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.
Chapter 1
Circumcision and the Cultural Economy of Difference
The point of new historical investigation is to disrupt the notion of fixity.
—Joan Wallach Scott
Circumcision and the Jews: A Sign to the Gentiles
Stereotype: The Jewish Body in the Roman Empire
In the early second century, the Roman historian Suetonius described an incident from decades earlier under the revenue-hungry emperor Domitian: “Besides the other [taxes], the Jewish tax (Iudaïcus fiscus) was pursued with especial vigor: for which those persons were turned over (deferebantur)1 who either lived a Jewish life undeclared or who, lying about their origins, had not paid the levy imposed on their people. I recall being present, as a teenager, when an old man, of ninety years, was inspected by a procurator (and a crowded court!) to see whether he was circumcised” (Suet. Dom. 12.2).2 This brief, brutal scene condenses for Suetonius’s readers, and for us, the convoluted role of Jewish circumcision in the early Roman Empire: a sign of distinction, strangeness, even shame, that at once sets the Jew apart (here, for special taxation), but also incorporates him into the broader economy of Roman power. The circumcised genitals of the tax-dodging Jew are part of the juridical processes that make the empire function.
In this first, preliminary chapter I ask what kinds of meanings Jewish circumcision carried in the Roman context, and how those meanings were both appropriated and contested: first, by the Jews themselves; second, by the earliest texts of the Jesus movement (the writings of Paul and his followers, including the Gospel of Luke); and, third, by early gentile Christians seeking to grapple with the overdetermined Jewishness of their religious past. My basic argument, throughout this chapter, is that Jewish circumcision circulated as part of a cultural economy of signs in the early Roman Empire: the stereotypical function of circumcision supported, but also destabilized, Roman control and management of Jewish otherness. The cultural force of circumcision, and its ability to resignify in multiple contradictory ways among ancient Jews and Christians, must be understood in this Roman imperial context. Only by considering the cultural and political implications of Jewish circumcision can we begin to understand the implications of imagining this overcharged sign on the body of Jesus.
The increasing significance of Jewish circumcision among Roman authors as “the mark of Judaism” has been well documented in modern scholarship.3 Indeed, by the early empire, Jewish circumcision was already something of an overdetermined symbol in Roman literature, as a mark of cultural difference and general ridicule among Roman literate elites.4 For Horace and Persius, the superstition of the “clipped Jews” (Iudaei curti) is a social nuisance (Hor. Sat. 1.9.69–70; Pers. Sat. 5.185).5 Martial jealously contemplates the sexual prowess of foreskinless Jewish men (Epig. 7.30.5), while Juvenal bemoans the weird Jews who “worship the sky” and “by and by, shed their foreskins” (Sat. 14.99).6 The valences of circumcision in these writings varies considerably, from a sign of hypersexuality to cloistered superstition. The one commonality is that it signifies Jewish: “Jews did constitute an identifiable ethnic group in the varied social