GruntGod 2.6.1: Snipped and/or Dipped
Jewish Identity and the Council of Jerusalem
This is drawn from the revision of the P(s)aul chapter in the second edition of God Is a Grunt.
Nobody was technically born a Jew. That's not a controversial theological claim—it's a historical one. Jewishness passed matrilineally (through the mother), but full membership in the covenant community required something more than genealogy. It required a ritual marker.
For males, that marker was circumcision. God's covenant with Abraham in Genesis 17 is explicit: every male in the household—including foreign-born servants—shall be circumcised. This was ⚖️ jus 🩸sanguinis applied to the body. Your blood wasn't enough; you had to demonstrate covenant membership in your flesh.
But what about women? Or men who were already circumcised by another tradition—or who came to faith later in life without any such practice? The ritual bath called the 💦 mikveh—full immersion in a body of living water—was the parallel requirement. It applied to everyone: women, men, eunuchs, and Gentile converts alike. If circumcision was the covenant marker for men, mikveh was the universal equalizer.
These two practices coexisted with reasonable clarity until the first century CE, when the Christian movement began attracting Gentile converts in significant numbers. The question that forced the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 was not primarily theological—it was logistical. What do you actually require of someone who wants to join?
James, presiding over the council, proposed a compromise that reads as modest but was actually significant: ease the burden dramatically. No longer obligatory circumcision or immersion. Instead, converts should refrain from eating food offered to idols, from blood, from strangled animals, and from sexual immorality. That's Acts 15:28–29.
What James's proposal actually accomplished—whether intentionally or not—was a leveling of the gender dynamics embedded in the previous requirements. Circumcision, as a male-only practice, had functionally ranked male conversion above female conversion in terms of visible covenant commitment. Relaxing circumcision to optional status removed androcentric hierarchy. "One faith; one entrance requirement" is how I put it in the book. 🍆 Penis optional.
Psaul of Tarsus, for his part, appears to have had both. He almost certainly was circumcised as an infant (he makes a point of it in Philippians 3:5). And when his encounter on the Damascus road overturned his entire frame of reference, the text says he "got up and was baptized" immediately (Acts 9:18). Circumcision and immersion. Jew and Christian. He didn't make a clean break from one identity to another—he just kept accumulating them.
This matters for reading Psaul's letters, where he is simultaneously dismissive of circumcision as a requirement ("If you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you"—Galatians 5:2) and clear that he himself was circumcised and proud of his Jewishness. He's not being inconsistent. He's distinguishing between identity and requirement. He retained the 🍆 marker. He rejected the claim that others had to have it to belong.
The early church's move—however stumbling and contested—was toward a community where entrance was defined not by what your body looked like or where it came from, but by common commitment to a specific Lord. That's a more radical claim than it sounds when you're reading it two thousand years later in translation.
The second edition of God Is a Grunt uses Psaul's dual citizenship (Roman and Jewish, circumcised and baptized) as a case study in how Christians have always been people of layered, contested, and sometimes contradictory identities. The question the church keeps failing to answer isn't which identity matters most. It's how to hold them all without selling any of them out.
