To consider Roman power, therefore, is to contemplate the triumph of the dialogic imagination of Rome—the back-and-forth between domestic metropolis and alien provinces—on a grand cultural and political stage.11
To reimagine in a similar fashion the formation of early Christian culture as the product of a shifting and unstable dialogic imagination is, in some ways, to continue and expand the work on “others” and boundaries that presently permeates the study of ancient religious identities, particularly our many “dialogue” texts.12 To read such texts dialogically, in a Bakhtinian sense, is to refuse the absolute separation of self and other that ancient Christians anxiously demand. Dialogues do not merely construct a boundary, isolating and segregating a Christian from a non-Christian. Dialogues internalize the other, creating fissures and contradictions within.13 If Christians persist in defining themselves in contradistinction to some other—pagan, heretic, or Jew—they make that other an indispensable part of “Christianness” (in the same way that “Rome” comes to be understandable through its relationship to “the provinces”).14
In this chapter I turn to examine the circumcision of Christ in a variety of “dialogue” texts in order to interrogate more deeply this Christian dialogic imagination, which both projects outward and internalizes a necessary other.15 My goal is to highlight the ambivalent and incomplete separation of “self” and “other” that lies beneath the totalizing veneer of early Christian discourses, with particular attention to Judaism. On Jesus’ body, the otherness of Judaism both articulates and disrupts the Christian self. Christ’s body becomes the site of a “de-Judaization” that is always incomplete, that continues to echo with the sound of Jewish origins.
I examine here two types of dialogue texts. I begin with the formal, “external” dialogues: texts that depict the explicit interaction between Christianity and Judaism. First, I look at Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew and Origen’s Against Celsus (with particular focus on the passages in which the pagan writer Celsus introduces a fictitious Jewish interlocutor to debate Jesus and the Christians). We have already met Justin and Origen in Chapter 1, where they contributed to the general transformation of Jewish circumcision into a distinctly (yet ambivalently) Christian sign. In this chapter, we see both Justin and Origen authoritatively appropriating the voice of Jewish otherness in the production of Christian truth and laying the groundwork for establishing Christ’s circumcision as thoroughly Jewish even as it articulates a logic of Christian supersession of Judaism. In stark contrast to these texts of seeming dialogic realism stands the later Altercation of Simon the Jew and Theophilus the Christian, a possibly early fifth-century dialogue that survives in a Latin recension. Here the voice of the other is but a tinny echo of an earlier Jewish intransigence, drowned out by the Christian voice in a manner that makes all too clear the ease with which a Christian could master and swallow up Jewish otherness.
In the final section of this chapter I turn to an internalized mode of Christian dialogic: the emerging literary genre of “question-and-answer” texts (erotapokriseis), in which the Christian subject is formally split—“never quite identical” with itself, in Eagleton’s words—in the fractured production of an ideal Christian identity. Here anonymous Christian ignorance replaces earlier Jewish opposition, creating a more subtle interiorization of Jewish challenge. Both sets of dialogic texts, the external dialogue and internalized erotapokriseis, inscribe the unrealized desire to establish that “horizon” where Judaism ends and Christianity begins. That horizon of religious difference remains intractably hazy: in the dialogic imagination of Christ’s circumcision, Christians repeatedly internalized the stark otherness of Judaism. Their differentiating rhetorics disclose a sense of permeability and indeterminacy that re-Judaizes even as it de-Judaizes.
Talking Back: Christian Dialogues
When analyzing the numerous dialogues of early Christian literature, scholars are often caught up in trying to tease out the social reality of the dialogue setting.16 Some historians prefer to read these texts addressed to “outsiders”—such as the second- and third-century apologies, or the various adversus Iudaeos texts framed as responses to intractable Jews—as evidence of real, antagonistic interaction.17 The apologists are responding to real pagan criticisms (and perhaps even expect that the imperial authorities to whom they address their “defenses” will be sympathetically responsive); the treatises adversus Iudaeos are likewise reacting to the criticisms of real Jews encountered in the public square, in formal or spontaneous debate. Others prefer to interpret these texts as internal documents, produced to delineate the boundaries of Christianity for insiders using the fiction of external animosity.18 The intended audience is not a Roman governor or recalcitrant synagogue, but the occasionally wavering convert, or the dedicated neophyte eager to 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