Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs
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is the “naming,” not the circumcising. Despite this grammatical imprecision, these passages are almost always understood as narrating the circumcisions of John and Jesus.78
Nonetheless modern commentators have little to say specifically about Luke’s circumcised messiah,79 other than to note that this event combines with the rest of the “prologue” of the Gospel of Luke (Luke 1–2) to create a deeply Jewish point of departure for a messiah who will, ultimately, deliver salvation to gentiles.80 Indeed, for most modern scholars Jesus’ circumcision is absorbed into the larger question of Luke’s (seemingly) incongruous emphasis on the particularities of Law and Temple in his universalizing gospel.81 Of the four canonical gospels, Luke’s is typically considered the most gentile in its orientation;82 the author crafts a “gospel for the gentiles” both theologically (a “universal” salvation that supplants the old covenant [see Luke 16:16]) and stylistically (a more urbane, sophisticated literary presentation).83
Luke’s incongruously Jewish opening chapters have vexed New Testament scholars for centuries. Early source critics explained these early, more Jewish passages as the calcified remains of an older gospel source preserved—like an extinct theological fly in more precious amber—in the layers of Luke’s gospel.84 This early stratum may retain early traditions about Jesus the Jew, but those early traditions are effectively neutralized by being preserved in a more evolved text. Later redaction criticism focused on Luke’s authorial motives in combining stories of Jesus’ Jewishness with theological messages of universal salvation.85 François Bovon imagines the evangelist as a gentile who, once drawn to Judaism as a “god-fearer,” now sees the value in leaving Judaism behind. So the narrative of Jesus’ Jewish childhood becomes something like a fond memory that carries nostalgic value, but little theological significance.86 Raymond Brown likewise understands “a Lucan view of the Jewish Temple and its ritual more in terms of nostalgia for things past, rather than of hostility for an active and seductive enemy.”87 Such commentary frames the first chapters of Luke, including the passage on Jesus’ circumcision, as splashes of theological color: an acknowledgment of the resolutely past-tense significance of Israel, a kinder and gentler mode of theological supersessionism.88
A more creative redaction-critical explanation for the early emphasis on Law and Temple in Luke’s work was raised by John Knox, and recently defended by his student Joseph Tyson.89 For these scholars, the redacted fragments of Luke-Acts, replete with Jewish color, do not look back (in triumph or nostalgia) to a primitive moment of the Jesus Movement; rather, they bear witness to a later debate among gentile Christian groups in the mid-second century: the rise of Marcionite Christianity. In the early second century, Marcion preached a popular form of Christianity that sharply distinguished Christian salvation from the prior—material, legalistic, judgmental, and Jewish—covenant. Christianity, and Jesus, had nothing to do with the Creator God of the Old Testament and his Jewish worshipers, Marcion taught. His later detractors accused him of producing a corrupt and truncated New Testament, purged of Jewish elements, in order to spread his heresy.90
Knox and Tyson have argued that the reverse might be true: perhaps Marcion’s shorter, less Jewish gospel preceded the canonical Gospel of Luke, indeed, prompted the fuller, Judaized nativity.91 Speaking specifically of Luke 1–2, Knox writes: “Marcion would surely not have tolerated this highly ‘Jewish’ section; but how wonderfully adapted it is to show the nature of Christianity as the true Judaism and thus to answer one of the major contentions of the Marcionites! And one cannot overlook the difficulty involved in the common supposition that Marcion deliberately selected a Gospel which began in so false and obnoxious a way.”92 Although this last point may be somewhat unfair—no one has argued that Marcion had multiple narratives of Jesus’ life at his disposal and quirkily chose the one least suited to his theological agenda93—the overall idea that proto-orthodox expansion can explain the textual and canonical history of Luke as well as Marcionite truncation has found some traction in recent years. Tyson concludes that “[the] work as a whole, Luke-Acts as we know it, surely served as a formidable anti-Marcionite text.”94 Central to Tyson’s argument are the highly “Jewish” chapters of Luke 1–2,95 particularly the account of the circumcision: “it is important to observe that the vital link with Judaism signified by Jesus’ circumcision would have been highly offensive to Marcion and his followers.”96 Although creative in its canonical revision, the “Knox-Tyson theory” participates in a well-established scholarly attempt to explain—and explain away—the presence of such an anomalous feature as Jesus’ circumcision in the gentile gospel. The time frame has simply been moved up several decades, and the target of Luke’s anomalous narrative (Jews, gentiles, or Marcionites) shifted to suit. Redaction criticism, early and late, rhetorically isolates and, in a sense, evacuates the Jewishness of the circumcision of Jesus. It is not “really” a part of Luke’s gospel, and therefore easy to read right past.
Two twentieth-century commentators have attempted to explain the Jewishness of Luke’s first chapters, and the circumcision specifically, in a way that does not view these passages as anomalous to Luke’s “real” theological perspective. Jacob Jervell sees no incongruity between the Law-fulfilling Jesus of Luke 1–2 and the messianic community envisioned generally by Luke-Acts.97 For Jervell, the circumcised messiah fits neatly into what was, at its origins, a fundamentally Jewish-Christian messianic movement: “Luke must indicate that the Messiah Jesus is the genuine and true Messiah. Among other things, this is evidenced by the fact that he was circumcised according to the law.”98 Instead of the theological friction that most modern readers of Luke’s nativity encounter, Jervell finds harmony, a gesture of inclusion rather than supersession.99 Ultimately, Jervell does concede that the Jewish-Christian perspective of Luke, according to which a circumcised messiah makes sense, opens up to a more universal, gentile movement so that, in the end, the passage still derives from and speaks to a past-tense Jewish experience.
The most recent treatment of the circumcision of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke comes from theologian Graham Ward, who considers multiple reasons why the evangelist might have included an account of Jesus’ circumcision.100 Like Jervell, he resists redactional arguments that reduce the significance of the passage to a mere “remnant” embedded in a fundamentally gentile account of salvation. Ward also wants to find something organic in Luke’s unique inclusion of this scene. Ward suggests: “To speak of the circumcision was making a cultural and political statement …. I suggest, whatever the implied readership of the text, a statement is being made here about embodiment (as early Christian exegetes understood) and about Jewish masculinity (and by implication femininity). It is a statement not just about religious and ethnic self-identity (as Jervell argued) but about the way certain figurations of the body are invested with cultural status. It says something, then, about the politics of embodiment.”101 Ward’s insistence on the “politics of embodiment” is intriguing; unfortunately, he does not then specify what that “something” might be that Luke is saying, other than that “Luke appears to be making a gesture of resistance to a cultural hegemony.”102 I am nonetheless sympathetic to his desire to move beyond the redaction-critical explanations of previous scholarship, away from interpretations that make the scene of the circumcision either ironic or nostalgic, and ask the question from a different angle: why is the gentiles’ messiah circumcised?
Here we need to return to the political and cultural contexts of circumcision, and to the power of the stereotype in the Roman world. There is no doubt that the Gospel of Luke is a document highly sensitive to empire: the very chapter that mentions the circumcision is framed by “Caesar Augustus” (Luke 2:1) and “Tiberius Caesar” (Luke 3:1).103 Moreover, Roman power is made to interact discursively with distinctive Jewish identity: the power of the imperial city intersects with the bygone Jewish autonomy of the “city of David” in Luke 2 just as the circumscribed power of the tetrarchs is subordinated to “Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea” in Luke 3. Finally, the Temple itself symbolizes acutely the domination of Rome over the province of Judea in the late first century and early second century. Certainly the destruction of that Temple in 70 CE would haunt those passages that portray Jesus and his relatives moving through the sacred precincts.104