This book uses the circumcision of Jesus as a lens through which to understand and examine Christian difference, self-definition and identity formation in late antiquity. Calling into question traditional models that have often explained the historical problem of Christian difference in terms of ‘boundaries, conflict and exclusion’ (p. 1), Andrew Jacobs's closely argued and highly compelling study attempts to devise a narrative that reconciles the paradoxical discourse of early Christian literature that emphasised unity and singularity alongside the persistent reality of diverse and multiple Christianities in the late antique period. Employing psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory in order to offer fresh readings on a multitude of early Christian texts including apologies, heresiologies, theological essays, ascetic treatises, homilies, biblical commentaries and exegetical texts, Jacobs examines the ideological function of Jesus' circumcision, as it was interpreted and imagined in the first centuries of Christianity, and determines that the history of religious difference was driven by abjection and hybridisation rather than the socioanthropological models that understood difference in terms of ‘self’ and the rejection of the ‘other.’

In his first chapter, Jacobs examines the concept of a Roman cultural economy of signs and determines that circumcision came to signify Jewishness and that this ‘mark of Judaism’ functioned as a stereotype to both support and undermine the Roman Empire's power and control of Jewish otherness. As with other colonial stereotypes, Jacobs rightly notes the complexity and ambiguous nature of the Jewish stereotype, which depended on the management of otherness through containment and appropriation, but never its erasure (p. 16). In support of the affirmation of this sign, Jacobs astutely notes the significance of circumcision among Jews and the shifting ways in which they envisioned this mark as a way to regain control and wrest back their sign and own Jewishness from Roman imperialism. Specifically, he argues that the mark becomes more ritualised and elaborate as a process for entering the covenanted community among rabbinic literature and interprets this shift in terms of the Jewish need to Judaize the Jewish sign (p. 21). These significations of the circumcision from both the insider and outsider perspectives frame Jacobs's examination of Christian texts on circumcision in general, and Jesus' circumcision in particular. Offering new political and cultural insights into Paul's texts, Jacobs suggests that Paul's resistance to circumcision can also be interpreted as social and political markers of cultural resistance in the Roman economy of cultural signs. According to Jacobs, Paul did not reject circumcision, but rather emphasised the need to internalise and spiritualise this mark. Whether Jesus' circumcision in Colossians should be read literally or figuratively, Jacobs argues that the result of bringing circumcision in contact with Christ was the Christianisation of circumcision; that is, the mark becomes no longer under Jewish or Roman control, but rather is open to multiple and new meanings. Jacobs finds the expression of these new meanings in Luke's Gospel and other Christian texts including the Epistle of Barnabas, the writings of Justin Martyr, Origen and Cyprian. In these writings, Jesus' circumcision is reinterpreted, reinscribed and appropriated as a Christian marker, thus further blurring the religious boundaries between Jewish and Christian, and also Roman, identity.

In his second and third chapters, Jacobs examines the construction and blurring of boundaries between Jews and Christians in the late antique period by exploring anti-Jewish dialogue texts and Christian heresiological writings respectively. Looking closely at Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, Origen's Against Celsus, the later Altercation of Simon the Jew and Theophilus, the Liber quaestionum of Ambrosiaster and the Quaestiones ad ducem Antiochum, Jacobs reveals how Christians projected, reinscribed and internalised their own Jewish otherness in the imagination of Christ's circumcision. Jacobs concludes that these ‘differentiating rhetorics disclose a sense of permeability and indeterminacy that re-Judaizes even as it de-Judaizes’ (p. 44) since Christ's circumcision, the symbol of Jewishness par excellence, on the body of Christ was a ‘paradigmatic symbol of Jewish-Christian paradox and contradiction’. Building on the work of Julia Kristeva, Jacobs reads the effects of orthodoxy and heresy articulations on Christian boundary-making in heresiological writings in terms of abjection, that is not rejection or exclusion of the ‘other’, but rather the partial absorption and internalisation of the ‘other,’ which leaves the boundaries between the ‘self’ and ‘other’, above all, ambiguous. Jacobs points to the circumcision of Christ as the signal of early Christian orthodox abjection. Focusing on the theme of scriptural ideas on the relationship between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ covenant and the metaphysical and ascetic writings on the person of Jesus from the second through the sixth centuries, Jacobs examines the writings of Tertullian, Marcion, Augustine and Faustus, Athanasius of Alexandria, Amphilochius of Iconium, Jovinian and Jerome, and argues against traditional readings of the heretic as the rejected other, positioning instead the heretic as the abject figure of Christian identity (p. 98).

In chapter iv, the modern scholarly construct of ‘Jewish Christianity’, as well as theoretical discussions of hybridity, are brought into the discussion of identity-making. Specifically, Jacobs examines the Ebionites whose claims to both Jewish and Christian traditions provide an ideal example of a Jewish-Christian sect and articulate the construction of various Christian boundaries. Offering a close reading of the writings of Epiphanius, Jacobs focuses on the practice of circumcision to argue persuasively that the offence of the Ebionites (and other like groups), in Epiphanius' view, involved their incorrect participation in things correctly Jewish or piously Christian. Their attempt to stand midway between Judaism and Christianity resulted in a diabolical error and rendered their status null. In Jacobs's reading, Epiphanius necessarily affirms, embodies and internalises the Jewish truth of Jesus' circumcision in order to construct, appropriate and Christianise ‘true’ Judaism (i.e. a Judaism that accepts Christianity) (p.112). In chapter v, Jacobs examines the power of biblical commentaries (especially Lucan descriptions of Christ's circumcision) and the traditional view that held these texts to be conveyors of a single truth and a unified Christian voice. Interrogating a range of commentaries and sermons including those of Origen, Ephrem, Ambrose, Cyril of Alexandria, Proclus of Constantinople and Philoxenus, Jacobs brings to the forefront the reality of multiple and contradictory voices in early Christian thought on the paradox of the ‘otherness within’, as found on the circumcised body of Christ.

In his sixth and final chapter, Jacobs traces the ritualisation and inscription of Jesus’ circumcision through the celebration of the Feast of the Circumcision which emerged in churches across the Mediterranean and the Near East during the pre-Islamic period. In this highly Christian ritualised time and space, the call ‘to become circumcised like Christ’, evoked by the commemoration of the festival, engages the question of how difference was ritualised, problematised and inscribed and the ways in which Christian communal identities were shaped and scripted. In his thought-provoking conclusion, Jacobs explores the trope of ‘passing’. Initially developed as a narrative of racial camouflage in race literature of the nineteenth century, ‘passing’ was used as a way to describe and account for black individuals who could ‘pass’ for white. Jacobs astutely observes that the constant and repetitive Christian desire to articulate the difference between Christians and Jews reinforces the idea that difference was not obvious and ‘that Jews, Christians, orthodox and heretics were constantly “passing”, even unknowingly’ (p. 181). Applying this trope to Jesus' circumcision, Jacobs argues convincingly that Jesus too was a figure who ‘passes’ and that it was his circumcision, the signature Jewish mark of identity, that allowed him to pass as a Jew and as a male in early Christian thought. Thus Christians were able to imagine him as the occupier of the quintessential paradoxical space of both and neither, simultaneously rejecting and incorporating the essence of the ‘other’ and existing in a paradoxical formation of self – ‘true and false at the same time’ (p. 182). Jacobs writes that it was Jesus' paradoxical and contradictory mark that serves as a template for understanding the complex and interlocking Christian identity.

Jacobs should be commended for his sophisticated and masterfully written study on the circumcision of Christ and his fresh perspectives on Jewish and Christian identity, boundary-making, and the construction of orthodoxy and heresy in antiquity. Subjecting multiple and varied sources to a number of contemporary theoretical and interpretative models, Jacobs works easily with these approaches to highlight how Christ's circumcision can be used as a way to offer important insights into the complex duality of Judaism and Christianity. One of Jacobs's strengths is his ability artfully to guide his readers in and out of close readings of texts in order to see the broader implications of how Jesus' circumcision is used, understood or interpreted within each chapter. This fluidity, however, does not always translate to the book as a whole, so the reader is left at times to wonder about the connections between the chapters. Finally, in light of Jacobs's goal to examine Christian discourses of boundaries, differences and distinction, one might have hoped for more treatment of Jewish discourses on the circumcision beyond the brief tracing of rabbinic trends that saw increased attention to circumcision from the last century bce to the mid-second century ce. Problematic is the tendency in recent scholarship to focus on only one side of the identity and boundary-making equation. Readers would have benefitted greatly from Jacobs's careful reading of rabbinic texts as well as other Jewish documents as an important counterpart to his discussion of boundary-making. None the less this study is a highly persuasive and thought-provoking piece of work and contributes much to studies on Jewish and Christian identity, difference and distinction.