Christ Circumcised. Andrew S. Jacobs
for the Liber quaestionum. Given the context of other contemporary Latin erotapokriseis—found in letters and treatises of Jerome and Augustine, for instance96—we can most easily envision Ambrosiaster acting as the ecclesiastical authority setting out to correct the average Christian reader and direct her or him away from possible error. That is, much like the external dialogues examined above, Ambrosiaster’s Liber quaestionum is concerned with boundaries. The desire to keep the putative questioner on the right theological track lends a distinctly polemical and, at times, apologetic edge to Ambrosiaster’s “answers.” His particular attention to Jews and Judaism has even led some scholars to posit that Ambrosiaster was a former Jew, on the theory that no zeal matches that of the convert.97 But as we have already seen in the externalized dialogues of Justin, Origen, and the Altercation, more compelling concerns about identity and otherness might lead a Christian to appropriate and repudiate the voice of the Jewish other.
While Ambrosiaster’s chapter traditionally titled “Adversus Iudaeos” might seem a logical place to investigate his attitude toward the Jewish heritage of Christianity,98 more telling are those briefer quaestiones that approach Christianity’s latent Jewishness obliquely. In the obscure chapter “De lingua Hebraea” (Liber quaestionum 108), Ambrosiaster uses philology to engage the ongoing polemical debate between Jews and Christians over the legacy of Abraham, a debate ostensibly stretching all the way back to the time of Jesus and Paul.99 Ambrosiaster begins by addressing the assumption (shared by his contemporaries and, it should be noted, by modern biblical scholars) that “Hebrew” derives from “Heber” (Gen 10:24–25, 11:14–17), a patronymic that would have associated the Hebrews (and their Jewish descendants) more specifically with the “family of Shem, by family, language, land, and nation” (see Gen 10:31).100 Nothing could be further from the truth, Ambrosiaster asserts: Hebraeus actually comes from (H)Abraham.101 The Hebrew language, Ambrosiaster goes on to explain, is the divine tongue of creation, spoken by Adam in Eden and extinct after the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel.102 Later this language—which, Ambrosiaster points out, no longer has “any land or any people” (neque terram … neque gentem)103—was restored by God’s chosen ones, Abraham (from whom the language now took its name, Hebraeus) and Moses.104
That Ambrosiaster intended this somewhat esoteric discussion of languages and names to reverberate in Jewish-Christian debates over Abraham’s spiritual patrimony seems clear from one trenchant New Testament example of a “Hebrew” invoked in the course of his answer: the apostle Paul. Paul famously referred to himself as a “Hebrew born of Hebrews” (Hebraeus ex Hebraeis; Phil. 3.5). For Ambrosiaster, however, Paul’s boasting of his “Hebrewness” was due to his likeness in piety to Abraham, not his ethnic or linguistic origins among the Jews.105 In a few dense paragraphs on a seemingly esoteric topic, Ambrosiaster takes the ethnic and linguistic core of “Jewishness” as it was understood in his day, and thoroughly de-Judaizes it: Hebrew means Abrahamic, Abrahamic refers to piety, and even the apostle Paul, whose ambiguous Jewishness might trouble early Christians, is rendered safely, and unequivocally, non-Jewish.
The question of Christ’s circumcision—another moment at which Christianity might seem perilously Jewish—receives a similarly fine treatment. The question arises early in the section reserved for quaestiones novi testamenti, immediately following a question on the baptism of Jesus: “Why was the Savior—even though he was born holy (sanctus) and was called Christ the Lord at his very birth—baptized, even though baptism takes place on account of purification and sin?”106 Assuring the questioner that Christ was, indeed, born without sin and therefore had no need of baptism (indeed, this is why John hesitated: Matt 3:14–15), Ambrosiaster explains: “It was fitting that he should be as an example to those who would later become ‘sons of God’ [John 1:12], whom he taught would be made sons of God through baptism.”107 The very next question pursues this idea of Christ’s exemplary activity on earth: “But if the Savior was baptized so that he would be as an example, why did he, having been circumcised, forbid others from being circumcised?”108 Ambrosiaster begins his response in a manner befitting a treatise structured according to New and Old Testaments: “The circumcision of the foreskin (circumcisio praeteriti) was a dated commandment (temporis mandatum), which rightfully possessed authority until Christ; so that it remained in force until such time as Christ was born, who was promised to Abraham, so that, as for the rest, circumcision has ceased since the promise has been fulfilled.”109 Ambrosiaster invokes a familiar patristic strategy for explaining the difference between Old and New Testament obligations, used also in the Altercation: a “difference in times” by which Christ’s advent created a cosmic rupture between then and now, a Jewish past and a Christian present.110 Of course, this has the effect of relegating Ambrosiaster’s Jewish contemporaries to a state of hopeless anachronism, but at least provides an opportunity for understanding their willful blindness to New Testament truth. Ambrosiaster also creates a space within his own orthodox religion for an account of the Jewish past: it is the prehistory of salvation, a time of commandments once honored but now “fulfilled.”111
As Ambrosiaster continues, however, we see that his Christian appropriation of the Old Testament promise is not quite so gracious. After affirming Abraham’s covenant in Genesis 17, Ambrosiaster proceeds to transform it entirely. I cite the rest of his “answer” in full, continuing directly from the quotation above:
Now, Isaac was promised as a type of Christ (figura Christi). For God said to him: “in your seed all nations will be blessed (in semine tuo benedicentur omnes gentes)” (Gen 22:18); this is Christ. Indeed that faith which Abraham received was restored by Christ, with the result that “in the seed of Abraham” (which is Christ) “all nations will be blessed.” Such was Abraham’s promise.
Therefore circumcision was the sign of the promised son—that is, Christ. At his birth it was fitting for the sign of the promise (signum promissionis) to cease; nevertheless also that the one who was promised should himself receive the sign of his father (signum patris) when he came, so that he would be known as the one who was promised to justify all the nations (gentes) through faith in the circumcision of the heart. Now since bodily circumcision (circumcisionis corporale) was a seal (signaculum) of the son born according to the flesh to the father, Abraham, so too for those born according to the spirit the circumcision of the heart is a spiritual sign; therefore it is more correct, after Christ, no longer to require circumcision according to the flesh.112
Ambrosiaster’s exegetical logic is typically dense, and begins by reframing the “promise” invoked earlier in his answer. We learn, immediately, that Christ was the promised “child according to the flesh” of Genesis 17, while Isaac was merely a “type” (figura). Therefore, as the fruit of the promise, it was fitting for Christ to receive the “sign of the promise,” that is, circumcision. Already the voice of Christian identity is shaded by Jewish undertones. Christ’s circumcision—as the child of Abraham’s flesh, as part of the “promise” made in Genesis 17—might appear no different in kind from the circumcision of any Jew, past or present: also performed on children of Abraham’s flesh, also in memory of the “promise” made in Genesis 17. This interplay of carnalis and spiritualis then becomes a lynchpin in the rest of Ambrosiaster’s answer.
For if the “promised son” explains why Christ was circumcised, it does not yet answer the question as it was posed: why should not every Christian take this physical circumcision as a literal example and follow suit? (Especially considering the immediately preceding quaestio, in which Christ’s baptism served exactly this exemplary purpose.) Ambrosiaster explains that precisely because Christ, and not Isaac, fulfilled the ancient promise to his “father” Abraham, it was fitting and necessary that the seal of that promise should no longer be necessary. Instead, a “spiritual circumcision of the heart” must take its place for those children born according to the “spirit.”113 In fact, we learn, this was the entire purpose of the promise, its sign, and its fulfillment, for the key passage in the Genesis covenant for Ambrosiaster is Genesis 22:18, “in your seed shall be blessed all the nations,”