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

Abstract

Christ Circumcised. A Study in Early Christian History and Difference. By Andrew S. Jacobs. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2012. Pp. xii, 314. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-8122-4397-0.)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 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 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. …