Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs
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from his household eighteen men and three hundred.” What knowledge, then, was given to him? Learn that first there are the eighteen and then, after a pause, he says “three hundred.” For “eighteen”: iota is ten and ēta is eight: you have [the first two letters of] Jesus (
Circumcision here is not just reinterpreted through Jesus, it is actually equated with Jesus, and the crucifixion, and the entire scheme of Christian messianic redemption. This remarkable act of resignification allows the author at once to repudiate Jewish circumcision (as it exists among actual Jews) and reappropriate it as a mark of distinction through (as) Jesus.
Other early Christians attempted to maintain this doubled view of Jewish circumcision, often through the prophetic metaphor of “circumcision of the heart.” Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew begins by locating his interlocutor, the Jew Trypho, squarely in the realm of the Roman political and cultural economy: “I am a Hebrew of the circumcision,” Trypho supposedly tells Justin upon meeting him, “fleeing the war just now taking place, sojourning in Greece, mainly in Corinth.”123 “The war” refers to the so-called Bar Kokhba revolt—prompted, some scholars have posited, by a Hadrianic ban on circumcision124—which had left Jerusalem devastated and the very province of Judea absorbed and renamed. Trypho’s situation, like that of Suetonius’s old Jewish tax dodger, registers both the anomaly of the “other” in Roman society as well as his legibility to the imperial gaze.
Justin affirms the designating function of Trypho’s circumcision: “For the circumcision from Abraham according to the flesh was given as a sign, so that you may be separated from other nations and from us; and so that you alone may suffer that which now you now justly suffer; and so that your lands may become deserted, and your cities burned up; and so that foreigners may eat your fruit in your presence, and not one of you may go up to Jerusalem. For not by anything else are you recognized among the other people than from the circumcision of your flesh.”125 The function of circumcision for Justin extends far beyond tax collection, however. The “just punishments” executed by the Roman army have a distinctly Christian logic: “Now these things have happened to you well and justly. For you have slain the Just One, and his prophets before him. And now you reject those who have hope in him and in him who sent him, the Almighty and the Creator of all things, God, and as much as you can you dishonor him, cursing in your synagogues those who believe in Christ.126 For you do not have the authority to become murderous against us, on account of those who now are in charge.”127 “Those who are now in charge” are the Romans, but the real power at work is “the Almighty,” who has devised a punishment for the blasphemous Jews as well as a sign to distinguish those who are to be punished. Circumcision is a Roman marker deployed by a Christian God. Once more the figure of Jesus—here crucified and daily avenged—intervenes to rewrite the script of Roman-provincial relations.
The figure of Jesus also reinscribes the sign of circumcision as a positive Christian marker, the “second circumcision” (
As in the Epistle of Barnabas, the moral purification of Christian circumcision is identified with, and performed by, Jesus himself. Justin explains this through a numerical association between the law of circumcision and the resurrection of Jesus:131 “Now the command of circumcision, ordering that these always take place on the eighth day, was an image (τύπος) of the true circumcision, in which we are circumcised from every error and wickedness through the one who rose from the dead on the first day following the Sabbath, Jesus Christ our Lord: for the first day following the Sabbath is also the first day of all the days, but according again to the count of the cycle of all the days is called the eighth, while it remains the first.”132 Resurrected on the eighth day of the week, Jesus both embodies and performs a “true circumcision,” a moral purgation of the community formed in him. Christians are constituted (in Pauline language) as the body of Christ, and that body has been circumcised.
The association between resurrection and circumcision recalls the connection between circumcision and baptism that some scholars, as we have seen, find in Colossians 2:12. It is debatable whether Justin himself makes this connection, although twice in the Dialogue he seems to come close.133 Early in the Dialogue, he exhorts Trypho and his companions to abandon Jewish “foolishness” and embrace true religion: “Wash therefore, and make yourselves clean, and remove the wickedness from your souls [Isa 1:16], as God orders you to be washed in this bath, and be circumcised in the true circumcision.”134 Later, speaking once more of “spiritual (
But just as Roman stereotypes simultaneously affirmed the totality of Rome while dangerously embedding the non-Roman other within, Christian circumcision likewise created and disrupted religious boundaries. In the mid-third century, Cyprian of Carthage was surprised to learn that at least one North African bishop was adapting the “law of ancient circumcision” to regulate infant baptisms in his church. Specifically, this bishop, Fidus, was taking up wholesale the “eight-day” standard of infant circumcision and using it to argue that no infant should be baptized before its eighth day.140 This literal transference of circumcision law to baptismal regulation troubled Cyprian and his fellow bishops, precisely because it blurred the boundary between “old” and “new” Israel that circumcision normally articulated. They reiterated to the bishop that literal, Jewish, carnal circumcision had been but a “type” (imago) which had “ceased with the supervention of truth.”141 Cyprian and his episcopal colleagues find that they must insist on circumcision as an institution of distinction and boundary: “we think that no one should be kept from obtaining grace because of a law which was previously instituted,