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