Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 Therefore I would heartily agree with Ward that Luke is engaged with “cultural hegemony,” more specifically, with the cultural economy of signs and stereotypes in which circumcision circulated.¹⁰⁵

      If Luke is not preserving a bygone sense of Jewish “self-identity” (his own or another’s), how might we interpret his intervention into the Roman cultural economy of stereotypes? Several alternatives are possible (and I think any or all of them may be present to a certain degree: cultural discourse is necessarily heterogeneous). Scholars have often read Luke-Acts as politically conciliatory, portraying sympathy to the Roman Empire.¹⁰⁶ Paul Walaskay’s formulation is even stronger, claiming that Luke-Acts functions not only as an apologia pro ecclesia to the Empire, but as an apologia pro imperio to the church: “Luke … has high regard for the imperial government and for those who administer it.”¹⁰⁷ If Luke is theologically structured, in part, as a positive response to the Roman Empire, we might read Jesus’ circumcision as a concession to the cultural economy of symbols that permeated the empire. Where Paul resisted the legibility of circumcision as a sign of Judaism to the Romans, Luke embraces it: the circumcised messiah is “Jewish,” therefore, only insofar as he is also Romanized, visible and comprehensible to the knowing eye of Rome. If the founder of the Way can be comprehended by the imperial gaze, so can his followers. The participation of the messianic and divine figure in the cultural economy of Rome paves the way for an entirely conciliatory discourse of Christian identity.

      But the discourse of stereotype, “as anxious as it is assertive,”¹⁰⁸ is rarely so straightforward; even if Luke is seeking, on some level, to acknowledge and defer to the authority of Roman signs, he is also taking it upon himself to manipulate and reinterpret those signs. This paradox informs Homi Bhabha’s understanding of the function of stereotype in the colonial encounter: the good colonial subject takes on the legible signs of identity expected by the colonizer, but in that gesture makes those signs her or his own. Roman stereotypes in the hands of an outsider—the provincial, the object of the gaze, not its master—are always potentially subversive.

      Like the later sages, who would attempt to reclaim control over their sign from Rome through ritualization, Luke’s circumcised messiah may be read through the lens of mimicry. By placing Jesus squarely within the cultural economy of Roman signs, by signifying him as Jew in the opening chapters, Luke can subvert both the sign Jew and the Roman system of signification that encodes it.¹⁰⁹ Gary Gilbert has pointed out the ways in which Luke’s Pentecost narrative in Acts 2 adapts a “well-established method of political propaganda” and “presents an alternative to Roman ideology and challenges Rome’s position as ruler of the inhabited world.”¹¹⁰ In a similar geographic vein, Laura Nasrallah explores how the journeys of Paul in Acts effectively “mimic the logic of empire without shading into mockery.”¹¹¹ Both of these studies point out the ways that Luke mimes and appropriates Roman culture for theological (and political) purposes.

      So too may we read the body of Jesus, appropriately—but a bit oddly—signified as that of a Jewish male. It is no stretch to read this sign, crafted in the shadow of an imperial census conducted at the city of David, as deliberately engaging Roman cultural power in the provinces. Its value, however, is destabilized in Luke’s hands, rendered opaque by the ambiguity of circumcision, Law, and Temple throughout Luke-Acts. By only partially acknowledging the power of Rome to assort and categorize its other subjects, Luke destabilizes that power, makes it his own. At the same time, the desire of (some) Jews to slip beyond the bounds of Roman specular authority is also thwarted and undermined: Jesus is irrevocably (but still a bit ambiguously) marked by the preeminent sign of Judaism at the same time he is inscribed (but also a bit ambiguously) into the imperial Roman census. Just as the name given by God’s angel is also the name registered by Roman power, so too the covenantal sign ordained by God is also the sign sought by Roman authority (as Suetonius’s old man attests). On the person of Jesus, both those systems of power and identity are disrupted and reorganized. Jesus is Judaized, and thereby Romanized, but in both senses he is not quite a Jew and not quite a Roman. It makes a kind of sense that the sign unproblematically taken up by the messiah in the Gospel of Luke should be cleanly demoted and minimized in the Acts of the Apostles.

      In many ways Luke is Paul’s intellectual and theological descendant, organizing what he perceived as Pauline principles (especially the mission to gentiles) in a nonapocalyptic register. But it is not quite accurate to say that Luke and Paul agree on the role of “Law,” or circumcision, in the new covenant.¹¹² As I have suggested, for Paul circumcision was a dangerous sign at least partly because it rendered the people of God legible and apprehensible to Roman, worldly power. His successor in the letter to the Colossians first attempted to resignify that sign, make it less dangerous, by bringing it into contact with the body of Christ: there, circumcision was drawn into an opaque swirl of literal and figurative signs of salvation. The author of the Gospel of Luke takes us further, placing that sign directly on Jesus’ infant body; there it acts not merely as a sign of capitulation to Roman power, but as a mimicry of that power. Jesus circumcised sets his followers on the path to the annulment of this doubly Jewish-Roman system of signification.

      Christian Circumcision

      By the second century—around the time, possibly, that Luke’s ambivalent verses on Christ’s circumcision began to circulate—gentile Christian authors had begun contending СКАЧАТЬ