Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs

“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,