Concision

Concision (Greek katatomē, meaning mutilation or cutting) appears in Philippians 3:2 where Paul employs it as a polemical counterterm to circumcision (peritomē). Writing against those who insisted that Gentile believers must be circumcised for salvation, Paul uses a biting wordplay: beware of the concision — those who perform a mere cutting of the flesh without the spiritual reality it signified. He reserves the word circumcision for true believers: we are the circumcision, who worship God in the Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.

The term katatomē may also echo the Old Testament prohibition against cutting or gashing the body in pagan religious practices (Leviticus 21:5; 1 Kings 18:28), implying that insistence on circumcision for Gentiles had become indistinguishable from pagan mutilation rites. Paul's polemic here parallels his argument in Galatians that those who require circumcision ought to go further and castrate themselves (Galatians 5:12). The force of the term is to undermine the spiritual pretensions of a requirement that, when detached from faith, reduces a sacred covenant sign to a mere physical act.