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Introduction

Splitting the Difference

Making Difference

This is a surprisingly long book about a small mark: the circumcision of Christ, as it was imagined and interpreted in the first several centuries of Christianity. I propose to use this curious sign to begin to rethink the historical problem of Christian difference. By the historical problem of Christian difference I mean this: how do we, as historians, devise a narrative that reconciles the persistent Christian discourses of unity and singularity with the undeniable existence of multiple, diverse Christianities in antiquity? As Rebecca Lyman has phrased the problem: “‘Christianity’ defined as ‘orthodoxy’ rests uncomfortably on a history of inner conflict and persistent multiplicity. This intractable problem of diversity together with the ideological claim of unity only reinforces the cultural uniqueness or ideological paradox of Christian exclusivity in late antiquity.”¹ Like Lyman, I am suggesting our standard answers to this “intractable” historical problem need retooling.

Most narratives of Christian development have attempted to explain this historical problem of Christian difference using the language of boundaries, conflict, and exclusion. Two narrative models in particular have predominated, both of which rely on similar assumptions about boundaries and distinction. The first narrative may be labeled the “traditional model,” deriving as it does from the self-representation of Christian development from within the tradition.² Given definitive shape in the fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea (although important groundwork was already laid by the Acts of the Apostles),³ this traditional model viewed the development of “the Church” as singular and organic, directed by providence and guided by the apostles and continuous ecclesiastical institutions.⁴ Difference is understood as deviance (“heresy”) away from a pure norm (“orthodoxy”). In confessional narratives of Christian history, such deviant difference is always subsequent, malicious, and identifiable as outside the bounds of authentic Christianity. Nonconfessional variations on this traditional model still posit an “original” Christianity, and explain variant forms of Christianity as later, derivative biformations or “syncretisms” (without overtly judging their theological correctness).⁵ Traces of the notion of “difference as deviance” also survive in modern accounts that seek to elevate and celebrate the excluded “others” of this traditional model, the implicitly or explicitly preferred “road not taken” that would have avoided the undesirable (misogynistic or otherwise hierarchical) traits of “normative” Christianity.⁶

The second narrative, which has ostensibly displaced the traditional model in the academy, is credited to early twentieth-century philologian and scholar Walter Bauer and his work Rechtglaübigkeit und Kezterei im ältesten Christentum (Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity). Bauer’s thesis, that Christianity was originally diverse and that centralization and enforcement of a unified, Rome-oriented theology was secondary, has become especially influential in scholarship since its translation into English in the 1970s.⁷ The dissemination of the translated Nag Hammadi codices and other “nonorthodox” texts over this same period contributed to a growing counternarrative of early Christian difference that denied primacy to any single formulation of Christian identity. Instead, Bauer has conditioned historians to view the development of normative Christianity as the end result of a conflict with and triumph of a “proto-orthodox” party over equally “original” and authentic forms of early Christian thought.⁸

This counternarrative (embedded, by the end of the twentieth century, in incipient multicultural identity politics) seeks to undo the totalizing and triumphalist narrative of the traditional model, and yet retains one of its central assumptions: that normative early Christianity (whether we consider it the original message of Jesus or simply one among several equally authentic, competing Christian “trajectories”) employed the construction of boundaries to exclude difference and otherness. Even more recent, self-consciously “post-Bauer” historiography, which “reject[s] [Bauer’s] idea that we can narrate a monolithic story of heresy becoming orthodoxy,”⁹ adheres to a model of exclusionary boundary drawing to explain Christian development and difference. Lewis Ayres, in a recent issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies on “the problem of orthodoxy,” remarks of these post-Bauer scholars: “They have shaped accounts of the emergence of defined orthodoxies from more pluralistic situations which preceded them and frequently from situations of exegetical uncertainty. Orthodoxy is constructed from a range of possibilities, some more prominent than others, some already seemingly marginal. Scholars working from a variety of perspectives and commitments now also tend to take for granted that the emergence of orthodoxy involves a concomitant definition of heresy as that which is excluded.”¹⁰ The perspective may shift, from Eusebius to Bauer to “post-Bauer,” but the model of “definition” and “exclusion” remains standard.

Informing this historiographic model, at least since the 1960s, are socioanthropological theories of the formation of self and community. In these theories of identity formation, the “self” can only emerge through the identification and exclusion of an “other.”¹¹ The “other” may be real, imaginary, or some indeterminate combination of the two; what is important is the separation of “self” and “other” through the process of boundary formation and exclusion of an “other.” Even when such boundary formation is incomplete or ineffective, historians of early Christianity still assume that it became “normal” for early Christians to desire theological and social unity and “normal” for them to strive for this unity through the identification, classification, and rejection of difference.¹² It is one goal of this book to move a step beyond both the “traditional model” and the Bauer-inspired counternarratives by interrogating their shared assumptions about sameness and difference, namely, the centrality of boundaries and exclusion in the shaping of early Christian identities.

When we take as normative the process of defining the self through the exclusion of difference, we gloss over some of the complex internal dynamics that shaped Christianity throughout the ancient period. It is of course self-evident that our early Christian sources quite frequently speak of “boundaries” and “others” and deviance and difference, and frequently profess a desire for exclusion, uniformity, and singularity. But what if such totalizing language serves not as a clue to a sincere desire for theological unity, but rather as a mask lightly covering over persistent—even necessary—fragmentation and dissolution? What if the singular language of orthodoxy does not seek to exclude, but rather to internalize and appropriate the so-called deviance of the other? What if the failure of this constant boundary formation to achieve such unity was not a bug but rather a feature of the discourses of early Christian difference? How would our perception of early Christian identity change, and what would this do to our assumptions about the very invention of the category of “religion” in the crucial period of late antiquity?

The Fantasy of Boundaries

The socioanthropological model of boundary formation and exclusion is not the only theoretical tool available to us in addressing the historical problem of Christian difference. A different theory of the interaction of difference and identity comes from the tradition of psychoanalysis, rearticulated recently in feminist and postcolonial appropriations of the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and others.¹³ Already, historians of the premodern period have made convincing (and appropriately contingent) cases for the use of a theory formed in the heart of modernity as a lens to reconfigure earlier subjects and topics.¹⁴ Psychoanalytically informed theories of subjectivity and personhood, quite apart from any universalizing claims, provide (I suggest) a compelling and useful model for rethinking our historical narratives of early Christian difference.

In these models, “self” (and, by extension, participation in a coherent community of “selves,” such as races, genders, or nations) is a partially realized fantasy from which the “other” is never completely separated. In this understanding of personhood, the “other” is for the “self” simultaneously an object of identification and distinction. There are no real boundaries; there is never exclusion.

Lacan famously drew on the idea of a child regarding herself in the mirror, realizing herself as a subject through the imperfect “other” reflected there: at once recognizable as the “self” (“she moves when I move, she looks like me”) yet intuitively other, apart from the self (“she’s over there, I’m here”), with a smooth integrity the child does not experience in her own porous and uncooperative body.¹⁵ As Terry Eagleton puts it, “The object is at once somehow part of ourselves—we identify with it—and yet not ourselves, something alien…. For Lacan, the ego is just this narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify.”¹⁶ “Self” in its broadest sense then emerges out of an act of misrecognition, and this “fantasy of ego” perpetuates the mistaken notion that subjectivity is stable, bounded, and discrete. In reality, “I” exist by virtue of my fantasies of an “other” that is really just a reminder of that smoothed-out reflection of my own psyche. “The subject constructs itself in the imitation of as well as opposition to this image,” asserts Ania Loomba.¹⁷ Whatever sense of self I possess is an illusion that emerges out of fragmentary and imaginary negotiations of unreal and ideal selves and others. The “other” is not only an object of distinction and difference by which I know myself (the “not-I”) but also an object of desire and identification for myself (the “ideal-I”). Identity is always already split against itself at the moment of its formation between “self” and “other.” No boundary between self and other persists, except as a fantasy of identity. Because my subjectivity emerges out of a scene of imaginary boundaries between my “self” and “others,” it is inherently unstable: it shifts and reconstitutes itself according to myriad psychic and material pressures and forces. It desires wholeness and a sense of permanence—thus the insistence on “myself,” a coherent subjectivity that can speak in the first person—but that desire is constantly, and sometimes thrillingly, frustrated.¹⁸ The sense of self is therefore always accompanied by anxiety and ambivalence.

Whether or not my internal psyche or yours actually operates this way is unfalsifiable, and to some extent irrelevant for my purposes. It is when we turn this model of subjectivity outward, into the realm of social relations, that I find it becomes illuminating and helpful. When we think of the boundaries of community along these same lines, as fantasies that both create and uncreate communal cohesion, we view the formation of such identities, and their disruption, quite differently. Take, for instance, the articulation of gender as a social category. On a socioanthropological model of gender construction, “male” comes to exist by distinction from and exclusion of “female.” A boundary is formed between self (“male”) and other (“female”); to cross that boundary is to transgress it knowingly in an act of deviance, whether we find such gender deviance laudable or not. Any attempt to critique the normativity of the male self—say, a feminist critique—must therefore operate from an a priori position of exteriority and marginalization: self and other, male and female, may be equalized but must remain bounded and distinct.

A feminist appropriation of psychoanalysis, however, presses that initial moment of differentiation and finds very different consequences. The articulation of “male” is not simply the recognition and rejection of “female.” Rather “female” is simultaneously an object of distinction and identification: it is never fully externalized, but always part of the male “self.” “Maleness” exists always in contradiction to itself, always reinternalizing and rejecting its other (“femaleness”). Sexism, from this perspective, is not the fear or oppression of an other, but rather the fear of the otherness within, the fear of the permeability of the self’s own boundaries. Likewise the critique of the seemingly privileged edifice of “maleness” does not take place from the distant margins but from that newly recovered place within. To cross the boundary between “male” and “female,” moreover, is not to transgress at all, but rather to acknowledge the illusory boundary between self (“male”) and other (“female”). It is also simply to acknowledge the inherent instability and shiftiness of those gender categories. In this reading, “gender relations” become politically and socially more open to intervention.¹⁹

Similar conclusions hold with our reading of other groups’ formations, such as race or nationhood. Instead of seeing the instability of racial categories or national identities as a sort of category failure—the desire to construct “whiteness” cannot outpace the messy realities of daily existence; the will-to-“Americanness” is constantly troubled by new and unexpected contingencies and border infiltrations—we instead read such instabilities as part of the very nature of categories: “whiteness” abhors but longs for its internalized racial otherness, “Americanness” shouts for borders that can never be securely established.²⁰ The politics of race and nationhood become much more pliable and open to critique when we begin to see that the very attempt to bound and define constitutes a hidden act of dissolution and blurring.

Other scholars precede me (and instruct me) in the appropriation of psychoanalytic theories of identity deployed in the social field of history. Anne McClintock’s 1995 study Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest employs psychoanalytic frameworks to untangle the politics of race, gender, and class from Victorian England to postindependence South Africa. McClintock follows in the footsteps of postcolonial theorists from Frantz Fanon to Homi Bhabha,²¹ and feminist theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigarary, all of whom have operated at the intersections of politically informed history and psychoanalytically informed theory: “Psychoanalysis and material history are mutually necessary for strategic engagement with unstable power,” McClintock writes.²² Practicing what she terms a “situated psychoanalysis,”²³ McClintock weaves together various strands of thought that have moved psychoanalysis from the realm of the therapeutic and individual to the study of the historical and social, demonstrating the analytic value in rethinking difference and identity. Moving away from a binary logic that automatically diminishes and partitions the “other” of identity, this new view of subject (and community) formation leaves the “self” and “other” of identity mutable and dynamic, embedded in the shifting realities of a material world open to ambivalence and anxiety.

History, Theory, and Hybridity

It will become evident in the course of this book how I think this new model of difference based on the fantasy of boundaries can help us interrogate identity and difference in early Christianity. I want to make it clear in this introduction, however, that this is not simply a case of theory swapping, that, weary of sociology and anthropology, I turn to the linguistically puzzling and intellectually challenging world of “situated psychoanalysis.” Just as the psychoanalytic construction of identity can be theoretically useful in exploring issues of race, gender, and nation-state formation, it is specifically applicable, I argue, in the context of the late ancient Roman Empire. In the early Christian context, we have a social and cultural situation in which recent postcolonial interpretations of “empire” dovetail with the psychoanalytic framing of identity and provide new insight into the workings of the Roman Empire.

A contrast between the imperial logics of the Greeks and Romans is instructive to get our historical and theoretical bearings. We tend to think of “Greekness” (hellenismos) as it developed in the post-Persian period as hinging on a putative binary distinction between self and other, creating a coherent cultural and social self (“Hellene”) through the articulation of an excluded other (“barbarian”). It is no surprise that the socioanthropological model of boundary formation and exclusion has proved particularly useful in illuminating this cultural ideal.²⁴ Roman imperial identity, however, coming fast on the heels of this “Greekification” of the East, understood itself to be operating very differently.²⁵ Throughout the imperial period (emerging already in the late republic) we can pinpoint no overarching ethnic or cultural totality of “Romanness” that defined participation in the empire, analogous to Alexander’s hellenismos. Or rather, “Romanness” was not expressed through boundary and exclusion. Romanitas was not the imperialization of Latinitas,²⁶ and the political unity of Rome never mapped onto any consistent cultural homogeneity. To be sure, we see traces of a “Roman/barbarian” dichotomy in Latin literature,²⁷ as well as attempts to construct a coherent sense of self in contradistinction to “others.” But whereas Greeks identified barbarians in order to draw distinction and boundaries, Romans identified the barbarians as a site for the exercise of Rome’s civilizing power.²⁸ The other was not to be excluded; he was to be incorporated, otherness intact, into the Roman sphere of imperium. Jeremy Schott succinctly notes, “Rome sought to contain the threat of diversity by incorporating otherness within its borders, not through its elimination.”²⁹

As the Roman Empire grew, it imagined its origins not in the clearly bounded selfhood of ethnic autochthony—the mythical articulations, for instance, of ancient Greek identity³⁰—but rather in domination and appropriation of difference.³¹ From the rape of the Sabine women through the opening up of the Roman Senate to Gallic nobles, Rome’s founding power was to seize, appropriate, and manage difference. Tacitus’s version of Emperor Claudius’s speech to the Senate, in which the emperor argues for the extension of senatorial status outside of Italy, captures how Rome’s logic of empire differed from that of the Greeks: “What else was the downfall of the Spartans and Athenians except that—although they prevailed in arms—they bounded off (arcebant) those whom they conquered because they were foreign-born (alienigenis)? But our Founder Romulus was so wise that multiple peoples (plerosque populos) on the same day he held as enemies and then as citizens (civis)” (Tacitus, Annales 11.24).³² Greek xenophobia and boundedness make way for Roman heterogeneity, a strategy, we are led to believe, that is ultimately more successful in the expansion and management of an empire.³³ Yet with that internalization of difference comes an anxiety about subjectivity: Juvenal, through his disaffected poetic character Umbricius, complains about the unctuous Syrian Orontes flowing into the Tiber, leaving its Greek dregs on once-pristine Roman banks (Juvenal, Satura 3),³⁴ even as his contemporary Martial marvels at the exotic cacophony (human and animal) in the imperial arena.³⁵ “The city of imperial splendour was full of reminders of the violence of conquest,” Catharine Edwards and Greg Woolf have remarked.³⁶ As the city grew into an empire, Rome’s power continued to be defined through an anxious ability to contain and absorb difference.

Conditioned as we are by Gibbon’s eighteenth-century tristesse,³⁷ we imagine the boundaries of the empire from the third century onward slowly crumbling, barbarians first dribbling and then pouring over poorly guarded and ineffective borders.³⁸ Yet C. R. Whittaker’s recent work on the Roman Empire’s borders has asked us rethink the limites of Empire.³⁹ These were not, after all, boundaries but rather frontiers: sites for the negotiation and management of difference.⁴⁰ The physical limits of the Roman Empire, the maintenance of this frontier zone of difference, embodied the Roman ideology of power: not the (always failed and failing) imposition of homogeneity (Hellenism, for instance) but the majestic management of difference and otherness. The very ideal of Roman selfhood, constructed out of the power of imperium, depended therefore on the persistence of difference and otherness alongside and within the limits of empire. Difference can never be eliminated or covered over, but must remain visible in order to support the logic of Roman domination.

Identity in this Roman Empire is thus always split against itself, a self that must always confront, appropriate, and risk being destabilized by difference. Like the child of Lacan gazing into the mirror, the Roman comes to desire the other that defines his self, and yet fears its difference. One way to frame this cultural economy of the Roman Empire—always identifying, categorizing, and internalizing the difference of its subject peoples—is through the theoretical concept of hybridity, as elucidated by postcolonial theorists.⁴¹ The critical force of the “hybrid” elaborates the psychoanalytic description of the self outlined above, in that it helps us to uncover the fiction of a closed, bounded identity. Language of purity and containment, focused on the fear of the (racial, ethnic, or religious) mixing of the hybrid, masks the very operations of appropriation of those feared “others,” and covers over a reality that is always already mixed: “colonial specularity, doubly inscribed,” writes Homi Bhabha, “does not produce a mirror where the self apprehends self; it is always the split screen of the self and its doubling, the hybrid.”⁴² Roman rule was always hybridized in this way, pulling the provincial “other” into the heart of the cultural, social, and imperial formations of self and community. Tacitus would have us believe that this internalization of the otherness of subject peoples lay at the heart of Roman imperial might; Gibbon would no doubt disagree. Postcolonial criticism would highlight the simultaneously successful yet deconstructive effects of Rome’s imperial hybridity.

Rome’s hybridized self becomes visible at the very site of its imperial articulation. The Roman appropriation of hellenism is an instructive case in point. The mastery of Greek literature, art, and philosophy by the Roman elites created visible and pervasive evidence of Roman imperial mastery. Greek language and literature became the cultural spoils of Rome, but were never fully internalized—that is, Greek culture had to remain legibly “Greek” in order to retain value within the logic of Rome’s empire.⁴³ At the same time, Romanness—defined through cultural domination—exists only by virtue of the legible Greekness within. “Captive Greece captured the beastly victor, and introduced the arts to rustic Latium,” Horace wrote (Epistularum liber 21.1.156–57). To be Roman, in this sense, is to possess Greece, maintaining its discrete otherness within. Romanitas is hybridized, even in its careful delineation of (and anxiety over) the otherness of the interiorized, defeated Greek.

We can recall Cicero’s poignant depiction of the multitudes of Greekspeaking visitors to the city of Rome (ex Asia atque Achaia plurimi Romae) openly weeping upon seeing their native statues “carried away” to be displayed in the forum.⁴⁴ Cicero is attempting to evoke antipathy against Gaius Verres and sympathy for his Sicilian clients, but he is also framing the despoiled, and despairing, Greeks for the masterful Roman gaze alongside the spolia of their statuary.⁴⁵ The weeping Greek becomes for the Roman viewer an object of both desire (the vehicle of paideia, the value of which is confirmed only by the Greeks’ keen sense of its material loss) and of fear and anxiety (as the weeping Greeks threaten to transform into the litigious Sicilians who were Cicero’s clients). The presence of the Greek highlighted Rome’s strength but also problematized the hybridity of Rome by pinpointing the otherness within.

Indeed, Rome’s hybridized hellenism created the space for Greek resistance. As Rome literally and figuratively colonized the Greek past—erecting Greek statues in the Roman forum, purchasing Greek paidagōgoi to teach the alphabeta to Roman noble children—the ostentatious control over Greek difference served to value that difference. Rome viewed the Greek as homo paedagogus, “definitively characterized by paideutic activity,”⁴⁶ and thereby provided a means for the Greek to assert his own cultural subjectivity. With the power of hybridized imperialism comes the threat of the “mimic man,” as Bhabha has argued.⁴⁷ As Rome’s imperial appropriation of Hellenism spread across the face of the Mediterranean, so too did the phenomenon later dubbed by Philostratus the “second Sophistic,” the renewal of Attic artistry that can be read as a response to Roman power: the exploitation of the ambivalent relationship between ruler and ruled, the mimicry of Rome’s colonizing power.⁴⁸ As Romans appropriated Greekness—because they did so—Greeks found a means to resist Romanness.

The simultaneous appropriation and differentiation of “Greekness” in the early Roman Empire provides merely the most visible and closely studied example of political and cultural hybridity at work among ancient Romans, and a clear sense of how the hybridized Roman both created and (to an admittedly limited fashion) empowered the colonized “other.” One of my assumptions throughout this book is that the overall Roman ideology of empire at work in late antiquity lends itself readily to an analysis of the hybrid self, the self that comes into existence not through rejection of “the other,” but rather through a simultaneous distinction from and appropriation of that other. It is this strategy for identity and difference, I suggest, that is taken up in early Christianity. It is this desire for, and fear of, the other at the heart of the self that I argue becomes visible through the circumcision of Christ.

A Different Fetish

The circumcision of Christ is, as I said at the outset, a small mark, but a potent one. In the next chapter, I explore more closely the specific place of circumcision in the economy of signs that circulated to uphold (but also, potentially, to undermine) Roman power in the imperial period. This particular instance of the sign of circumcision, however—typical yet unique—can reveal a great deal about Christian appropriations of difference, identity, and power. It is, to borrow Anne McClintock’s use of the term, a revealing fetish of late ancient Christianity. The term “fetish” arrives in McClintock’s postcolonial study by the parallel routes of the history of religions, where it marks the materialist fixations of “primitive” religions, and theories of psychosexual development, where it figures as the displaced site of libidinous attachment.⁴⁹ McClintock sees in the fetish the possibility of a psychoanalytically informed social history, cognizant of ambiguity, ambivalence, resistance, and transgression.⁵⁰

In its simplest sense, “fetishism” displaces desire, the fixation on an object that always represents something more. In McClintock’s more complex reading, fetishism gives the social and intellectual historian a window into “the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.” If a community’s identity results from paradoxical gestures of distinction from and appropriation of an other (hybridity), then the fetish materially reenacts that paradox. McClintock writes: “The fetish thus stands at the cross-roads of psychoanalysis and social history, inhabiting the threshold of both personal and historical memory. The fetish marks a crisis in social meaning as the embodiment of an impossible resolution. The contradiction is displaced onto and embedded in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur with compulsive repetition. Hence the apparent power of the fetish to enchant the fetishist. By displacing power onto the fetish, then manipulating the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.”⁵¹ The fetish embodies that moment in time when the self is formed, that moment of identification and differentiation and splitting; it embodies, and ameliorates, the anxiety of that moment (am I my-self or an-other?). McClintock takes examples of fetish objects that make sense of the triangulated discourses of race, class, and gender in Victorian England: the crisp, white linen blouse, the polished black boot, the leather “slave” band of a scullery maid. Social groups, she argues, also locate the paradox of communal identity in fetish objects: the map, the flag, and the statue that contain and embody the difference of “nation” or “empire.”

The fetish object grants the historian a glimpse into the contradictory figurations of communal selfhood, what I am calling the historical problem of early Christian difference. Other scholars of early Christianity before me have attempted to describe analytically the dense, contradictory figural language often found in our ancient Christian texts. In two important essays, Patricia Cox Miller has taken her cue from literary criticism: borrowing first the “hypericon” from W. J. T. Mitchell to imagine a “fundamentally ambivalent standpoint toward the desert and its role in the development of Christian anthropology”;⁵² and later the “grotesque” from Geoffrey Galt Harpham to articulate the “impossible split reference” that is neither “a mediation or fusion of opposites but the presentation or realization of a contradiction.”⁵³ Like Mitchell’s hypericon and Harpham’s grotesquerie, the fetish provides an analytic tool that makes sense of—instead of explaining away—the contradictions and ambiguities of early Christian discourse: “Fetishes may take myriad guises and erupt from a variety of social contradictions. They do not resolve conflict in value but rather embody in one object the failure of resolution.”⁵⁴ By historicizing the fetish, removing it (as McClintock does) from the “narrow scene of [Freudian and Lacanian] phallic universalism,” we can open it up to “far more powerful and intricate genealogies that would include both psychoanalytic insights (disavowal, displacement, emotional investment, and so on), as well as nuanced historical narratives of cultural difference and diversity.”⁵⁵ The fetish embodies the anxieties of identity, it replays them, it gives them shape that makes them at once manageable but never resolvable.

Christ’s circumcision is such a fetish for early Christianity. A unique moment—by definition, it could occur only once—it is nonetheless repeated in multiple discourses of early Christianity: interpreted, manipulated, disputed (but never discounted), creating a site for the articulation of Christian paradox. When I first began this project, I assumed that the contradictions embodied and enacted by discussions of Christ’s circumcision would center on the fraught Jewish origins of an increasingly non- and anti-Jewish movement. I found, however, that this was only one level on which the circumcision of Jesus embodies “the failure of resolution” in early Christianity. All manner of paradox and contradiction—of impossible, desirable otherness at the heart of the Christian self—are articulated in this sign, made visible and never fully resolved.

My contention throughout this book is that an exploration of the diverse and often unexpected ways that this curious mark on the body of Christ pops up in ancient Christian discourse reveals a great deal about the making of Christian culture and identity. Like late ancient Christianity itself (as I shall argue), Christ’s circumcision is an ultimately unbounded and confounding object of speculation in late antiquity. I do not examine here discrete treatises or homilies “on the circumcision of Christ” (until the last chapter, which seeks out the first examples of such writings), but find my subject weaving in and out of a variety of other discourses: anti-Jewish apology, heresiology, theological essays, ascetic treatises, homilies, and biblical commentaries. Like Judaism itself—the “signified” to which circumcision metonymically pointed in the ancient world—Jesus’ circumcision is found throughout these early Christian discourses, difficult to “pin down” precisely for its perfusion throughout the early Christian imaginary. The remarkable ubiquity of Christ’s circumcision in so many diverse areas of Christian thought is our first hint that this small, diffuse mark might possess a larger significance for the study of early Christianity.

Our second hint comes in the paradoxical nature of this mark: circumcision, the mark of Judaism, commemorated and delineated on the body of the Christian savior. It confounds some of our basic assumptions about normative Christianity: the blemish of multiple particularities (Jewish, male) on a universal messiah. What’s more, there is a curious insistence on this confounding mark in our early Christian sources: from the first century onward (when Christ’s circumcision perhaps makes its first appearance), Christians find it useful in some way to embrace the paradox of the circumcised messiah.

In the following chapters I explore the specific instances of these paradoxical uses of the divine circumcision, from the Gospel of Luke to the Latin and Byzantine Feasts of the Cirumcision. In Chapter 1, I explore in more detail the concept of a Roman cultural economy of signs that made “otherness” both visible and manageable—and disruptive—as signs of Roman power. In this cultural economy, the stereotypical circumcision—despite its existence in a variety of Near Eastern groups—came to signify “Judaism” in the metaphorical and material Roman economy. Like all stereotypes, however, this signifying circumcision had two effects: it at once supported and undermined Rome’s cultural economy. When the earliest followers of Jesus came to confront this economy of signs, “circumcision” likewise signaled the symbolic freight of Jewishness: rejected by the apostle Paul, it was curiously—and, perhaps, cannily—recouped by the Gospel of Luke, in possibly the earliest reference to Christ’s circumcision.

Chapter 2 treats the attempts by Christians throughout the late antique period to create—and blur—the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism. Through an exploration of dialogue texts (both literary dialogues between Jews and Christians, as well as the internalized dialogue of question-and-answer texts) that feature the circumcision of Christ, we see how Christianity can simultaneous reject and reinscribe its own originary Jewishness. Chapter 3 turns from (anti-) Jewish texts to the welter of Christian heresiological writings: here, too, we see that the attempt to construct boundaries often covers gestures that reabsorb the strangeness of abject theological “others” (heresies) into the heart of orthodoxy.

In Chapter 4, I focus on a single text that incorporates much of the paradoxical productivity enabled by Christ’s circumcision. Epiphanius’s Panarion, or “Medicine Chest for Heresies,” contains a long chapter in refutation of the “Jewish-Christian” sect of the Ebionites. It is Epiphanius, ventriloquizing these Ebionites, who first voices the desire and fear of Christ’s circumcision for “orthodox” Christians: “If Christ was circumcised, so too should we be.” Epiphanius’s response masterfully rewrites Judaism, Christianity, orthodoxy, and heresy in a single stroke; this text, perhaps most forcefully of any in the entire book, shows us how boundary-creating discourse provided early Christians an apt and surprising vehicle for the retention and internalization of difference.

Chapter 5 takes the Bible as an object of centralizing unity among Christians and demonstrates how the very act of constructing a unified scriptural vision could reproduce and recreate fission and faction. Emerging in both literary and ritual circles, biblical commentaries and sermons—both on the Lucan description of Christ’s circumcision and in other passages where Luke 2:21 serves as intertext—wrestle with the multifarious Christ through the encounter with God’s multivalent Word, perhaps nowhere more divided than at Christ’s most Jewish moment. In Chapter 6, we arrive at the formal institutionalization of Christ’s circumcision in mainstream Christian discourse: the commemoration of the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision, emerging in churches across the Mediterranean and the Near East in the pre-Islamic period. Here, the call to Christians “to become circumcised like Christ” places the paradox of difference and identity squarely in the heart of Christian ritual time and space. I conclude with some final thoughts on the question that haunts much of this book: could ancient Christians conceive of Jesus (male and circumcised) as a Jew, or did their conception of Jesus “passing” as Jewish allow them to rewrite notions of religion and identity altogether?

There is no single trajectory or ideological line that Christ’s circumcision allows us to trace throughout the late antique period. Indeed, my argument is precisely that Christ’s circumcision reveals the fiction of lines, the fantasy of boundaries, even as it permeates the diverse discourses of early Christian identity. The accumulated details contribute to a single argument throughout this book: that early Christian discourses of boundaries, differences, and distinctions consistently and paradoxically worked to erases boundaries, confound difference, and problematize distinction. That is, early Christian identity emerged out of the simultaneous making, and unmaking, of difference.