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 with circumcision as a distinctly Christian sign. For these Christians, circumcision condensed and refracted broader discourses of stereotype, identity, and ambivalence. On the one hand, they intensified and amplified the Roman stereotype of circumcision as the paradigmatic, and ignominious, sign of “the Jew.” That is, the sign that distinguished Jews from—and made Jews comprehensible to—Romans now performed the same functions in a new, gentile, Christian idiom. At the same time, however, non-Jewish Christians also arrogated positive Christian meaning to this sign, as they claimed for themselves the title of Israel.113
The doubled view of circumcision finds its way into anti-Jewish literature early on:114 the Epistle of Barnabas, which probably dates from the mid-second century,115 sounds the twin notes of repudiation and appropriation that will become standard in the stereotypical discourses of early Christianity. The letter as a whole interweaves a defense of Christian practices (such as baptism) and theologies (such as the passion and the new covenant) with rejections of Jewish customs and practices. The chapter on circumcision opens with a metaphor drawn from the Hebrew Bible that would become a favorite of early Christians, the “circumcised” hearts and ears (Deut 10:16, 30:6; Jer 4:4, 6:10).116 The author goes further than this metaphorical, biblical language, however, and declares that God had never ordained fleshly circumcision for the Jews: “But even the circumcision in which they trusted has been nullified. For he has said that circumcision is not a matter of the flesh. But they transgressed because an evil angel instructed them.”117 This ascription of the rite of circumcision—alone among the Jewish covenant laws discussed in Barnabas—to an “evil angel” is an extraordinary step: “B. was not willing simply to argue for the truth of the purely symbolic interpretation of the rite (as he had for sacrifice, the temple, and the dietary laws), but to demonise it.”118 Even as this sign is plotted in a distinctly religious register (the domain of angels and demons), it is simultaneously removed from the Roman economy of signs: “But you will say: Surely the people were circumcised as a seal. So is every Syrian and Arab and all the priests of the idols: so are they also part of their covenant? Even the Egyptians have circumcision!”119 Circumcision no longer retains its particular stereotypical signification in the Roman symbolic order, setting Jews apart from other provincial populations. A new system of stereotypes has taken its place; although circumcision still indicates the peculiar (demonic) quality of the Jews, Christians have seized that system of signs from Roman hands.
Yet as strong as Barnabas’s “demonization” of Jewish circumcision seems, his recuperation of the Christian meaning of this rite is equally remarkable. This chapter of the Epistle of Barnabas may contains the earliest example of Christian gematria, the symbolic interpretation of letters through their numeric equivalents (possible since ancient languages used the same symbols for letters and numbers).120 Here, the author draws on the circumcision of Abraham’s household in the Hebrew Bible:121
Abraham,