“Given as a Sign”: Circumcision and Bodily Discourse

M Adryael Tong. “Given as a Sign”: Circumcision and Bodily Discourse in Late Antique Judaism and Christianity. Ph.D. Dissertation, Fordham University, 2019.

My dissertation argues that understanding circumcision as a bodily discourse, rather than exclusively as a bodily practice, illuminates a surprising number of similarities in early Christian and rabbinic Jewish texts, in addition to their often more obvious differences. Following an examination of circumcision discourse in Hebrew biblical and pre-rabbinic Jewish sources, I focus on three topics—genealogy, gender, and the composition of the body—wherein rabbinic and patristic authors discuss circumcision as a means to explore theological anthropology.

I demonstrate that in the early stages of the development of what would later be called rabbinic Judaism and orthodox Christianity, a shared set of theological assumptions and commitments often led Jewish and Christian thinkers to deploy similar theological arguments––even as they used these very arguments to insist on their difference from one another. Even with regards to the issue most emblematic of disagreement and difference between Jews and Christians––the topic of circumcision––these communities articulated difference in ways which exhibit theological and rhetorical similarity. Accordingly, I suggest we expand our interrogation of circumcision beyond the question whether or not late antique Jews and Christians practiced circumcision. Rather, by conceptualizing circumcision as an integrated symbolic system, one that functions at the intersection of bodies and language, we can discern new aspects of the ways in which rabbinic Judaism and Christianity developed along parallel—although not identical—lines of theological inquiry.

For example, in one chapter, I argue that Mishnah Nedarim 3:11 and Tertullian’s Against Marcion both agree with each other that the Pauline eschatological vision of Jews and Gentiles united as one Israel was untenable. Both texts reject Paul’s vision of an Israel that unites two groups while nevertheless maintaining their ethnic difference and distinction. Instead, they insist that only their group are legitimate descendants of Abraham. Furthermore, Tertullian and the Mishnah both make their arguments through an appeal to geneaology (although two different kinds of genetics) via a language (not a practice) of circumcision. For the Mishnah, whether one is physically circumcised does not determine one’s legitimacy as a descendant of Abraham, only whether or not one belongs to Israel, defined by the rabbis as biological descent. For Tertullian, God’s abrogation of circumcision in the New Testament proves that God had ordained, from the beginning, that only Abraham’s descendants “in the spirit”––that is, only Christian gentiles––were meant to be counted as his true descendants.

In another chapter, I demonstrate that although rabbinic and patristic texts disagreed on the practice of circumcision, this did not lead them to differing gender ideologies. Both Jewish and Christian texts construe circumcision as a means of both determining and guaranteeing masculinity. For example, Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 134b-135a narrows the legal definition of circumcision articulated in Mishnah Shabbat 19:3 so that only the circumcision of the doubtlessly male could be considered fully legitimate, while the circumcisions of the doubtfully-sexed or androgyne are rendered halakhically marginal. Christian texts accept this male-exclusive definition of circumcision, but cast it in the negative, arguing that the male-exclusivity of the ritual demonstrates Christianity’s superiority. Despite this ostensible objection to circumcision’s masculine-exclusivity, certain early Christian texts nevertheless also appeal to Jesus’s circumcision as proof that Jesus was definitively male. By elevating the theological importance of the ritual within their respective traditions, sexual difference henceforth became a theological problem for both Jewish and Christian thinkers. Even more surprisingly, both traditions also contain voices that address this problem in the same creative way––by suggesting a conceptual possibility wherein women could be circumcised (or, rather, “circumcised”).

My final chapter challenges scholarly inclinations to place Origen and the rabbis in binary opposition with regards to their hermeneutics and anthropologies. Through analysis of circumcision discourse in Origen’s Third Homily on Genesis and in Genesis Rabbah, I show that it is not the case that Origen’s “allegory” led him to diminish the theological significance of the body, nor is it the case that rabbinic “literalism” unilaterally affirms the body. This is not, however, due to a disconnect between hermeneutics and anthropology. Rather, scholars have lent too much credence to Origen’s characterization of his own hermeneutics as allegorical. Instead, I expose Origen’s claim that his reading of Genesis 17 is allegorical as a mere rhetoric strategy. Origen’s so-called “allegory” in the Third Homily does not share the same characteristics of allegory––directing oneself from the body to spiritual things––as other contemporaneous forms of allegoresis. The Third Homily reveals how Origen remains deeply invested in the body, even believing that circumcision is a bodily act––albeit not one that is narrowly defined as the removal of penile foreskin. At the same time, the rabbinic sayings preserved in Genesis Rabbah do not narrowly locate circumcision to the penis either, but rather entertain the question of circumcisions of the ears, lips, and heart. The rabbis defend the practice of circumcision by effectively disembodying the foreskin––that is, by (re-)defining the foreskin as a piece of the body whose purpose is its own removal.

Traditional classification of early Christian and Jewish texts on circumcision into binary opposition cannot be substantiated once we look beneath disagreement over the practice of circumcision on the surface. An examination of the ways in which Jewish and Christian thinkers deploy circumcision as a bodily discourse, reveals a far more complex situation. I thus conclude the dissertation by suggesting that scholarly projects that attend exclusively to similarities or to differences necessarily produce an incomplete understanding of these texts and these traditions. On the contrary, where we see difference, we see similarity––and where we see similarity, we see difference.