Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs

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