Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs
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the Abrahamic covenant, Christ’s circumcision reveals the truth about circumcision in general: that this Jewish sign was, in truth, a sign to the gentiles, and always had been. Ambrosiaster’s answer doubly inscribes the (seeming) Jewishness of Jesus and the absolute non-Jewishness of Christianity in the same stroke.
In this one condensed dialogic moment, we glimpse both the desired “horizon” between Christianity and Judaism and its determined lack of definition. Christ, in his circumcision, embodies this moment of heteroglossia, particularly through his representation of both “carnal” and “spiritual” truths. On the one hand in this passage, as elsewhere in the Liber quaestionum (and throughout early Christian writings) the categories of carnalis and spiritualis function as a shorthand for the qualitative difference between Jews, mired in the blindness of the fleshly Law, and Christians, liberated by spiritual grace.114 So the Christian questioner can rest assured that he need not fear finding himself on the wrong side of that divide: he is a spiritual “son,” like all faithful believers, part of the blessed “nations.” Christ’s revelation of the truth of circumcision thus affirms the Christian’s spiritual superiority.
Yet we note that this spiritual surety is guaranteed by the son “according to the flesh,” whose literal, physical descent from Abraham—as well as his submission to the literal, physical seal of circumcision—will always, of necessity, create a kind of kinship with “real” Jews. Christ’s circumcision is effective in its revelation and fulfillment because it is carnalis, in exactly the fashion that the Jews persist in their circumcisio carnalis. We have already seen how the Jewishness of Christ’s circumcision remains visible in the external dialogues, affirmed by the literal voice of Jewish interlocutors. Although here the Jewish interlocutor has been replaced with a faceless Christian, the visibility of the Jewish other remains, on the surface of Christ’s body and in the theological logic of his actions. It is not enough for the Christian to claim spiritual truth, he must also acknowledge its fleshly basis. In Ambrosiaster’s terse reply we hear the doubled voice of Christian dialogic: the utter rejection, and appropriation, of Jewish otherness.
Ps.-Athanasius and “Duke Antiochus”
By nature, the erotapokriseis is a flexible form—much like biblical commentary, which I discuss further in Chapter 5—ever expanding to include more questions, different answers, and varying voices of Christian inquiry. The relatively well-known Liber quaestionum of Ambrosiaster itself comes down to us in multiple textual traditions, with contents ranging from 115 to 151 questions and answers.115 Pseudonymous sets of questions in the later Latin West and Greek East provided a similarly flexible format, not only for containing the anxiety of theological uncertainties but for safely expanding the subtextual chorus of voices in this Christian heteroglossia.116 The internalized anxiety over the circumcision of Christ, we should not be surprised to learn, receives ongoing attention in this format.
The question-and-answer text known as the Quaestiones ad ducem Antiochum was, by the seventh century or so, ascribed to Athanasius of Alexandria. While Athanasius’s writings provide one of the many sources for the compilation of this erotapokriseis text, its authorship and provenance are otherwise unknown.117 The most common surviving Greek version probably dates from the seventh or eighth century,118 and possibly betrays the influence of the rise of Islam;119 these Questions to Duke Antiochus may even have been edited and adapted until the time of the Crusades.120 While most erotapokriseis can be considered something of a hodgepodge, bringing together heresiology, scriptural commentary, philosophy, cosmology, and a myriad other Christian discourses, the Questions is a notably disjointed conglomeration of a wide variety of sources held together by little more than an enduring title and textual transmission.121 Various “sources” can be identified—especially prominent Christian writers of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries—but my interest here is not source criticism. Rather I seek to gain insight into the ways ancient and early medieval Christians created a space for the dialogic cacophony of different voices even as they were ostensibly refining and narrowing the bounds of “orthodox” identity. Certainly a loud voice in that babel, for the author(s) of the Questions, was the insistent voice of Jewish criticism and the equally pressing call for sharp, diverse responses.122
The question concerning Christ’s circumcision comes among other discussions of ritual correctness, stated here even more baldly than in Ambrosiaster’s Book of Questions: “Why, since Christ was circumcised, are we not also circumcised like him?”123 Here is Athanasius’s answer in full:
Christ, being the Son of God, came to fulfill the Law, so that he would not be considered hostile to God (
The result therefore is that we recognize clearly that all those who have been circumcised are strangers to Christ (
For just like all those who, supposing they can offer sacrifice to God through blood and senseless creatures, nullify and make abominable the bloodless sacrifice of Christ: so all those who have been circumcised in the flesh revile and reject the spiritual circumcision, that is, holy baptism; for the one is like the other.
For not in the Law did Christ render the devil and the demons powerless, nor did he effect salvation through it: but in the cross. So the demons do not look upon the Law with fear and trembling, but rather when they see the cross they tremble and flee, and they are rendered powerless and chased away.125
Several arguments from earlier dialogues and other Christian explications of the circumcision of Christ are expressed here in a variety of “voices.” On the one hand, Christ seems to ameliorate his own baffling circumcision with the Pauline exhortation on the uselessness of the act (recall that Origen similarly juxtaposed Paul’s words with Christ’s actions). For Ps.-Athanasius, these words remind good Christians that circumcision becomes the ultimate mark of non-Christianness, by which both “Jews and gentiles” can be recognized and excluded. Like all other marks of the “Law of Moses,” such as sacrifice, circumcision is rendered ineffective by the world-transforming act of Christ’s salvation in which all Christians should hope to participate. Do demons quake at the sight of sacrifice or (we are led to imagine) circumcision? No, it is the sign of the cross that drives away evil.
Such an answer is, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation for Christian noncircumcision, ultimately reaching back to interpretations of Paul himself: to trust in the Law is to doubt in the cross, and lose salvation. This answer does little, however, to explain Christ’s own circumcision. Surely it was not to mark him as outside the community of the faithful? Surely good Christians posing the query are not to understand by this response that Christ himself misplaced his trust in the Law? No, the beginning of the response clarifies this for us—in some ways. For, as we can see, Christ’s circumcision was at once a scrupulous adherence to the Law and a total obliteration of that Law.
First there is the idea of Christ’s ministerial condescension, which we saw Theophilus invoke in the Altercation. For Jews—both in the period of the New Testament and, we learn, even unto the (nebulous) time of the questioner—“have accused” Christ of being “hostile to God” (
