Fidus’s attempt to control the signifying power of circumcision may strike the bishops of third-century North Africa as overly “Judaizing” (although it seems Fidus was just as concerned with ancient concepts of hygiene), but in one sense it was entirely Christianizing. By seeking to institute and control a system of distinguishing signs—and by privileging circumcision in that system of signs—Fidus was following in the footsteps of Jesus followers from Paul onward. Christians, drawing on the stereotyping gaze of Roman imperialism (as did non-Christian Jews), were teaching themselves to view the world in a new way. The metaphorical, typological, and allegorical implications of circumcision as a sign of Christian distinction would continue to proliferate through late antiquity.145 The person of Jesus—in direct and indirect ways—played a central role in this symbolic proliferation.
That the person of Christ, in his earthly incarnation, should function as a destabilizer and resignifier of cultural symbols reminds of us the great distance between early Christian concepts of divinity and history and our own. In the twenty-first century, it is commonplace to see Jesus as distinctly embedded in and defined by the world of signs, symbols, and values we imagine he inhabited. Christians and non-Christians alike assert, “Jesus was a Jew.” Such a statement makes sense to modern readers: Jesus is explained by his symbolic world. Circumcision signifies Judaism, Jesus circumcised is Jewish. But early Christians, as we have seen in this chapter, did not engage so straightforwardly with their universe of cultural signs. The Roman economy of identity was charged with power, knowledge, and resistance, and to engage in that circulation of signs was to open up the possibility of resignification. Jesus Christ, incarnate among Jews, was precisely resistant to the signifying power of cultural signs. On his person, they could mean anew.
Circumcision, already an overburdened and contested sign before the spread of Christianity, acted as a kaleidoscope in which gentile Christians saw themselves reflected and refracted, and through which they also gazed upon their despised “other,” the Jews. As we have seen, this simultaneous appropriation of and fear of the sign of circumcision amplifies and twists discourses of identity and stereotype already at work at the fractious contact zone of Jews and Romans. In the nascent literature of Christian difference—apologies, treatises, texts adversus Iudaeos—these contact zones are reconfigured and reimagined. In the texts that will become embedded in the New Testament, we see the first hints of this discourse of identity and difference through circumcision pushed onto the incongruous and unique body of Christ.
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