Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs
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which also appears in some biblical commentaries on Jesus’ circumcision, draws partially on the claim in Matthew 5:17 that Jesus came “not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.” While modern biblical scholars may argue that the evangelist’s intent here was to intensify and internalize the precepts of the Torah,126 ancient and medieval Christians understood “fulfillment” rather differently, as the response makes clear. Here “fulfillment” means something like “filling to the brim” or “paying in full.”127 Jesus has not simply observed the Law (perhaps a more straightforward sense of “fulfillment”); he has entirely satisfied it for all future generations, to the point that any further observance of the Law is not only moot but counterindicated. Thus, Jesus can go on to proclaim (through Paul) that circumcision is “of no benefit,” for Christ’s observance of the Law has completely filled it out.
Although the responder goes on to trace out the implications of this fulfillment (specifically, the fact that circumcision now serves only and entirely as a negative marker of “outsider” status for Christians), it is worth lingering over this creatively reimagined moment of Jesus’ circumcision. At this moment, gesturing ritually to his Jewish contemporaries and future Jewish critics, Jesus is at once embodying and emptying out the content of the Law. He is, at this one charged instant, completely filling and completely full of the Jewish Law, so completely full of Jewishness that he uses up all of the positive Jewishness in the cosmos. This Christian internalization of Jewish otherness, otherwise feared and derided in this short chapter and throughout the rest of the Questions, is compelling, to say the least. The reader must imagine Jesus at one and the same moment as intensely, overwhelmingly Jewish in his fulfillment of the Law (otherwise, some trace of obligation might remain) even as he de-Judaizes salvation for all time. The potentially threatening identification with a Jewish Jesus with which the question began has been only partly allayed: Jesus’ Jewishness lingers, potently, at this originary moment of Christian salvation. Any boundary making effected later in the response can therefore only be partial and incomplete. The other voice of the Jewish Law, “senseless” and “bloody,” echoes still.
Other Voices
Historians of early Jewish-Christian relations have, understandably, attended with some eagerness to the echoes of other voices embedded in ancient Christian dialogue texts. The temptation to recover the elusive voice of Jewish resistance as a counterpoint to the sheer volume of Christian polemic and apology is a worthy project. My goal in this chapter has not been to undermine such a task, but rather to nuance it. For the Christian act of appropriating and speaking in a Jewish voice conveys more than inadvertent historical data; it provides insight into the convoluted and contradictory processes by which ancient Christians formed their collective religious identities. The literary staging of a dialogue might preserve some authentic Jewish point of critique or belief; it also subsumes and internalizes that critique into the lines of a Christian text and transforms that Jewish voice into one carefully managed strain in the chorus of Christian culture.128
The circumcision of Christ, appearing occasionally in these dialogue texts, provides one tool for untangling this staged antiphony of Christian and Jewish voices. The freighted symbol of Jewish identity in the ancient Roman world could not but disrupt any sense of secure religious boundaries when imagined on the body of the Christian savior. Like the remainder of Jewishness on Christ’s body, Judaism in these texts is not elided or eliminated: it is preserved and hypostatized, reincarnated time and again, contained (perhaps) but always present. In some of the texts I have examined, such as Justin’s Dialogue, the problem of Judaism remains conspicuously unresolved. In Origen’s Contra Celsum and the later Latin Altercation of Simon and Theophilus, the circumcision of Christ signals how Christians could rewrite Judaism as a legible symbol of Christianity itself, transmuting the negatively coded Jewish traits of “Law” or “flesh” into positive Christian values. I introduce the erotapokriseis texts as an internalized form of Christian dialogue to demonstrate how profitably Christians might imagine their own identity as a chorus of (not always harmonious) voices even as they insisted on the monophonous singularity of orthodoxy. For Ambrosiaster or the serial authors of the Questions to Duke Antiochus, Christ’s circumcision at the same time celebrated and amplified anxieties about boundaries, making Jesus into a paradigmatic symbol of Jewish-Christian paradox and contradiction.
While these dialogic “encounters” with the other serve the particular goal of creating a sense of Christian community, the strategies by which other voices are conjured to construct Christian culture were neither unique nor entirely invented by Christians. That “culture” should be hybrid, polyphonous, and embedded in an asymmetrical confrontation with “others” lay, as we have seen many times so far, at the heart of Roman imperial identity. We must also keep in mind, however, that, by staging in so spectacular a fashion that confrontation with the “other” inside the empire, the Roman self was also rendered unstable, liable to the threatening otherness within.
Likewise circumcision, this symbol of Jewishness par excellence, came to be incorporated into the fractured singularity of Christian identity on Christ’s body. This assumption of Jewish otherness becomes visible to us through texts that most clearly and deliberately stage the multiple voices of self and other composing Christianity: the dialogue texts. Here, in texts traditionally read as the vanguard of religious boundary formation, we glimpse the partial and even contradictory ways in which Christianity configured itself vis-à-vis the Jewish other. Much like the cultural economy of Roman imperialism, moreover, this Christian staging of the simultaneous repudiation and internalization of difference could generate a fragile sense of self, always vulnerable to the other it maintains within.
Yet even as we can sketch a plausible historical context for such a maneuver in the analogous operations of Roman imperial culture, we can also attend to the lasting effects of this sly internalization of Jewish otherness that always supports yet threatens the coherence of cultural identity. Perhaps the Christian absorption of its originary Jewishness, evident in these dialogue texts through the paradoxical circumcision of Christ, has left its lasting marks on the formation of cultural identities even into our postmodern period.129 At the very least we can appreciate the resonances between the premodern and the postmodern that are made visible. Although speaking of twentieth-century articulations of race and hybridity, Robert Young’s description of “culture” works well for the strategies of an early Christian dialogic imagination as well: “Culture never stands alone but always participates in a conflictual economy acting out the tension between sameness and difference, comparison and differentiation, unity and diversity, cohesion and dispersion, containment and subversion.”130 As we turn now to consider a different category of Christian other, the heretic, we should nonetheless keep this sense of culture—unified and divided, contained and subverted—close at hand.
Chapter 3
Heresy, Theology, and the Divine Circumcision
The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions.
—Julia Kristeva
Abject Heresy
In the fifth century, Vincentius of Lerins famously described Christian orthodoxy as “that which everywhere, always, and by everyone was believed.”1 Traditionally, we have understood Vincentius to be asserting the continuity of orthodoxy through time and space.2 Yet we might hear this claim to singular discourse differently within the political framework of the late Roman Empire. As I explained in Chapter 1, no overarching “Romanness” defined participation in the Roman Empire. Rather, the empire existed by virtue of its ability to contain and manage difference. Reading historically between Vincentius’s lines, then, we might hear him trumpeting not continuous assent stretching back to the time of the apostles, but rather a more fluid economy of doctrinal control patterned on the cultural economy of Roman authority.3 Orthodoxy literally comprises all manner of Christian belief, even that which it seems to reject.
In this chapter, I explore how the articulation of orthodoxy and heresy simultaneously asserted and negated Christian boundaries, visible through