Cohen notes, “In the first century of our era, the practice of circumcision seems to have been widely debated by Greek-speaking Jews.”30
Indeed in the first century, allegorically minded Jews in Alexandria—according to Philo—were spiritualizing the mark of Abraham, claiming that its symbolism trumped actual performance of the ritual.31 Philo defended the literal practice of circumcision while trying to recoup its philosophical and symbolic value, although he himself displays little enthusiasm for the physical rite.32 Often Philo and his nameless opponents are read on a sliding scale of traditionalism and assimilation. The so-called antinomians are eager to assimilate into Greco-Roman culture, while Philo—despite his own “disquietude” over circumcision33—is understood as holding the literal line of the Law regardless of his allegorical proclivities. Yet if we cast the terms of debate along political lines, the polarities might reverse. By turning away from physical circumcision, the antinomians are radically disengaging their Jewish identity from the Roman cultural economy of signs—refusing Rome’s specular domination, camouflaged by philosophical generality; by contrast Philo, a member (after all) of a respectful legation of provincials to the imperial court,34 preserves the physical sign of Jewish stereotype clearly distinguishable beneath the glossy sheen of hellenistic philosophical sophistication. At issue then is the external legibility of Jewish identity, condensed in the sign of circumcision.
For this reason, perhaps, we see increased attention to the particulars of circumcision among the burgeoning class of rabbinic sages. Cohen details a shift from the last centuries BCE, when “circumcision was deemed efficacious no matter how, under what circumstances, or by whom it was performed,” and the “mid-second century [CE],” when some rabbis “distinguished noncovenantal circumcision, the removal of a piece of skin, from covenantal circumcision, or berit.”35 The mark became ritualized, part of a more elaborate process of entering into the covenant community. The surgical details of Jewish circumcision became more complex, as the rabbis insisted that Jewish circumcision, in distinction from other circumcisions, must not only remove the foreskin (milah) but the membrane attaching the foreskin to the glans (periʿah).36 Even the significance of circumcision for the rabbis seems more profound and cosmic: “the praise that circumcision received in rabbinic literature is entirely unprecedented and extraordinary.”37 Some scholars posit that this intensified attention to the particulars and glories of circumcision emerges from a tacit resistance to the rising tide of Christianity, which elevated Pauline discouragement of circumcision to an art form. Cohen, by contrast, wonders if this rabbinic mania for circumcision might bespeak an internal Jewish conflict, stretching back to the Maccabean conflict between “hellenizers” and traditionalists.38
Without setting aside these important and overlapping contexts, I suggest we might also read the rabbinic elevation of circumcision as a means of appropriating, and resisting, the stereotyping functions of Roman culture. Much in the same way that Greeks under the Roman Empire continued to produce paideia, consumable but never digestible by their Roman rulers,39 so too some classes of Jews produced an elaborated and utterly distinct form of circumcision that was visible to—but never totally comprehensible by—Roman authority. By assuming control over the mark of circumcision, and therefore their own Jewishness, the sages were also exerting paradoxical control over “the nations,” now configured as “the uncircumcised.”40 Romans might think they were demanding a sign of provincial legibility, but the Jews were taking back control of that sign and the manner in which it might be apprehended.
If Cohen is right, and the surviving instructions for rabbinic conversion to Judaism in the Babylonian Talmud are of earlier, Palestinian origin,41 then the framing of the ceremony—with circumcision at its heart—also tells us something about the configuration of circumcision at the heart of the Roman Empire of cultural signs.42 The conversion begins with the approach of the proselyte, who must accept the role of Israel as “pained, oppressed, harassed, and torn.” While some interpreters have tried to locate this fragmented sense of “oppression” in a particular moment of Jewish-Roman relations,43 the ritualization of this sense of objectification surely speaks to a general sense of provincial marginality. The proselyte is then given both heavy and “light” instruction in the Law; specific mention is made of dietary restrictions and Sabbath observance, two common stereotypes about Jews in the Roman world.44 After being warned again about the marginality of Israel and its promise of a place in the world-to-come, the proselyte is circumcised. Sometimes he is even circumcised a second time if the first circumcision is deemed physically insufficient (i.e., the surgery has not removed enough of the foreskin): an assertion of control that borders on the excessive. Finally the healed proselyte is immersed in a ritual bath, given more (and less specific) instruction, and “Voilà, he is like Israel.”45 At every step the difference of Jews can be read in particularly Roman terms: from the acknowledgment of political subordination to accepting the sign (circumcision) by which the Romans “read” Jewish difference. Yet in that very act of assuming the stereotypes of Judaism those terms are being reworked and recuperated, even resisted. The Jewish sign is Judaized.
Jews who insisted on the significance of circumcision, yet struggle to control and redirect that signification, are like Homi Bhabha’s “mimic men,” who take on with necessary imperfection the constructed image of the colonizers.46 Bhabha attended to the Indian colonial scene, and the crucial slippage between English and Anglicized; in the Roman context, in which power derives from the (impossible) mastery of stereotypes, the difference between Roman and Romanized consists precisely in the cues and signs of difference and distinction. The Romanized Jew accepts the marks of colonial difference (circumcision) but in taking up this mark with fervor and a newfound attention to arcane, ritualized detail simultaneously slips beyond the Romanizing gasp. Jewish circumcision, like all stereotypical signs of imperial power, becomes “an ambivalent mode of knowledge and power.”47
Old Covenant in the New: Resignifying Circumcision
New Testament Circumcision: A Sign of Trouble
The increased pressure on the Jewish signification of circumcision from within and without must frame our exploration of the earliest Christian texts on circumcision, and the circumcision of Jesus. That is, we must view attention to circumcision, and Jesus’ circumcision, not just theologically but also politically and culturally. Circumcision appears throughout the Pauline texts that form the core of the New Testament, from the letters of Paul (both authentic and pseudonymous) to the Acts of the Apostles. Almost always circumcision is a sign of trouble and division:48 “Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, ‘Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses (
To read circumcision only soteriologically—from the vantage point of competing theories of salvation—is to sidestep the very political tenor of the earliest decades of the Jesus movement. Likewise, to read Paul’s resistance to circumcision in his letters merely as simply repudiation of Judaism (or Torah or Law or “works”) is to divorce him too quickly from his very Jewish, Roman, first-century context.51 As Paula Fredriksen has pointed out, it was those who insisted on circumcising gentiles who were the innovators, rewriting the standard apocalyptic script. In most of our early Jewish sources, those from “the nations” who were saved