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. xi + 314 pp. $75.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)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. xi + 314 pp. $75.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesWith Christ Circumcised , Andrew Jacobs offers a fresh, erudite, and theoretically astute approach to the study of Christian difference. Seeking to move beyond the inadvertent reification of (imagined) communal limits, Jacobs interprets the early Christian longing for distinction as expressive of identification and desire. Christian writers did not successfully expel, disavow, manage, marginalize or cut off "the Jew," "the heretic," or the circumcised other within, nor did they actually want to accomplish these goals. Instead, their discourses of difference expose the fragmentation that lies at the very heart of quests for fixed identities and bounded selves. Adapting insights from psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies and critical theory, Jacobs regards Christian fantasies of difference as evidence of the failure of every classificatory scheme. Jesus' foreskin, he shows, served as a particularly evocative site upon which the interplay of fixation and attachment with differentiation and splitting could be negotiated. Circumcision may be a tiny cut, but the missing foreskin of the infant Jesus remained a generative paradox for the early Christians, one that constructed and confounded a twinned desire for boundaries and for the erasure of these same boundaries.The book begins with an examination of Roman and Jewish attitudes toward circumcision. Building on recent studies of the nature of "Romanitas," Jacobs interprets Roman denigration of "clipped Jews" (Iudaei curti ) as part of a broader epistemological structure that employed stereotyping to incorporate, dominate, and subsume an "other." Romans took pride in their ability to appropriate diverse peoples into their ideological and geographical realms, an ideology that required subject populations to remain visibly different and yet ever present. The all-seeing imperial gaze, however, could never be fully confident in its visionary acumen, even after stripping off a man's clothes to expose his genitals. Circumcision operated at the fault lines of this economy of Roman-Jewish difference, available to Romans and Jews both as they negotiated the limits of Roman/Romanized and Jew/Judaized. Writers like the apostle Paul and his early disciples participated in this oversaturation of circumcision with identitarian significance, making foreskins (or their absence) a slippery sign of Christ-following Jewishness or, ultimately, Christian-ness, leaving Jesus' own circumcision provocatively unresolved.Chapters 2 and 3 consider references to Jesus' circumcision in the context of two important literary genres, the dialogue and the apology. The dialogue form projects difference outward while internalizing that same difference, a particularly effective tool in an adversus Iudaeos tradition that inscribed Christian difference, at least in part, on the genitals of the Savior. Directed at a purported enemy within, apology internalizes the other even while (allegedly) pursuing that other's expulsion. In this literature, Jesus' circumcision provided an occasion for diverse reflections on two central paradoxes: the humanity and inhumanity of Christ and the ultimate impossibility of a bounded orthodox unity. In both the dialogue and the apology as they emerged in the second through the seventh centuries, the Jew and the heretic were repeatedly repudiated and re-absorbed through the central metaphor of Christ's bodily circumcision. …