With Christ Circumcised, Andrew Jacobs offers a fresh, erudite, and theoretically astute approach to the study of Christian difference. Seeking to move beyond the inadvertent reification of (imagined) communal limits, Jacobs interprets the early Christian longing for distinction as expressive of identification and desire. Christian writers did not successfully expel, disavow, manage, marginalize or cut off “the Jew,” “the heretic,” or the circumcised other within, nor did they actually want to accomplish these goals. Instead, their discourses of difference expose the fragmentation that lies at the very heart of quests for fixed identities and bounded selves. Adapting insights from psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies and critical theory, Jacobs regards Christian fantasies of difference as evidence of the failure of every classificatory scheme. Jesus’ foreskin, he shows, served as a particularly evocative site upon which the interplay of fixation and attachment with differentiation and splitting could be negotiated. Circumcision may be a tiny cut, but the missing foreskin of the infant Jesus remained a generative paradox for the early Christians, one that constructed and confounded a twinned desire for boundaries and for the erasure of these same boundaries.
The book begins with an examination of Roman and Jewish attitudes toward circumcision. Building on recent studies of the nature of “Romanitas,” Jacobs interprets Roman denigration of “clipped Jews” (Iudaei curti) as part of a broader epistemological structure that employed stereotyping to incorporate, dominate, and subsume an “other.” Romans took pride in their ability to appropriate diverse peoples into their ideological and geographical realms, an ideology that required subject populations to remain visibly different and yet ever present. The all-seeing imperial gaze, however, could never be fully confident in its visionary acumen, even after stripping off a man's clothes to expose his genitals. Circumcision operated at the fault lines of this economy of Roman-Jewish difference, available to Romans and Jews both as they negotiated the limits of Roman/Romanized and Jew/Judaized. Writers like the apostle Paul and his early disciples participated in this oversaturation of circumcision with identitarian significance, making foreskins (or their absence) a slippery sign of Christ-following Jewishness or, ultimately, Christian-ness, leaving Jesus’ own circumcision provocatively unresolved.
Chapters 2 and 3 consider references to Jesus’ circumcision in the context of two important literary genres, the dialogue and the apology. The dialogue form projects difference outward while internalizing that same difference, a particularly effective tool in an adversus Iudaeos tradition that inscribed Christian difference, at least in part, on the genitals of the Savior. Directed at a purported enemy within, apology internalizes the other even while (allegedly) pursuing that other's expulsion. In this literature, Jesus’ circumcision provided an occasion for diverse reflections on two central paradoxes: the humanity and inhumanity of Christ and the ultimate impossibility of a bounded orthodox unity. In both the dialogue and the apology as they emerged in the second through the seventh centuries, the Jew and the heretic were repeatedly repudiated and re-absorbed through the central metaphor of Christ's bodily circumcision.
Chapters 4 and 5 consider the place of Jesus’ foreskin in two important early Christian classification projects: the search for the “Jewish Christian” and the attempt to defend a scriptural unity in the face of literary and canonical polyphony. Rather than representing a now-lost evolutionary link in an inevitable march toward Gentile-dominated Christianity, the “heretics” identified in modern historiography as “Jewish Christians” are better understood as frightening instances of a hybridity that was simultaneously desired and threatening. Identifying and then seeking to weed out monstrous mixtures like the Ebionites, Christian writers adapted the epistemological structures of Romanitas to new ends, subjecting “the Jew within” to a Christian specular economy that found in circumcision an embodied evidence of distinctive sameness-difference. The developing tradition of the biblical commentary also enabled theologians to manage bewildering diversity, in this case of authoritative texts. Seeking a singular truth from the perplexing bounty of God's scriptures, the dual acts of becoming Word and being flesh were neatly summarized by the mute fact of Jesus’ missing foreskin. Why would God incarnate condescend to submit to a law-bound and “Jewish” act of genital mutilation? The many commentators who engaged Luke 2:21 offered various responses to this question, but each found in it a potent example of the mysterious paradox at the heart of the incarnation.
Turning from literary evidence to practice, the final chapter addresses the emerging festal calendars of late antique churches and examines the meanings given to the Feast of the Circumcision (January 1). By the fifth century, the contemplation of Jesus’ human activities had become a new ritual focus, condensing and refracting the sophisticated theological debates that characterized elite literary activity from this same period. In this context, the Feast of the Circumcision offered an occasion for homiletical musings on Christ's self-abasement that invited congregants to teeter on the edge of their own Judaizing desires. As such, late antique and early medieval homilists blurred the lines of self and other only to reconstruct these lines once more by cutting away the alleged depravity of Jewishness for the sake of reinstituting a more fully Christian present.
Jacobs ends this sometimes dizzying and yet always rich exploration of nearly six centuries of early Christian literature by applying the contemporary trope of “passing” to some of the same texts considered earlier. As he points out, the invention of ancient Christian subjectivities involved the repeated articulation of fantasies of difference that were at once real and unreal; unreal in the sense that all human theories are invented, not given, but real in the sense that communal fantasies have genuine implications for the bodies that both participate in and are subject to them. Passing, a narrative of racial camouflage invented in the nineteenth century, implies that the body's surfaces can be disastrously misread, which in turn exposes the fictional nature of racial categories more generally. Similarly, the early Christian fixation on Christ's circumcision reveals that orthodoxy was a fiction in need of constant reinvention. In this book, Jacobs refuses to participate in that particular project, preferring instead close readings of texts that, as he clearly demonstrates, are often divided against themselves.
