Christ Circumcised. A Study in Early Christian History and Difference by Andrew S. Jacobs (review)

Discussion of ancient Christianity has become increasingly concerned with the idea of identity. In a reaction against older discussions of the subject, scholars, influenced by recent theoretical models that have their origins in postmodernity, have emphasized the diversity of the early Christian movement and the constructed character of the identities promoted by individual Christians, including those who came to be associated with the “orthodox.” In the discussion of the construction of such identities, much significance has been attached to the role of the “other” and to the related idea of boundary formation and exclusion. The book under review emerges out of these concerns, but critiques what it terms the prevailing “socioanthropological model of boundary formation and exclusion” (p. 4) in favor of an approach, based upon psychoanalysis, in which the self is a partially realized fantasy from which the other is never completely separated: “In this understanding of personhood, the ‘other’ is for the ‘self’ simultaneously an object of identification and distinction” (p. 12). Such a view of identity will be used to articulate Christian understandings of Judaism, in particular as these were refracted through the idea of Jesus’s circumcision.

In this learned and wide-ranging book, Andrew S. Jacobs covers a bevy of subjects. The book is set against the overarching background of Rome and its Empire, in which Jacobs sees questions of difference and their incorporation as central to Roman identity and shows how Roman understanding of circumcision in some ways embodied these ideas. Jacobs writes authoritatively on a range of Christian texts that have traditionally been described as adversus Judaeos, showing how their engagement with the circumcision of Christ “simultaneously rejects and reinscribes its originary Jewishness” (p. 12), noting also how the dialogical form that some of these texts take also implies a more blurred and complex understanding of Christian identity. Chapters follow on heresiological writing, again emphasizing a similar point about the capacity for those who are supposedly excluding to reabsorb contents of the ideas of those they are opposing (here introducing Julia Kristeva’s idea of the “abject” in which rejection and absorption of the other are brought together and the question of identity rendered ambiguous) and on St. Epiphanius’s discussion of the Ebionites. In the latter, Jacobs makes clear how the bishop of Salamis—in opposing Ebionite justification for using the rite of circumcision by reference to Jesus’s own practice—retains and internalizes ideas of difference, ideas that are severely tested by the cross-dressing “Jewish-Christian” sect (“Orthodox Christianity subversively mirrors the hybridity of Jewish Christianity” [p. 118]). The final two chapters deal with Christian exegetical engagement with the subject of Christ’s circumcision and with the introduction in the sixth century of the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision, viewed against a variety of interpretations. In a lengthy conclusion, which is much more than a summary of the book, Jacobs introduces the idea of “passing,” in which he shows, inter alia, how the circumcised Christ could pass both as a Jew and a male, arguing that it was Jesus’s paradoxical and contradictory mark that can be used as an emblem for engaging with the complex and interlocking Christian identity.

This is a stimulating and thoughtful book at whose qualities this review can only hint. Amongst many other things, it builds upon and develops ideas that have been advocated in the so-called “ways that never parted” school, which argues for a much more nuanced understanding of Jewish and Christian separation. Some, whose level of theoretical sophistication is a few registers below that of Jacobs (this is a book with a considerable amount of theoretical freight, but articulated with clarity), might argue he has given eloquent theoretical expression to the view that Christians in rejecting Judaism, however understood, were inevitably forced to appropriate and reinterpret aspects of it if they wished to...