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

In this study Jacobs mines the early Christian literary tradition for reflections on the circumcision of Jesus. Noted in passing in Luke 2.21, this foremost sign of Jesus’ Judaism naturally concerned interpreters trained on Paul’s famous refutation of its necessity. Their efforts to reconcile those facts yielded a variegated discourse of cultural difference highlighting Jesus’ otherness amidst his Jewish surroundings, and, by extension, the Christians’ evolving sense of otherness in Roman society. If Jesus was to overcome his Judaism and his materiality, his submission to circumcision would seem to signify his mastery of those qualities en route to his transcendence. That argument, Jacobs shows, resonated with Christian thinkers aiming to manage the internal and external differences which defined the Church as it took on the features of the hegemonic “impossible orthodoxy” (91) of the post-Nicene age.

The book presents a series of case studies variously plotted by context and form. An introduction establishes Jacobs’s theoretical framework against the backdrop of a fluid Roman discourse on cultural imperialism. Chapter one proceeds with an account on the social stigma of Jewish circumcision in the Roman world, a fact likely informing the attitudes toward that rite expressed by Paul, Luke, and other apostolic authors. Chapter two addresses efforts by Justin and Origen, among others, to factor Jesus’ circumcision into an orthodox theological argument at once internalizing and negating Christianity’s Jewish roots. In their accounts, Jesus’ submission to the archaic Jewish rite was an early mark of his self-sacrifice, a motif revisited by later patristic authors and revisited throughout Jacobs’s study.

Chapter three addresses a concurrent exegetical development citing Jesus’ circumcision as a defense against alleged Christian heretics seeking to de-Judaize Christianity, a strategy used by Tertullian against the Marcionites and by Augustine against the Manicheans, as well as by Jerome against Jovinian against the latter’s effort to dematerialize Christ. Chapter four examines the use of a corresponding heresiological argument by Epiphanius. Revisiting the territory of his previous book Remains of the Jews, Jacobs here focuses on the Ebionites, whom Epiphanius alleges to have cited Jesus’ circumcision in order to justify their own adherence to the Jewish law. In casting the Ebionites as Christian heretics, he argues, Epiphanius at once laid claim to their Judaism and dispossessed it, exemplifying the paradoxical nature of his orthodoxy and its contrarian logic of Jesus’ Jewishness.

Chapter five offers further, sporadic exegetical insights gleaned from commentaries on Luke by Origen, Ephrem, Ambrose, Cyril of Alexandria, Proclus of Constantinople, and Philoxenus. Finally, chapter six deals with ritual invention of the Feast of the Circumcision. Though conveniently coinciding with the first day of the Julian calendar year and the established feast of Basil of Caesarea, the supposed date of Jesus’ submission to the Jewish law is the subject of two pseudonymous Byzantine-era homilies conflating the Savior’s circumcision of the flesh with Paul’s circumcision of the heart. The public celebration of Christianity’s management of its Jewish past, Jacobs therefore argues, served to extend its triumphalist rhetoric into a Roman cultural sphere now likewise subject to the totalizing discourse of the church.

As Jacobs acknowledges, the varied exegetical evidences he surveys exhibit no univocal or linear development in thought by which one might measure the cumulative effect of those evidences on early Christian culture (14). In his conclusion, however, Jacobs offers a metanarrative describing the efforts of early Christians to “pass” as typical Romans by forgoing the physical mark of circumcision, which kept Jews from achieving that effect. In accomplishing this effect, their theologians invented a Christian Jesus who merely pretended to be Jewish for the sake of advancing his salvific mission. But with the rise of Docetism, the pretense became more nuanced. Now Jesus had also to pass for a human being, occupying a gendered male body in order to fulfill the Jewish law and, later, to perform his ultimate act of...