of the birth of King Hezekiah to his “maiden” mother) while the Christian side is figural: Justin’s own interpretation of Isaiah 7 in the Dialogue with Trypho stands as an early and classic example.73 Here, however, the Jewish position is represented as too freewheeling and allegorical—the “virgin” as Zion—while the Christian insists that the literally carnal interpretation must take priority. In essence, Theophilus reverses the exegetical stream: claiming both the “carnal,” or Jewish, interpretation alongside the allegorical, spiritual reading. Jesus’ circumcision, then, represents this Christian absorption of Jewish carnality. Just as Christ took on circumcision, but seemingly only as proof of his universal humanity, so too Theophilus appropriates the fleshly, Jewish mode of reading as part and parcel of universal Christian truth.
Simon is, predictably, convinced by Theophilus’s Christianizing interpretation.74 The discussion moves on to other aspects of Jesus’ messiahship, and soon to the new covenant ushered in by Christ’s advent. Simon returns to the question of circumcision: “We indeed read many things, but we do not understand them in that way. So I want to understand, one by one, each of the things I ask you to be proven by the evidence of truth. Now, because God instructed that circumcision be performed, which he first entrusted to the patriarch Abraham, and which you professed earlier that Christ underwent (quam circumcisionem Christum habuisse superius professus es), how then are you going to persuade me to believe, you who forbid circumcision?”75 Simon picks up Theophilus’s earlier thread of the circumcision of Christ in such a way as to allow Theophilus to introduce the familiar Pauline trope of Abraham’s righteousness “before he was circumcised” (priusquam circumcideretur; see Rom 4:10). For Theophilus, Abraham’s dual status—uncircumcised believer and circumcised believer—presages the dual nature of the universal church, “showing that two peoples would come into the faith of Christ: one would come having been circumcised and one would come still having the foreskin.” Following Simon’s lead, Theophilus moves directly from Abraham’s circumcision to Christ’s: “For if Christ had not been circumcised, how would you believe me today or the prophets, who say that Christ came from the seed of David? Circumcision is in fact a sign of race, not of salvation (circumcisio enim signum est generis, non salutis).”76 Theophilus’s response is, as before, a mixture of literal and figurative interpretation, of de-Judaizing and re-Judaizing exegesis. For, on the one hand, the general thrust of Theophilus’s interpretation is spiritualizing and universalizing: the “old covenant,” and its sign of circumcision, point inevitably to the extension of salvation to all peoples, Jewish and gentile. It is, as Justin had insisted to Trypho, not a sign of salvation but one of “race” (genus). Theophilus adds to Justin’s earlier reading of Christ’s circumcision the notion of messianic condescension: Christ had no need of circumcision, but took it upon himself so that Jews would willingly receive his message of salvation. He condescended to the Jews by taking on their “racial” sign; although, tellingly, Theophilus does not explicitly state whether this condescension actually makes Christ Jewish, or functions merely as a strategic disguise (I return to this question in my concluding chapter). Indeed, we are led to believe that Christ is an antitype of Abraham, who is both “uncircumcised” and “circumcised,” the father of Jews and gentiles alike.
For Theophilus, circumcision—even (and especially) the circumcision of Christ—is the Jewish sign of the former covenant that, ultimately and paradoxically, leads Jews away from that former covenant. The “Law” both makes and unmakes the Jew. As if to drive home the doubled nature of circumcision, as the mark of Jewish “race” and the sign of that race’s absorption into a universal salvation, the Altercation then introduces the example of the Lawgiver himself: Moses. Simon asks about the salvific circumcision of Exodus 4:25, prompted perhaps by Theophilus’s claim that circumcision does not bring “salvation” (salus).77 Although no avenging angels appear in the Altercation, we should recall Origen’s similar association of Exodus 4:25 with the circumcision of Christ. Theophilus’s interpretation is even more straightforwardly christological: “All things, whatever [Moses] did, he was anticipating them in Christ’s image. Surely his wife Zipporah, who circumcised the boy, is understood as the synagogue. Moreover, what she says, ‘Let the blood of the boy’s circumcision cease,’ means that at the time of Christ’s advent the circumcision of boys stopped. And so God says the following to Moses: ‘Build for me an altar of uncut stones (lapidis non circumcisis), as also you will not bring an iron tool on them’ [Deut 27:5], because certainly in his coming Christ was to build a church of uncircumcised people (de populo incircumciso).”78 In the case of Abraham, the sign of circumcision had signaled the coming church comprising both Jews and gentiles. Christ’s circumcision is “racially” more ambivalent (does assuming the Jewish “sign of race” make Christ himself a Jew, or is he just passing?), but also is effected in order to bring Jews out of their former covenant into his saving church. Finally, in this strange story from the life of Moses—who does everything as an “image of Christ”—the advent of Christ (and, we should understand, his own circumcision) answers the prayers of “the synagogue” that infant male circumcision “should cease” and to construct a church built of “uncut” (non circumcisi) gentiles. All circumcising roads, including Jesus’ own, lead Jews out of their own circumcising covenant. In the subsequent sections of the Altercation, Theophilus explains to Simon the true circumcision “of the heart,” and continues leading him down the path to conversion and baptism.
On first blush, the Altercation presents a typical, de-Judaizing Christian interpretation of circumcision: the faithfulness of Abraham before circumcision, the temporary nature of the Law of Moses, the transformation of incomplete and prefigurative “signs” into full salvation at the coming of Christ. But the dialogic format of the Altercation, the back-and-forth between suggestible Jew and authoritarian Christian, injects a subtle nuance of re-Judaizing into the discussion, only heightened by the prominence of Christ’s own circumcision. For while the truth of circumcision remains ineluctably Christian, it is also persistently Jewish: this “sign” creates the genus Iudaïcum, the “Jewish race,” even as it instructs them on how to give up their “genus” for Christian salvation. Circumcision, the ambivalent circumcision of Christ in particular, functions as a shorthand not for the eradication of Judaism in favor of Christianity, but for the transformation of Judaism into Christianity. Furthermore, it is a transformation that remains conspicuously visible, on the surface, apparent to the triumphant, spiritual church of the gentiles. Even at the climax of the Altercation, when Simon pleads to progress (like a catechumen) from instruction to the baptismal font, Theophilus’s response invokes not the new covenant, but the old: “A blessing indeed! So Isaac blessed Jacob, and through his hand received blessing, so that the greater might proceed from the lesser, so also Ephraim and Manasseh were exchanged by the imposition of hands.”79 Again, Christian triumph echoes in the voice of the “old covenant” (the blessings of the patriarchs, here read as an allegory for the choosing of the “younger son” over the elder). The appropriation of the Jewish voice, almost comically subservient in the Altercation, remains audible and essential to the spiritual victory of Christianity.
Justin’s Dialogue and Origen’s apology Against Celsus ventriloquize the voice of Jewish others, and are two of our earliest Christian writings to hint at the complex, and unresolved, boundaries with Jews and Judaism through Christ’s circumcision. Scholars of Christian difference in antiquity have often been tempted to seize upon this presentation of “the other’s voice” in such texts to reconstruct some historical account of Jewish and pagan opposition to Christianity (the Quest for the Historical Trypho or Celsus, perhaps). Yet the circumcision of Christ, whose unavoidable difference destabilizes Jewish-Christian boundaries, suggests that something more intricate is taking place within early Christian dialogues with Jewish others. The entirely schematic format of the Altercation of Simon and Theophilus, in which a two-dimensional Jewish character is led like a marionette to the baptismal font, makes this point even more clearly: in tracing the interaction of Jewish and Christian voices in late antiquity, we may do better to attend to the dialogic genre rather than to the historicity of characters and events.
It is important to recognize that the format of these texts conveys as much ideological meaning as the content. By