleton, as for Lieu, communal identity (“culture”) claims a wholeness and finitude that masks fragmentation and incompleteness: the “boundary” between persons and groups, on closer examination, turns out to be an ever-receding horizon. Eagleton’s comparison with the “rough ground of language”—which also aims for a precision that is lacking in the execution—further echoes the dialectic ground of early Christian culture. As Mikhail Bakhtin long ago asserted, and his cultural studies descendants have elaborated, “language—like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives—is never unitary.”⁶ Our encounters with the world, framed by language, are (in Bakhtin’s now familiar terms) dialogical—“an encounter within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses”⁷—and therefore can never be reduced to a singular, “unitary” selfhood. Dialogue provides the appearance of discrete identities, a formal separation between self and other (speaker and addressee); yet at the same time it confounds those identities, grounding them necessarily in a temporary space of identification (communication).⁸ Dialogue creates difference and yet elides that same difference; as Eagleton suggests, “culture” operates in much the same fashion. “Self” can only ever emerge from the dialogic imagination as the strange and contingent interaction with the “other.”⁹

The notion that identity emerges within a cacophony of strange, overlapping voices—that the singularity of identity is, in actuality, a product of multiple voices or, to use Bakhtin’s felicitous term, “heteroglossia”¹⁰—would surely come as little surprise to the architects of the ancient Roman Empire, as we have already seen. To a world teeming with unfamiliar signs and sounds, the Romans (as they told themselves) brought order, meaning, and stability. The vast frontiers of this empire did not coalesce around the homogeneity of a nouvel Hellenism, but through a carefully managed spectacle of heterogeneity. To be Roman was to exert an ostentatiously precarious control over an omnipresent parade of “others”; to engage with, and even internalize, their strange voices. To consider Roman power, therefore, is to contemplate the triumph of the dialogic imagination of Rome—the back-and-forth between domestic metropolis and alien provinces—on a grand cultural and political stage.¹¹

To reimagine in a similar fashion the formation of early Christian culture as the product of a shifting and unstable dialogic imagination is, in some ways, to continue and expand the work on “others” and boundaries that presently permeates the study of ancient religious identities, particularly our many “dialogue” texts.¹² To read such texts dialogically, in a Bakhtinian sense, is to refuse the absolute separation of self and other that ancient Christians anxiously demand. Dialogues do not merely construct a boundary, isolating and segregating a Christian from a non-Christian. Dialogues internalize the other, creating fissures and contradictions within.¹³ If Christians persist in defining themselves in contradistinction to some other—pagan, heretic, or Jew—they make that other an indispensable part of “Christianness” (in the same way that “Rome” comes to be understandable through its relationship to “the provinces”).¹⁴

In this chapter I turn to examine the circumcision of Christ in a variety of “dialogue” texts in order to interrogate more deeply this Christian dialogic imagination, which both projects outward and internalizes a necessary other.¹⁵ My goal is to highlight the ambivalent and incomplete separation of “self” and “other” that lies beneath the totalizing veneer of early Christian discourses, with particular attention to Judaism. On Jesus’ body, the otherness of Judaism both articulates and disrupts the Christian self. Christ’s body becomes the site of a “de-Judaization” that is always incomplete, that continues to echo with the sound of Jewish origins.

I examine here two types of dialogue texts. I begin with the formal, “external” dialogues: texts that depict the explicit interaction between Christianity and Judaism. First, I look at Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew and Origen’s Against Celsus (with particular focus on the passages in which the pagan writer Celsus introduces a fictitious Jewish interlocutor to debate Jesus and the Christians). We have already met Justin and Origen in Chapter 1, where they contributed to the general transformation of Jewish circumcision into a distinctly (yet ambivalently) Christian sign. In this chapter, we see both Justin and Origen authoritatively appropriating the voice of Jewish otherness in the production of Christian truth and laying the groundwork for establishing Christ’s circumcision as thoroughly Jewish even as it articulates a logic of Christian supersession of Judaism. In stark contrast to these texts of seeming dialogic realism stands the later Altercation of Simon the Jew and Theophilus the Christian, a possibly early fifth-century dialogue that survives in a Latin recension. Here the voice of the other is but a tinny echo of an earlier Jewish intransigence, drowned out by the Christian voice in a manner that makes all too clear the ease with which a Christian could master and swallow up Jewish otherness.

In the final section of this chapter I turn to an internalized mode of Christian dialogic: the emerging literary genre of “question-and-answer” texts (erotapokriseis), in which the Christian subject is formally split—“never quite identical” with itself, in Eagleton’s words—in the fractured production of an ideal Christian identity. Here anonymous Christian ignorance replaces earlier Jewish opposition, creating a more subtle interiorization of Jewish challenge. Both sets of dialogic texts, the external dialogue and internalized erotapokriseis, inscribe the unrealized desire to establish that “horizon” where Judaism ends and Christianity begins. That horizon of religious difference remains intractably hazy: in the dialogic imagination of Christ’s circumcision, Christians repeatedly internalized the stark otherness of Judaism. Their differentiating rhetorics disclose a sense of permeability and indeterminacy that re-Judaizes even as it de-Judaizes.

Talking Back: Christian Dialogues

When analyzing the numerous dialogues of early Christian literature, scholars are often caught up in trying to tease out the social reality of the dialogue setting.¹⁶ Some historians prefer to read these texts addressed to “outsiders”—such as the second- and third-century apologies, or the various adversus Iudaeos texts framed as responses to intractable Jews—as evidence of real, antagonistic interaction.¹⁷ The apologists are responding to real pagan criticisms (and perhaps even expect that the imperial authorities to whom they address their “defenses” will be sympathetically responsive); the treatises adversus Iudaeos are likewise reacting to the criticisms of real Jews encountered in the public square, in formal or spontaneous debate. Others prefer to interpret these texts as internal documents, produced to delineate the boundaries of Christianity for insiders using the fiction of external animosity.¹⁸ The intended audience is not a Roman governor or recalcitrant synagogue, but the occasionally wavering convert, or the dedicated neophyte eager to bolster his or her newly adopted religious persona. A common assumption on all sides of such debates is that these Christian texts of dialogue give us insight into an evolving and hardening array of Christian boundaries: whether the “pagan” or “Jew” addressed in the Christian text is “real” or not, he or she is believed to create for the Christian a clear sense of the otherness that must lie beyond the Christian pale.

I propose instead to hear these texts as part of the religious and cultural polyphony that produced Christianity, the anxious heteroglossia of Christian culture: the multiple and contradictory discourses that are jarringly juxtaposed in the service of crafting a social identity. Such a reading does not deny that Christians might have intended their texts for pagan or Jewish audiences, with missionary or polemical goals; nor does it rule out the possibility that these texts served internal purposes of reassurance and self-definition (or even, as scholars often end up claiming, that such texts could serve multiple purposes).¹⁹ My goal is to shift our understanding of these “self-differentiating” texts altogether, away from assumptions about boundaries and the establishment of difference.

The textualization of religious difference may bring not logical resolution but dialogical irresolution: the problems of difference (and similarity) are not resolved, but rather enacted, creating the sense of a boundary (between speaker and interlocutor) without finite closure. The heteroglossic nature of Christian religious culture is thus produced and reproduced: projected ostensibly “outward” into the person of a Jewish “other,” but safely constrained within the lines of a Christian text. The circumcision of Christ, likewise the strange container of difference on the paradigmatic body of the savior, emerges as the particularly apt signal of such a project.

Justin Martyr and Trypho the Jew

One of the earliest appearances of Christ’s circumcision in early Christian literature is in the only surviving second-century “Jewish-Christian dialogue” text, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew.²⁰ Justin is notable among the earliest Christian writers for demonstrating his mastery of “orthodox” Christianity through literary refutations of deviant heresy, recalcitrant Judaism, and impious paganism.²¹ It is tempting to read Justin as an orthodox triumphalist, whose multivocality gave his readers of a sense of security and the ability to “answer back” authoritatively to any and all outside criticism. Yet Justin’s texts, particularly the very long Dialogue,²² also disrupt that sense of security by preserving, even hypostatizing, such criticism. The Dialogue is a notoriously difficult text to parse—both in historical and literary terms—as a straightforward text of Jewish-Christian differentiation. Despite Justin’s frequently rancorous tone throughout the long Dialogue,²³ the very dialogic nature of the text hints at ongoing communication and rapprochement: the shared desire to determine what divides Jew from Christian cannot help but gesture at what holds them together. I am not suggesting that, beneath a veneer of discourtesy and acrimony, Justin is trying to get in touch with his “inner Jew”; to the contrary, I think the text lays out for us the ways in which gentile Christians of the second century felt haunted by that “inner Jew,” and sought to confront, domesticate, and humble him. Yet at the same time, this early text illustrates the ways in which such efforts at confrontation and domestication lack clear resolution.²⁴

The discussion of Christ’s circumcision in the Dialogue exemplifies the frustrated attempts of Christianity to confront its originary Jewishness. The appearance of this stereotypical mark of Jewish identity and symbol of “the Law” on Jesus’ body should be especially noteworthy in a text whose “core … is the vindication of what today we would call supersession” (to quote Tessa Rajak),²⁵ focused particularly on the failure of that Jewish Law. For much of the Dialogue, Justin and Trypho debate Jesus’ status as the true messiah, with particular focus on his fulfillment of prophecy.²⁶ In earlier chapters, Justin manages to convince Trypho that many scriptural elements of the messiah could be seen in the life of Jesus. Trypho, however, balks at the virgin birth. He dismisses Justin’s Greek version of Isaiah 7:14, and instead asks whether it wouldn’t make more sense to believe that Jesus was appointed to the messiahship because of his perfect conformity to the Law of Moses. Could this not be the basis on which Jew and Christian come to agree on Jesus as the Christ?

At this moment of potential dialogic convergence, Justin pulls away dramatically. The bulk of the Law, he insists, was not given to the Jews as a source of redemption, but rather as a punishment and mark of their continual disobedience.²⁷ If the Law is not a sign of salvation, it cannot be a mark of the Savior. Trypho tries again. He points out that even Justin’s own description of Jesus suggests otherwise, that Jesus did bear the mark of the Law and could therefore satisfy Jewish expectations: “But you have confessed to us ( ) both that he was circumcised and that he kept all of the legal precepts () ordained through Moses!”²⁸ (It is worth noting that there is, in fact, no point in the Dialogue prior to this assertion where Justin makes such a “confession” to Trypho.) Trypho insists that Jesus’ exemplary and voluntary Jewishness can provide a key to the messianic rapprochement of Jew and Christian.

Justin, however, continues to demur. Justin does not deny that his “confession” accurately portrays what Justin believes about Jesus’ life (i.e., he was circumcised); but neither does he accede to Trypho’s reading of Christ’s circumcision. Instead, Justin chooses to recontextualize Jesus’ circumcision and, along with it, Jesus’ seeming submission to Jewish Law. According to Justin, circumcision in this one, special case is no longer a sign of Jewish obeisance, but rather a unique symbol of divine redemption: “And I replied: ‘I have confessed it, and I do confess. But I confessed that he underwent all of these things not as if he were made righteous () through them, but bringing to fulfillment () the dispensation that his father—creator of all things, Lord, and God—wished. For likewise I confess that he underwent fatal crucifixion and that he became a human being and that he suffered as many things as those members of your people arranged for him!’”²⁹ Christ’s circumcision did not demonstrate Jesus’ admirable Jewishness: on the contrary, it was of a piece with the redemptive suffering “arranged” by Trypho’s Jewish confrères, a mark not of fraternization but of alienation. Despite appearances, Christ’s submission to the Law connotes the eradication of legal righteousness, and the establishment of the boundary between Jew and Christian. Circumcision was just one more indignity that Christ suffered in order to redeem humanity, to end the “old dispensation” of the Lord and bring the righteous to a “new dispensation” (a non-Jewish dispensation) ordained by God.³⁰

This biographical redirection mirrors Justin’s cosmic reinterpretation of the Law, and the division between Christianity and Judaism. In a move that is theologically unsurprising, but still notable in a “dialogue,” Justin claims to understand the Jewish Law more accurately than his Jewish interlocutor. The fact that the Christian savior took the Law upon himself (through such acts as circumcision) appears, in part, to authorize this rhetorical move: now Christians who understand the full scope of salvation through their redeemer can likewise understand in fullness the older dispensation of the Law which that savior took on himself. Yet upon closer examination, Justin’s argument remains tantalizingly vague.³¹ On the one hand, the very Jewishness of Christ’s circumcision provides Justin his warrant for a superior understanding of the Law: he can correct Trypho’s misapprehension of Jesus’ acts and therefore the true relationship of Law and messiah. On the other hand, the uniqueness of Jesus’ circumcision also allows Justin to argue for the dissolution of that Law. Jesus’ circumcision is Jewish (in that it opens up the Jewish Law to the clear perception of Christians), yet non- (or even anti-) Jewish (in that it reveals that Jews do not understand the true meaning of their own Law).

The mechanics of this doubled understanding of Christ, circumcision, and Law are not fleshed out. Justin merely asserts that—somehow—Jesus’ participation in the rite of circumcision provides the rationale for its discontinuation. The fact that Justin follows up his point on the Mosaic Law with a typical litany of patriarchs “righteous before the Law” only muddies his point further.³² For Christ was precisely not “righteous before the Law,” but rather (Justin argues) he was righteous despite, and within, the Law. Only the Jews, Justin remarks (and Trypho curiously concedes) actually needed the harsh yoke of the Mosaic Law, “because of the hardness of their hearts and their tendency to idolatry.”³³ Neither the righteous patriarchs before the Law nor their spiritual descendants (the Christians) had need of such a burden. Where, then, does that leave Christ? Would he not have demonstrated the impermanence of the Law much better by not submitting to its yoke?

As we shall see, later interpreters of the divine circumcision handled the logic of Christ’s circumcision with more finesse and creativity. Yet, I suggest, the incompleteness of Justin’s own argument is exactly the point in the Dialogue: in it, we hear the articulation of anxiety about Justin’s Christian identity, an anxiety that is neither dismissed nor glossed over. An earlier moment in the Dialogue clarifies this resistance to an absolute resolution of the difference between Jew and Christian. When Justin delivers his dictum on the negative, pedagogical nature of the Jewish Law (imposed because of the “hardness” of the Jews’ hearts),³⁴ Trypho challenges him. Trypho queries Justin: “But if someone, who knows that this is so [i.e., the Law does not contribute to righteousness], after he knows that this one is the Christ, and clearly he has believed in him and he wishes to obey him and also to observe these [laws], will he be saved?”³⁵ Justin makes his own curious concession: “I said: ‘As it seems to me, Trypho, I say that such a one will be saved, as long as he doesn’t struggle in any way to convince others (I mean those from among the Gentiles who have been circumcised from error through Christ) to keep these things with him, saying that they won’t be saved unless they keep them. Just as you yourself did at the beginning of these speeches, proclaiming that I wouldn’t be saved until I kept them!’”³⁶ Justin draws the barest line between Christians who keep the Law, but don’t bother their gentile coreligionists, and Jews like Trypho, who will not realize the “truth” about their own Law and will insist on imposing it on others.

But Trypho astutely notices how Justin hedges here (“as it seems to me,” ); when pressed, Justin admits that not all Christians remain in communion with Christians who follow the Law. As for himself, however, as long as the Law-abiding Christians do not “compel” others to follow their example, “so I proclaim it is necessary to admit as our own and keep fellowship with all of them, as kindred spirits () and brothers.”³⁷ Already by the early second century, the fraught question of “Jewish Christians” articulated a keen anxiety among the self-proclaimed, gentile “orthodox”:³⁸ what constitutes the lines of division (the horizon) between Judaism and Christianity, and when and how can that boundary be breached? (I return to this question, in its robust fourth-century flower, in Chapter 4.) Justin’s own answer is contingent and uncertain, foreshadowing his equally uncertain discussion of the Law inscribed on Christ’s own person in the circumcision.

As this earlier discussion in the Dialogue suggests, the brief moment of unease surrounding Christ’s circumcision and Justin’s halfhearted attempts to suggest that this sign was, at once, a disapprobation of Jewish Law and a key to special Christian insight into that Law bespeak a profound blurring of distinction and problematization of difference. By the end of the Dialogue, difference seems to win the day over reconciliation: both Trypho and his attempts to secure a scriptural and theological middle ground with Justin are rejected. Yet this is far from a triumphalist Christian text; Trypho also remains unconvinced of Justin’s arguments, and there is no conversion of the Jewish interlocutor to constitute the Dialogue’s “happy ending.”³⁹ This ambiguous conclusion suggests, again, that we should direct our attention away from any unequivocally triumphant message of Christianity facing and defeating its Jewish “other” (whether real or imaginary), and focus instead on the ambivalent, dialogic process in which this confrontation is framed. The point seems to be not so much erasure or capitulation of “the other,” but rather the preservation of that still, disturbing voice within Christianity. Justin leaves various questions of Christian truth relatively unresolved in this text; even the central Christian argument against Judaism—true “Law” versus Torah, true “Israel” versus the Jews—is ultimately disrupted by the dialogic back-and-forth, the heteroglossic lack of clear differentiation.

In a text whose fundamental purpose would seem to be the articulation of the difference between Judaism and Christianity, absolute difference from the Jew is deferred. The brief discussion of Christ’s circumcision neatly encapsulates both the desire for certainty and the deferral of that certainty. Since Christ’s circumcision cannot, for Justin, affirm the sort of valorization of Jewish Law desired by Trypho, it must (somehow, even paradoxically) affirm the contingency and impermanence of that Law. Yet this assertion of the Jewish Law’s impermanence is only possible because the Jewishness of Christ’s circumcision establishes a dialogic space in which Trypho and Justin can communicate, in which Justin can assert that his knowledge of Jewish Law is superior to that of the Jews. Christ’s circumcision, a small feature in this very long text, becomes a resonant echo of Trypho himself: the reminder, and remainder, of the Jewish voice required to establish Christian truth that can therefore never be fully silenced.⁴⁰

Origen and Celsus

An even more complex interweaving of the “other” voices of Christian difference appears in the next century in Origen’s Against Celsus, written at the behest of Origen’s patron Ambrose.⁴¹ Although ostensibly an “apology” addressed to a (dead) pagan critic, this text is also an illuminating counterpart and double to Justin’s “anti-Jewish” dialogue with Trypho. First, scholars have suggested that the interlocutor of Origen’s apologetic text, Celsus, a younger contemporary of Justin, may have composed his True Doctrine as an answer to Justin’s several “philosophical” Christian texts.⁴² We are therefore picking up the threads of a century-long dialogue between parties seeking to “out-know” and thus outargue their opponents, an empire-wide antiphony of religious differences.⁴³ Second, Origen’s response to Celsus also takes the form of a literary dialogue after the fact: Origen composes his defense of Christianity against its long-dead pagan despiser as an interlinear response, preserving large chunks of Celsus’s own words and responding to them piece by piece. Because of this purposefully dialogic format, Origen’s apology Against Celsus sounds like a chorus of juxtaposed, competing religious voices.

Scholars usually read this text with an eye to “Christian-pagan” relations in late antiquity. But the insistent interplay of pagan, Christian, and Jewish voices also creates a deliberately tangled interpenetration of Christian self and Jewish other. The Jewish voice plays a significant role in this “anti-pagan” apology. In addition to the posthumous voice of Celsus and the determined responses of Origen, we also hear the careful interpellation of a dissonant Jewish voice claimed by both Celsus and Origen. Celsus’s Jewish voice comes in his introduction of a prosopopoeial first-century Jew as a mouthpiece for criticisms of Jesus and of Jewish converts to Christianity.⁴⁴ Origen’s responding Jewish voice comes through his display here (as throughout his oeuvre) of “firsthand” knowledge of Jews and Judaism acquired in the course of Origen’s scriptural and exegetical studies.⁴⁵ We could read this Jewish interpellation as Origen’s reappropriation of the Jewish origins of Christianity, made necessary by the caustic and deprecating Celsus, as Origen claims early on: “Celsus … thinks it will be easier to falsify Christianity, if, by making accusations against its source, which lies in Jewish doctrines, he would establish that the latter is false.”⁴⁶ But when we turn to the appearance of Christ’s circumcision in this text, we gain a clearer sense of the way Judaism blurs Origen’s Christian apology.

Origen turns to Jesus’ circumcision during a long defense of Jewish customs and “wisdom.”⁴⁷ Part of Celsus’s argument against gentile Christianity relied on the appropriateness of ancestral customs. According to Origen, Celsus conceded that, for the Jews at least, there might be some value in preserving Jewish custom, but there was no reason for non-Jews to adopt it: “Now if, accordingly, the Jews should cloak themselves in their own law, this is not to their discredit, but rather to those who abandon their own [ways] and make themselves over into Jews.”⁴⁸ Celsus insisted that there was nothing particularly special about Judaism, and it was therefore unsuitable and even culturally treasonous for good Hellenes to abandon their traditional practices to follow some dead Jewish criminal.

Origen, in order to prove the superiority of Christianity, chooses first to prove the superiority of Judaism, “which has a certain greater wisdom not only than that of hoi polloi, but also of those who bear the semblance of philosophers.”⁴⁹ Origen argues that the intellectual and historical priority of Judaism over Hellenism makes it precisely the sort of universally admirable system of belief that should be adopted by all, even gentile Greeks.⁵⁰ Celsus (at least in Origen’s citation) had listed several aspects of Judaism that acted as the Jews’ false basis for superiority: their concept of heaven; their worship of a single, “highest god”; circumcision; and abstention from swine. Older, and better, nations could likewise boast of these practices and, Celsus concluded, were more impressive in their religious and cultural accomplishments.⁵¹ After a brief defense of the Jewish concepts of heaven and monotheism,⁵² Origen turns to circumcision.

Origen’s opening discussion of circumcision already betrays a certain ambivalence with respect to the comparative value of Judaism and Christianity. Origen first asserts, against Celsus, that Jewish circumcision is distinct from (and, consequently, superior to) the rite as practiced by various Near Eastern pagans: “the reason for the circumcision of the Jews is not the same as the reason for the circumcision of the Egyptians or Colchians; therefore it should not be considered the same circumcision.”⁵³ The praise of the singularity of Jewish circumcision is, however, undermined in the very next chapter, when Origen discusses the origins and function of circumcision in more detail: “So even if the Jews boast of circumcision ( ), they will distinguish it not only from the circumcision of the Colchians and Egyptians, but even from that of the Ishmaelite Arabs, even though Ishmael was born of their own forefather Abraham, and was circumcised along with him.”⁵⁴ A historical and scriptural gloss typical of the hyperlearned Origen, this evocation of the Ishmaelite double of Jewish circumcision also subtly chastises the “boasting” Jews, reinscribing Jewish inferiority alongside the scriptural and exegetical prowess of the Christian.⁵⁵

This double-sided interpretation of Jewish circumcision is the context in which Origen introduces the circumcision of Jesus, in a manner that likewise preserves the Jews’ superiority while introducing a note of disrepute. In describing the unique circumstances of Jewish circumcision, Origen speculates that it was “on account of some angel hostile () to the Jewish people that this [rite] is even performed, who was able to injure those of them who were not circumcised, but was weakened against the circumcised.”⁵⁶ He arrives at this theory through an ingenious interpretation of the enigmatic passage in Exodus 4, where Zipporah’s emergency roadside circumcision of her son somehow fends off Yahweh’s murderous attack on Moses.⁵⁷ Like most late ancient readers of this strange incident who discounted the possibility of a direct theophany of a transcendent God into his creation, Origen understood the agent of death as an “angel” of the Lord, and he posits:

Now I think this angel had power against those who were not circumcised from the people and generally against all those who worshipped the Creator alone (), and he was powerful as long as Jesus had not taken on a body. But when he did take it on, and his body was circumcised, all [the angel’s] power against those who were [not] circumcised in this piety () was toppled: by his ineffable divinity Jesus toppled him [i.e., the angel]. Therefore it is forbidden to his disciples to be circumcised and it is said to them: “For if you are circumcised, Christ is of no benefit to you.” (Gal 5:2)⁵⁸

The rite of circumcision, according to Origen, affirms the superiority of the Jews: after all, the “hostile angel” has singled out the Jews because of their proper worship of the “Creator alone,” in affirmation of the uniquely correct nature of their monotheistic worship. Presumably, such angelic avengers already held sufficient sway over the idolatrous pagans.⁵⁹ Yet the mark of the Jewish covenant is also revealed to be, at root, little more than a prophylactic talisman nullified by Jesus’ incarnation. Christ’s circumcision, therefore, reveals the hidden truth of Jewish covenant practice: even as it is superior to the polytheistic idolatry of the gentiles, it is but a stopgap measure long since eradicated by the new covenant of salvation.

This introduction of Jesus’ circumcision into Origen’s discussion of Jewish superiority over hellenistic “wisdom” in his defense of Christianity weaves together several disparate threads of early Christian apology. On the one hand, Judaism is plotted as superior to paganism because it constitutes the true revelation of divine philosophy, of which Plato’s later contribution is but a pale imitation.⁶⁰ On the other hand, Judaism is portrayed as defunct, no longer the bearer of this divinely inspired wisdom: the narrative of Christian supersession (over Jews and pagans) is inscribed on Christ’s own body.⁶¹ By taking circumcision upon himself, Christ both affirms the significance of the Jewish ritual and yet renders it moot and past tense. This overlay of supersession directly onto Christ’s person is so complete that Origen can introduce here (without attribution) Paul’s later voice, from the Letter to the Galatians, the point of departure for most Christian argumentation against circumcision. The obsolescence of the Law is portrayed as synchronous with Christ’s observance of that Law.

Yet this polyphonous synchronicity renders supersession ultimately ambivalent, as well. As in Justin’s Dialogue, transcendence of the Law is accomplished at the moment of Christ’s submission to the Law. In the treatise Against Celsus, we are at least given a glimpse into the mechanics of such a potentially counterintuitive argument: a cosmic drama and angelic avenger are conjured “behind the scenes” in order to explain first the institution and then the eradication of this Jewish ritual. Yet the Jewishness of the ritual on Christ’s body, at the beginning of the incarnation, remains incontestable, indeed, absolutely requisite for the logic of Origen’s argument to make sense.⁶² Christianity must, therefore, be constantly reminded of the remainder of Jewishness at its origins even as it persists in pushing an increasingly supersessionist line. The artful heteroglossia of Origen’s apology affirms this doubled position of recuperation and repudiation of Christianity’s Jewish origins. The Jewish voice functions at once as critic and defender of the truth of Christianity: Celsus’s prosopopoeial Jew provides Origen with as many occasions for defending Christian novelty against Jewish critique as it does for defending Jewish custom against pagan disrespect.⁶³ The invocation of Christ’s own circumcision at this nexus of identification and differentiation embodies the multivalence at work in the production of insistently porous Christian boundaries.

Simon and Theophilus

The Altercatio Simonis Iudaei et Theophili Christiani (the manuscript title of which already betrays something of a change in tone from Justin’s “dialogue” and Origen’s “reply”) reads much differently from older dialogues (although some of the content may be drawn from earlier texts).⁶⁴ The Altercation in the form we possess it probably dates from the late fourth or early fifth century,⁶⁵ and is ascribed by the late Latin bibliographer Gennadius to an otherwise unidentified Evagrius.⁶⁶ The Jewish interlocutor, Simon, is flat and listless, providing little more than prompting for the much more fulsome and lively (and aggressive) replies of the Christian, Theophilus. “Proba mihi,” Simon repeats throughout the Altercation, “Prove it to me,” and Theophilus proceeds to prove most convincing.⁶⁷ Simon’s compliant requests for more “proof” and “evidence” might read like the plaintive inquiries of a thick-headed catechumen, were it not for Simon’s occasional, and faltering, resistance and Theophilus’s sneering responses: “You speak like a Jew.”⁶⁸ It comes as little surprise, then, that at the end of the Altercation, all of his questions answered, Simon the Jew converts: “Bearer of salvation, Theophilus, good doctor of the sick, I can say nothing more: command me to be catechized and consecrated by the sign of faith in Jesus Christ. Indeed I think that, through the imposition of hands, I shall receive cleansing from my transgressions.”⁶⁹ That Simon’s conversion should be the “happy ending” of this later dialogue demonstrates already its distance from the dialogic imagination of Justin or Origen.

In a somewhat different register, then, this late Latin dialogue appropriates and integrates the Jewish voice into Christian truth. This Christian mastery of the Jewish voice—both repudiating and revaluing the Jewish origins of Christianity—is once more signaled by the intervention of Christ’s circumcision. The circumcision of Jesus is introduced in this instance by Theophilus the Christian, in the midst of his “proof” that Christ is the prophesied subject of Isaiah 7–8. Simon had suggested, through an intertextual reading of Isaiah 37:22 (“The virgin daughter of Zion has despised you and mocked you”) that the “virgin” of Isaiah 7:14 allegorically represented Zion. Theophilus counters that Simon’s allegory is nonsensical. Isaiah’s earlier prophecy had spoken of a literal child, “who ate butter and honey” (Isa 7:15), was born of “David’s lineage” (Isa 7:13), and who in his infancy received the “strength of Damascus and the spoils of Samaria” (Isa 8:4).

Theophilus proceeds to lay out the correct interpretation of the Isaiah passage, which subordinates any allegory to the literal interpretation: “First, it is explained that Christ ate butter and honey, in accordance with the birth of all infants. We believe this and so we maintain our faith; and certainly he was circumcised on the eighth day.”⁷⁰ The author of the Altercation introduces here an argument that was used earlier against docetists and Marcionites: a literal reading of Isaiah 7 proves Christ’s fleshly infancy and consequently the reality of his human form.⁷¹ Like all children (according to this reading), Christ ate the food of infants: butter and honey. Furthermore, in proof of his real childhood, he was really circumcised. The logic seems to be that, since Christ was demonstrably a child (as his infant circumcision proves), he would certainly have eaten the foods of a child (butter and honey) and, therefore, so far fits the literal description of the child in Isaiah’s prophecy. The ritual of circumcision in this interpretation has little or no resonance with Judaism:⁷² its purpose is to reinforce Christ’s literal fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy. Only when the literal significance of the passage has been understood should allegory be introduced: the “butter and honey” of Christ’s infancy are additionally understood to be the “anointing of the spirit” and the “sweetness of his teaching, which we follow and so we attain faith.” The “spoils of Samaria” are likewise first read literally—as the gifts of the Magi—before being allegorized as the pagan abandonment of idolatry in the face of Christ’s truth.

This christological interpretation of Isaiah 7–8 might not seem particularly noteworthy but for the strange insertion of Christ’s circumcision. Of all the signs of Christ’s infancy that might be drawn from the gospels—swaddling, being carried, and so on—why single out such a Jewish proof in the service of refuting Jewish biblical exegesis? Partly (as we shall see) the author is laying some textual groundwork for the more robust reinterpretation of circumcision to come later in the dialogue. But I suggest he is also inverting commonly held values of Christian Old Testament interpretation. In other exegetical duels over this Isaiah passage, we tend to see the Jewish side coded as literal (the “Virgin Birth” is no more than the prediction of the birth of King Hezekiah to his “maiden” mother) while the Christian side is figural: Justin’s own interpretation of Isaiah 7 in the Dialogue with Trypho stands as an early and classic example.⁷³ Here, however, the Jewish position is represented as too freewheeling and allegorical—the “virgin” as Zion—while the Christian insists that the literally carnal interpretation must take priority. In essence, Theophilus reverses the exegetical stream: claiming both the “carnal,” or Jewish, interpretation alongside the allegorical, spiritual reading. Jesus’ circumcision, then, represents this Christian absorption of Jewish carnality. Just as Christ took on circumcision, but seemingly only as proof of his universal humanity, so too Theophilus appropriates the fleshly, Jewish mode of reading as part and parcel of universal Christian truth.

Simon is, predictably, convinced by Theophilus’s Christianizing interpretation.⁷⁴ The discussion moves on to other aspects of Jesus’ messiahship, and soon to the new covenant ushered in by Christ’s advent. Simon returns to the question of circumcision: “We indeed read many things, but we do not understand them in that way. So I want to understand, one by one, each of the things I ask you to be proven by the evidence of truth. Now, because God instructed that circumcision be performed, which he first entrusted to the patriarch Abraham, and which you professed earlier that Christ underwent (quam circumcisionem Christum habuisse superius professus es), how then are you going to persuade me to believe, you who forbid circumcision?”⁷⁵ Simon picks up Theophilus’s earlier thread of the circumcision of Christ in such a way as to allow Theophilus to introduce the familiar Pauline trope of Abraham’s righteousness “before he was circumcised” (priusquam circumcideretur; see Rom 4:10). For Theophilus, Abraham’s dual status—uncircumcised believer and circumcised believer—presages the dual nature of the universal church, “showing that two peoples would come into the faith of Christ: one would come having been circumcised and one would come still having the foreskin.” Following Simon’s lead, Theophilus moves directly from Abraham’s circumcision to Christ’s: “For if Christ had not been circumcised, how would you believe me today or the prophets, who say that Christ came from the seed of David? Circumcision is in fact a sign of race, not of salvation (circumcisio enim signum est generis, non salutis).”⁷⁶ Theophilus’s response is, as before, a mixture of literal and figurative interpretation, of de-Judaizing and re-Judaizing exegesis. For, on the one hand, the general thrust of Theophilus’s interpretation is spiritualizing and universalizing: the “old covenant,” and its sign of circumcision, point inevitably to the extension of salvation to all peoples, Jewish and gentile. It is, as Justin had insisted to Trypho, not a sign of salvation but one of “race” (genus). Theophilus adds to Justin’s earlier reading of Christ’s circumcision the notion of messianic condescension: Christ had no need of circumcision, but took it upon himself so that Jews would willingly receive his message of salvation. He condescended to the Jews by taking on their “racial” sign; although, tellingly, Theophilus does not explicitly state whether this condescension actually makes Christ Jewish, or functions merely as a strategic disguise (I return to this question in my concluding chapter). Indeed, we are led to believe that Christ is an antitype of Abraham, who is both “uncircumcised” and “circumcised,” the father of Jews and gentiles alike.

For Theophilus, circumcision—even (and especially) the circumcision of Christ—is the Jewish sign of the former covenant that, ultimately and paradoxically, leads Jews away from that former covenant. The “Law” both makes and unmakes the Jew. As if to drive home the doubled nature of circumcision, as the mark of Jewish “race” and the sign of that race’s absorption into a universal salvation, the Altercation then introduces the example of the Lawgiver himself: Moses. Simon asks about the salvific circumcision of Exodus 4:25, prompted perhaps by Theophilus’s claim that circumcision does not bring “salvation” (salus).⁷⁷ Although no avenging angels appear in the Altercation, we should recall Origen’s similar association of Exodus 4:25 with the circumcision of Christ. Theophilus’s interpretation is even more straightforwardly christological: “All things, whatever [Moses] did, he was anticipating them in Christ’s image. Surely his wife Zipporah, who circumcised the boy, is understood as the synagogue. Moreover, what she says, ‘Let the blood of the boy’s circumcision cease,’ means that at the time of Christ’s advent the circumcision of boys stopped. And so God says the following to Moses: ‘Build for me an altar of uncut stones (lapidis non circumcisis), as also you will not bring an iron tool on them’ [Deut 27:5], because certainly in his coming Christ was to build a church of uncircumcised people (de populo incircumciso).”⁷⁸ In the case of Abraham, the sign of circumcision had signaled the coming church comprising both Jews and gentiles. Christ’s circumcision is “racially” more ambivalent (does assuming the Jewish “sign of race” make Christ himself a Jew, or is he just passing?), but also is effected in order to bring Jews out of their former covenant into his saving church. Finally, in this strange story from the life of Moses—who does everything as an “image of Christ”—the advent of Christ (and, we should understand, his own circumcision) answers the prayers of “the synagogue” that infant male circumcision “should cease” and to construct a church built of “uncut” (non circumcisi) gentiles. All circumcising roads, including Jesus’ own, lead Jews out of their own circumcising covenant. In the subsequent sections of the Altercation, Theophilus explains to Simon the true circumcision “of the heart,” and continues leading him down the path to conversion and baptism.

On first blush, the Altercation presents a typical, de-Judaizing Christian interpretation of circumcision: the faithfulness of Abraham before circumcision, the temporary nature of the Law of Moses, the transformation of incomplete and prefigurative “signs” into full salvation at the coming of Christ. But the dialogic format of the Altercation, the back-and-forth between suggestible Jew and authoritarian Christian, injects a subtle nuance of re-Judaizing into the discussion, only heightened by the prominence of Christ’s own circumcision. For while the truth of circumcision remains ineluctably Christian, it is also persistently Jewish: this “sign” creates the genus Iudaïcum, the “Jewish race,” even as it instructs them on how to give up their “genus” for Christian salvation. Circumcision, the ambivalent circumcision of Christ in particular, functions as a shorthand not for the eradication of Judaism in favor of Christianity, but for the transformation of Judaism into Christianity. Furthermore, it is a transformation that remains conspicuously visible, on the surface, apparent to the triumphant, spiritual church of the gentiles. Even at the climax of the Altercation, when Simon pleads to progress (like a catechumen) from instruction to the baptismal font, Theophilus’s response invokes not the new covenant, but the old: “A blessing indeed! So Isaac blessed Jacob, and through his hand received blessing, so that the greater might proceed from the lesser, so also Ephraim and Manasseh were exchanged by the imposition of hands.”⁷⁹ Again, Christian triumph echoes in the voice of the “old covenant” (the blessings of the patriarchs, here read as an allegory for the choosing of the “younger son” over the elder). The appropriation of the Jewish voice, almost comically subservient in the Altercation, remains audible and essential to the spiritual victory of Christianity.

Justin’s Dialogue and Origen’s apology Against Celsus ventriloquize the voice of Jewish others, and are two of our earliest Christian writings to hint at the complex, and unresolved, boundaries with Jews and Judaism through Christ’s circumcision. Scholars of Christian difference in antiquity have often been tempted to seize upon this presentation of “the other’s voice” in such texts to reconstruct some historical account of Jewish and pagan opposition to Christianity (the Quest for the Historical Trypho or Celsus, perhaps). Yet the circumcision of Christ, whose unavoidable difference destabilizes Jewish-Christian boundaries, suggests that something more intricate is taking place within early Christian dialogues with Jewish others. The entirely schematic format of the Altercation of Simon and Theophilus, in which a two-dimensional Jewish character is led like a marionette to the baptismal font, makes this point even more clearly: in tracing the interaction of Jewish and Christian voices in late antiquity, we may do better to attend to the dialogic genre rather than to the historicity of characters and events.

It is important to recognize that the format of these texts conveys as much ideological meaning as the content. By producing dialogues, these three authors conveyed the Christian desire to speak, at times, in the voice of the other: to sound like “the Jew” or “the pagan” (or, in Origen’s case, both). We need not read the attempt to erect a firm boundary against Judaism as merely reactive (“they’re just responding to criticism from Jews”), nor explain the tenuous and often contradictory nature of those boundaries as a result of the primitive level of religious development (“they’re still figuring out what they believe”).⁸⁰ These externalized dialogues of difference that draw on the irresoluble multivalence of the divine circumcision, in my reading, are deliberately and productively heteroglossic in their articulation of Christian identity vis-à-vis Judaism.

Especially the Altercation, from a later period than Justin’s or Origen’s texts, on the other side of the Constantinian divide, illuminates the hybrid character of the early Christian dialogic imagination. That is, beyond the debates about the historicity of Trypho, Celsus, or even Celsus’s prosopopoeial Jew,⁸¹ the Altercation underscores the degree to which Christians conjured a Jewish voice to serve their own needs. Simon, the weakest member of the chorus of Jewish voices surveyed here, makes all too clear the Christian desire to exert control over “the Jew” on the written page. Even if we can convince ourselves that we hear traces of a “real Jew” somewhere in Simon’s obsequious interlocution,⁸² we must confront him as a creature of Christian literary projection. In fact, Simon’s character rang so false for Adolf von Harnack that he served as a centerpiece for the German church historian’s argument about the fictitiousness of all such “Jewish-Christian dialogues.”⁸³ For Harnack, unable to believe that Simon was anything more than a cipher, the actual target of such texts, from Justin’s Dialogue onward, were heretics and pagans, not the moribund Jews who had slinked off after their rejection of Christ and their failed rebellions.⁸⁴

But if Simon’s flatness makes us recognize the artifice involved in the Christian production of these ancient Jewish voices, the robustness of Justin’s Trypho and even Origen’s own ambivalence in the face of a rhetorical Jewish opponent lead us to acknowledge the flip side: that, for all of this literary invention and artifice, Christians were drawn to elaborate the image of the Jew as their troubling interlocutor. The dialogic imagination of early Christians did not erase and silence those Jewish voices, but preserved them. The fact that Simon turned so easily to the baptismal font may lead us to question the “historical Simon,” or even his authentic Jewish credentials; it should not, however, lead us to ignore his necessary Jewishness, the framing of Christian mastery as an encounter with a Jew, the transformation of a Jew, and a desire to confront and domesticate Jewishness within Christianity.

The circumcision of Christ encapsulates this hybridizing impulse: the Jewish remainder that completes Christian identity (and yet, at heart, potentially disrupts it—for what is to stop suggestible Simon from turning into troublesome Trypho?). Just as Christ’s circumcision for these authors leaves the indelible trace of the Jew on the savior’s body, the trace that somehow speaks against the totality of Judaism, so too the careful retention of a Jewish voice in the service of a refutation of Judaism instructs us on the ways in which Christians blurred their own literatures of difference. This blurring is neither a sign of confusion or hesitation on the part of the dialogue writers nor a sign of religious immaturity, but—like the divine circumcision itself—a discourse of dialogic multivocality that makes Christian culture “work.”

Posing the Question: “If the Savior Was Circumcised …”

As I suggested above, the Jewish interlocutor in the Altercation of Simon and Theophilus often sounds more like an unformed catechumen, eager to be brought into the Christian mysteries, than a resistant and recalcitrant religious outsider. In the dialogic space of the Altercation, this confusion of self and other strikes me as intentional: a way of more fully assimilating that otherness into the orbit of Christian control, of taming and yet retaining the heteroglossia of religious identities. The suggestive overlap of Jewish resistance and neophyte ignorance leads me to introduce a second set of texts into my exploration of the dialogic imagination of Christ’s circumcision. These are texts from the fourth through seventh centuries that more fully internalize that “other voice” of Christian identity, texts that scholars have dubbed erotapokriseis (following a middle Byzantine neologism) or “question-and-answer texts.”

As a genre, the erotapokriseis emerge out of the literary flotsam and jetsam of classical paideia, perhaps like the novel or the gospel.⁸⁵ Various pre- and para-Christian authors made use of the “question-and-answer” format (known classically as or quaestiones) within treatises, letters, or other formal genres.⁸⁶ Philo of Alexandria subjected biblical texts to a “question-and-answer” treatment in the larger context of his scriptural commentaries,⁸⁷ and late ancient Aristotelian and Platonic instructors also found the process a useful instructional tool. The isolation of the question-and-answer format as an independent, self-conscious genre, however, seems to be the innovation of Christian authors in the fourth century.⁸⁸ Some Christian writers, such as Augustine, located their erotapokriseis in specific social contexts: an identified questioner has approached them (often in writing) and requested guidance, which is then provided in a responsive, question-and-answer framework.⁸⁹ Other Christians chose to leave their questions and answers floating in a kind of anonymity, identifying neither the questioner nor (except to the extent that we can identify an author at all) the answerer.

My exploration of the dialogic imagination of Christ’s circumcision provides, perhaps, a further context for the rise of this variegated genre in Christian literary circles in the early period of the Christian Roman Empire: the cultural hybridity and heteroglossia that characterizes Roman political power and Christian religious culture. Just as the production of external dialogic texts—Justin’s anti-Jewish Dialogue or Origen’s anti-pagan treatise Against Celsus—might allow for uncomfortable otherness to be confronted, controlled, domesticated (and yet, importantly, never eradicated), so the erotapokriseis could take this effort at internalizing otherness one step further by substituting Christian naïveté for external criticism.⁹⁰ Questions that in other contexts seem shocking or challenging coming from a non-Christian (on scriptural inconsistencies, or the impossibility of Christ’s incarnation or resurrection)⁹¹ are softened by being reframed as innocent Christian queries. Whereas a pagan or Jew might aggressively challenge Christian theology or exegesis, a Christian neophyte transforms incisive critique into simple curiosity.⁹²

For this reason, perhaps, the challenge of Christ’s circumcision to Christian identity emerges in its most direct form in the erotapokriseis. In the external dialogues—Justin, Origen, the Altercation—an unspoken anxiety of otherness lurked beneath the de-Judaizing, and re-Judaizing, efforts of our authors. These dialogues framed Jewish challenges to Christianity in a variety of ways: Christians selectively appropriated scriptural Law, they were inconsistent in their veneration of God’s covenant, and so forth. While Christ’s circumcision partially, and variably, might answer these charges, it was never allowed to raise the explicit question: “But doesn’t Christ’s circumcision somehow make Christians Jewish?” Yet it is, in some respect, this unarticulated anxiety that necessitates meeting and domesticating the otherness of Judaism through Christ’s circumcision: the fear (or, perhaps, desire?) that the original Jewishness of Christ, the apostles, the Scriptures, might unwittingly infect Christians. We find the direct formulation of this potential effect of Christ’s circumcision in one of the earliest fulsome question-and-answer texts, that of Ambrosiaster.

Ambrosiaster

The shadowy figure dubbed “Ambrosiaster”⁹³ organized his late fourth-century Liber quaestionum as a series of scripturally ordered queries.⁹⁴ Yet this scriptural arrangement, upon closer examination, contains and reframes larger, and perhaps more troubling, questions of Christian faith and knowledge. Using this organizing rubric, Ambrosiaster can subsume monotheism under the “Old Testament” (Quid est deus?) and Trinitarianism under the “New Testament” (Si unus est deus, cur in tribus spes salutatis est?). The “questioner” throughout is invisible and, in fact, exists only as a series of tabular questions appended to the beginning of the text:⁹⁵ he is the disembodied voice of Christian inquiry, whose interrogational bona fides is evident in the instructional (if, occasionally, confrontational) tone Ambrosiaster takes in his answers. There is likewise no preface, leaving us to imagine a context for the Liber quaestionum. Given the context of other contemporary Latin erotapokriseis—found in letters and treatises of Jerome and Augustine, for instance⁹⁶—we can most easily envision Ambrosiaster acting as the ecclesiastical authority setting out to correct the average Christian reader and direct her or him away from possible error. That is, much like the external dialogues examined above, Ambrosiaster’s Liber quaestionum is concerned with boundaries. The desire to keep the putative questioner on the right theological track lends a distinctly polemical and, at times, apologetic edge to Ambrosiaster’s “answers.” His particular attention to Jews and Judaism has even led some scholars to posit that Ambrosiaster was a former Jew, on the theory that no zeal matches that of the convert.⁹⁷ But as we have already seen in the externalized dialogues of Justin, Origen, and the Altercation, more compelling concerns about identity and otherness might lead a Christian to appropriate and repudiate the voice of the Jewish other.

While Ambrosiaster’s chapter traditionally titled “Adversus Iudaeos” might seem a logical place to investigate his attitude toward the Jewish heritage of Christianity,⁹⁸ more telling are those briefer quaestiones that approach Christianity’s latent Jewishness obliquely. In the obscure chapter “De lingua Hebraea” (Liber quaestionum 108), Ambrosiaster uses philology to engage the ongoing polemical debate between Jews and Christians over the legacy of Abraham, a debate ostensibly stretching all the way back to the time of Jesus and Paul.⁹⁹ Ambrosiaster begins by addressing the assumption (shared by his contemporaries and, it should be noted, by modern biblical scholars) that “Hebrew” derives from “Heber” (Gen 10:24–25, 11:14–17), a patronymic that would have associated the Hebrews (and their Jewish descendants) more specifically with the “family of Shem, by family, language, land, and nation” (see Gen 10:31).¹⁰⁰ Nothing could be further from the truth, Ambrosiaster asserts: Hebraeus actually comes from (H)Abraham.¹⁰¹ The Hebrew language, Ambrosiaster goes on to explain, is the divine tongue of creation, spoken by Adam in Eden and extinct after the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel.¹⁰² Later this language—which, Ambrosiaster points out, no longer has “any land or any people” (neque terram … neque gentem)¹⁰³—was restored by God’s chosen ones, Abraham (from whom the language now took its name, Hebraeus) and Moses.¹⁰⁴

That Ambrosiaster intended this somewhat esoteric discussion of languages and names to reverberate in Jewish-Christian debates over Abraham’s spiritual patrimony seems clear from one trenchant New Testament example of a “Hebrew” invoked in the course of his answer: the apostle Paul. Paul famously referred to himself as a “Hebrew born of Hebrews” (Hebraeus ex Hebraeis; Phil. 3.5). For Ambrosiaster, however, Paul’s boasting of his “Hebrewness” was due to his likeness in piety to Abraham, not his ethnic or linguistic origins among the Jews.¹⁰⁵ In a few dense paragraphs on a seemingly esoteric topic, Ambrosiaster takes the ethnic and linguistic core of “Jewishness” as it was understood in his day, and thoroughly de-Judaizes it: Hebrew means Abrahamic, Abrahamic refers to piety, and even the apostle Paul, whose ambiguous Jewishness might trouble early Christians, is rendered safely, and unequivocally, non-Jewish.

The question of Christ’s circumcision—another moment at which Christianity might seem perilously Jewish—receives a similarly fine treatment. The question arises early in the section reserved for quaestiones novi testamenti, immediately following a question on the baptism of Jesus: “Why was the Savior—even though he was born holy (sanctus) and was called Christ the Lord at his very birth—baptized, even though baptism takes place on account of purification and sin?”¹⁰⁶ Assuring the questioner that Christ was, indeed, born without sin and therefore had no need of baptism (indeed, this is why John hesitated: Matt 3:14–15), Ambrosiaster explains: “It was fitting that he should be as an example to those who would later become ‘sons of God’ [John 1:12], whom he taught would 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 together heresiology, scriptural commentary, philosophy, cosmology, and a myriad other Christian discourses, the Questions 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 () nor opposed to the God who has given the Law ( ). For early and late have the Jews accused him of this. But since he fulfilled the requirements of the law on our behalf, we are no longer under the law, but under grace. Therefore Christ tells us through Paul: “but if you are circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you” [Gal 5:2].

The result therefore is that we recognize clearly that all those who have been circumcised are strangers to Christ ( ), whether they are believers or unbelievers, Jews or Greeks, since they boast in the Law of Moses and do not follow Christ.¹²⁴

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” () the Lawgiver. Circumcision removes this argument and proves Christ’s connection to God’s (earlier) Law. More than that, however, Christ “fulfilled” the Law. This notion of “fulfillment,” which also appears in some biblical commentaries on Jesus’ circumcision, draws partially on the claim in Matthew 5:17 that Jesus came “not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.” While modern biblical scholars may argue that the evangelist’s intent here was to intensify and internalize the precepts of the Torah,¹²⁶ ancient and medieval Christians understood “fulfillment” rather differently, as the response makes clear. Here “fulfillment” means something like “filling to the brim” or “paying in full.”¹²⁷ Jesus has not simply observed the Law (perhaps a more straightforward sense of “fulfillment”); he has entirely satisfied it for all future generations, to the point that any further observance of the Law is not only moot but counterindicated. Thus, Jesus can go on to proclaim (through Paul) that circumcision is “of no benefit,” for Christ’s observance of the Law has completely filled it out.

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, Judaism in these texts is not elided or eliminated: it is preserved and hypostatized, reincarnated time and again, contained (perhaps) but always present. In some of the texts I have examined, such as Justin’s Dialogue, the problem of Judaism remains conspicuously unresolved. In Origen’s Contra Celsum and the later Latin Altercation of Simon and Theophilus, the circumcision of Christ signals how Christians could rewrite Judaism as a legible symbol of Christianity itself, transmuting the negatively coded Jewish traits of “Law” or “flesh” into positive Christian values. I introduce the erotapokriseis texts as an internalized form of Christian dialogue to demonstrate how profitably Christians might imagine their own identity as a chorus of (not always harmonious) voices even as they insisted on the monophonous singularity of orthodoxy. For Ambrosiaster or the serial authors of the Questions to Duke Antiochus, Christ’s circumcision at the same time celebrated and amplified anxieties about boundaries, making Jesus into a paradigmatic symbol of Jewish-Christian paradox and contradiction.

While these dialogic “encounters” with the other serve the particular goal of creating a sense of Christian community, the strategies by which other voices are conjured to construct Christian culture were neither unique nor entirely invented by Christians. That “culture” should be hybrid, polyphonous, and embedded in an asymmetrical confrontation with “others” lay, as we have seen many times so far, at the heart of Roman imperial identity. We must also keep in mind, however, that, by staging in so spectacular a fashion that confrontation with the “other” inside the empire, the Roman self was also rendered unstable, liable to the threatening otherness within.

Likewise circumcision, this symbol of Jewishness par excellence, came to be incorporated into the fractured singularity of Christian identity on Christ’s body. This assumption of Jewish otherness becomes visible to us through texts that most clearly and deliberately stage the multiple voices of self and other composing Christianity: the dialogue texts. Here, in texts traditionally read as the vanguard of religious boundary formation, we glimpse the partial and even contradictory ways in which Christianity configured itself vis-à-vis the Jewish other. Much like the cultural economy of Roman imperialism, moreover, this Christian staging of the simultaneous repudiation and internalization of difference could generate a fragile sense of self, always vulnerable to the other it maintains within.

Yet even as we can sketch a plausible historical context for such a maneuver in the analogous operations of Roman imperial culture, we can also attend to the lasting effects of this sly internalization of Jewish otherness that always supports yet threatens the coherence of cultural identity. Perhaps the Christian absorption of its originary Jewishness, evident in these dialogue texts through the paradoxical circumcision of Christ, has left its lasting marks on the formation of cultural identities even into our postmodern period.¹²⁹ At the very least we can appreciate the resonances between the premodern and the postmodern that are made visible. Although speaking of twentieth-century articulations of race and hybridity, Robert Young’s description of “culture” works well for the strategies of an early Christian dialogic imagination as well: “Culture never stands alone but always participates in a conflictual economy acting out the tension between sameness and difference, comparison and differentiation, unity and diversity, cohesion and dispersion, containment and subversion.”¹³⁰ As we turn now to consider a different category of Christian other, the heretic, we should nonetheless keep this sense of culture—unified and divided, contained and subverted—close at hand.