Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs

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СКАЧАТЬ bolster his or her newly adopted religious persona. A common assumption on all sides of such debates is that these Christian texts of dialogue give us insight into an evolving and hardening array of Christian boundaries: whether the “pagan” or “Jew” addressed in the Christian text is “real” or not, he or she is believed to create for the Christian a clear sense of the otherness that must lie beyond the Christian pale.

      I propose instead to hear these texts as part of the religious and cultural polyphony that produced Christianity, the anxious heteroglossia of Christian culture: the multiple and contradictory discourses that are jarringly juxtaposed in the service of crafting a social identity. Such a reading does not deny that Christians might have intended their texts for pagan or Jewish audiences, with missionary or polemical goals; nor does it rule out the possibility that these texts served internal purposes of reassurance and self-definition (or even, as scholars often end up claiming, that such texts could serve multiple purposes).¹⁹ My goal is to shift our understanding of these “self-differentiating” texts altogether, away from assumptions about boundaries and the establishment of difference.

      The textualization of religious difference may bring not logical resolution but dialogical irresolution: the problems of difference (and similarity) are not resolved, but rather enacted, creating the sense of a boundary (between speaker and interlocutor) without finite closure. The heteroglossic nature of Christian religious culture is thus produced and reproduced: projected ostensibly “outward” into the person of a Jewish “other,” but safely constrained within the lines of a Christian text. The circumcision of Christ, likewise the strange container of difference on the paradigmatic body of the savior, emerges as the particularly apt signal of such a project.

       Justin Martyr and Trypho the Jew

      One of the earliest appearances of Christ’s circumcision in early Christian literature is in the only surviving second-century “Jewish-Christian dialogue” text, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew.²⁰ Justin is notable among the earliest Christian writers for demonstrating his mastery of “orthodox” Christianity through literary refutations of deviant heresy, recalcitrant Judaism, and impious paganism.²¹ It is tempting to read Justin as an orthodox triumphalist, whose multivocality gave his readers of a sense of security and the ability to “answer back” authoritatively to any and all outside criticism. Yet Justin’s texts, particularly the very long Dialogue,²² also disrupt that sense of security by preserving, even hypostatizing, such criticism. The Dialogue is a notoriously difficult text to parse—both in historical and literary terms—as a straightforward text of Jewish-Christian differentiation. Despite Justin’s frequently rancorous tone throughout the long Dialogue,²³ the very dialogic nature of the text hints at ongoing communication and rapprochement: the shared desire to determine what divides Jew from Christian cannot help but gesture at what holds them together. I am not suggesting that, beneath a veneer of discourtesy and acrimony, Justin is trying to get in touch with his “inner Jew”; to the contrary, I think the text lays out for us the ways in which gentile Christians of the second century felt haunted by that “inner Jew,” and sought to confront, domesticate, and humble him. Yet at the same time, this early text illustrates the ways in which such efforts at confrontation and domestication lack clear resolution.²⁴

      The discussion of Christ’s circumcision in the Dialogue exemplifies the frustrated attempts of Christianity to confront its originary Jewishness. The appearance of this stereotypical mark of Jewish identity and symbol of “the Law” on Jesus’ body should be especially noteworthy in a text whose “core … is the vindication of what today we would call supersession” (to quote Tessa Rajak),²⁵ focused particularly on the failure of that Jewish Law. For much of the Dialogue, Justin and Trypho debate Jesus’ status as the true messiah, with particular focus on his fulfillment of prophecy.²⁶ In earlier chapters, Justin manages to convince Trypho that many scriptural elements of the messiah could be seen in the life of Jesus. Trypho, however, balks at the virgin birth. He dismisses Justin’s Greek version of Isaiah 7:14, and instead asks whether it wouldn’t make more sense to believe that Jesus was appointed to the messiahship because of his perfect conformity to the Law of Moses. Could this not be the basis on which Jew and Christian come to agree on Jesus as the Christ?

      At this moment of potential dialogic convergence, Justin pulls away dramatically. The bulk of the Law, he insists, was not given to the Jews as a source of redemption, but rather as a punishment and mark of their continual disobedience.²⁷ If the Law is not a sign of salvation, it cannot be a mark of the Savior. Trypho tries again. He points out that even Justin’s own description of Jesus suggests otherwise, that Jesus did bear the mark of the Law and could therefore satisfy Jewish expectations: “But you have confessed to us (

) both that he was circumcised and that he kept all of the legal precepts () ordained through Moses!”²⁸ (It is worth noting that there is, in fact, no point in the Dialogue prior to this assertion where Justin makes such a “confession” to Trypho.) Trypho insists that Jesus’ exemplary and voluntary Jewishness can provide a key to the messianic rapprochement of Jew and Christian.

      Justin, however, continues to demur. Justin does not deny that his “confession” accurately portrays what Justin believes about Jesus’ life (i.e., he was circumcised); but neither does he accede to Trypho’s reading of Christ’s circumcision. Instead, Justin chooses to recontextualize Jesus’ circumcision and, along with it, Jesus’ seeming submission to Jewish Law. According to Justin, circumcision in this one, special case is no longer a sign of Jewish obeisance, but rather a unique symbol of divine redemption: “And I replied: ‘I have confessed it, and I do confess. But I confessed that he underwent all of these things not as if he were made righteous (

) through them, but bringing to fulfillment () the dispensation that his father—creator of all things, Lord, and God—wished. For likewise I confess that he underwent fatal crucifixion and that he became a human being and that he suffered as many things as those members of your people arranged for him!’”²⁹ Christ’s circumcision did not demonstrate Jesus’ admirable Jewishness: on the contrary, it was of a piece with the redemptive suffering “arranged” by Trypho’s Jewish confrères, a mark not of fraternization but of alienation. Despite appearances, Christ’s submission to the Law connotes the eradication of legal righteousness, and the establishment of the boundary between Jew and Christian. Circumcision was just one more indignity that Christ suffered in order to redeem humanity, to end the “old dispensation” of the Lord and bring the righteous to a “new dispensation” (a non-Jewish dispensation) ordained by God.³⁰

      This biographical redirection mirrors Justin’s cosmic reinterpretation of the Law, and the division between Christianity and Judaism. In a move that is theologically unsurprising, but still notable in a “dialogue,” Justin claims to understand the Jewish Law more accurately than his Jewish interlocutor. The fact that the Christian savior took the Law upon himself (through such acts as circumcision) appears, in part, to authorize this rhetorical move: now Christians who understand the full scope of salvation through their redeemer can likewise understand in fullness the older dispensation of the Law which that savior took on himself. Yet upon closer examination, Justin’s argument remains tantalizingly vague.³¹ On the one hand, the very Jewishness of Christ’s circumcision provides Justin his warrant for a superior understanding of the Law: he can correct Trypho’s misapprehension of Jesus’ acts and therefore the true relationship of Law and messiah. On the other hand, the uniqueness of Jesus’ circumcision also allows Justin to argue for the dissolution of that Law. Jesus’ circumcision is Jewish (in that it opens up the Jewish Law to the clear perception СКАЧАТЬ